Remembering Luang Loong

Close your eyes; take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. Try to stay with the sensation of the breathing as it comes in, as it goes out. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If not, you can change. Try to find a way of breathing that feels comfortable.

We’re trying to give the mind a good place to settle down, so that it can collect itself, gather itself in, and see itself clearly. When the mind can settle in like this with a sense of well-being, then it’s easy to see where greed comes in, anger comes in, delusion comes in—and you can do something about it. When the mind is not still, it’s running around all over the place, and everything is a blur.

It’s in staying still in this way that you develop a quality called puñña, which sometimes is translated as “merit.” It’s better translated as “goodness.” We’re trying to create a good quality in the mind and the heart. Buddhism is all about training what the Buddha called citta, which means both the heart and the mind. Sometimes we translate it as mental training, and it sounds like if you’re going to be smart—book smart—you’re going to get ahead. But it also involves qualities of the heart. You have to be generous. You have to be virtuous, realizing that you don’t want your actions to harm anybody. And you want to have goodwill for all beings. When you develop these qualities, then you’ve got a well-developed heart.

We follow the example of others who’ve gone before us. Today we’re making merit for Luang Loong Maha Boontham. To give him his full, ecclesiastical rank, he was Phra Rajvinaisophon. He was a high ranking monk in Bangkok. He was also a student of Ajaan Fuang, who was my teacher. But he wasn’t like other monks in Bangkok. He was very frugal. Very generous. Very virtuous.

He had the position bhattudesaka, which is the monk who’s in charge of invitations for other monks. Now, that position is one which people can take advantage of it. But he never did. He held that position for 50 years, and there were never any legitimate complaints about how he did it. Everybody was treated fairly.

In fact, there was one time when the bhattudesaka in another monastery created a scandal. It seems that in the monastery—it was a cremation monastery—and cremations in Thailand are bigger affairs than they are here in America. You invite people; and sometimes you invite them for meals; you invite them for chanting. So there are people who make money off of providing the food, providing the drinks, providing other things—the flowers—even providing the music. This particular monk had arranged to push all the other people who initially had these positions in that monastery and gave them to his relatives. It became a scandal all over Bangkok.

One newspaper decided to check out the monasteries in Bangkok that had the famous crematoriums. How much money did the bhattudesaka shave in their bank accounts? And they discovered that Luang Loong had the least amount of anybody. He was very proud of that fact, because he was extremely generous, extremely honest. And this is one of the reasons why we think of him.

He was very generous with us here at the monastery. He used to come twice a year to help with the ceremonies of the kathina, help with the ceremonies for creating the candles for the rains retreat. He always, you might say, “had our back.”

So we think about the goodness he’s done. This is one of the reasons why we have commemorations for people who’ve passed away: to think about their goodness, to encourage us to be good as well. If he had been the kind of monk who used his position to gain money, well what would he have now? The money he would have gained isn’t his anymore. All he would have had was the karma. And who would want to remember someone like that?

Remember the people who have been good to others, who’ve also shown good examples in their behavior. Those are the kind of people we like to remember, to encourage us to follow their example, so that these qualities of goodness don’t die out of the world.

We look around us, and there’s so much that’s discouraging about the world outside right now. But we realize that we don’t have to let that discourage us. We can be independently good. After all, where does generosity come from? It comes from our own intentions. Virtue comes from our own intentions. Goodwill comes from our own intentions. These are things that we can generate inside regardless of what the world is doing. We can learn how to make those intentions skillful, so that nobody gets harmed by our thoughts, our words, our deeds. We make a positive contribution, both to our own true happiness and to the true happiness of others.

So when you think about the people who have passed away, think about their goodness. Let that be an encouragement that this is why we like to think about them: It’s because of their goodness.

Someday there will be people who want to think about us because of our goodness. Make that one of your intentions. It helps keep you on the high road, the road that eventually leads to true happiness. As the Buddha said, this road is good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end. It’s good all along the way. It’s a good path to be on.

So we can take encouragement from the people who’ve been on the path ahead of us, and we want to give good examples to the people who come behind us. In this way, goodness continues to live throughout the world.