..續本文上一頁motion, you know, ”I”m feeling great”, ”I”m feeling happy,” there”s already a certain amount of personality, my own particular form of happiness or sadness or whatever. But pleasant, unpleasant, neutral; who could they belong to

　　 This way of looking makes experience more objective. So it gives us a different way of looking at emotions, which for most of us are otherwise pretty personally charged. To put it in terms of pleasant, unpleasant, neutral gives it an objectivity. It”s not denying our happiness, but you see it as pleasant feeling rather than ”me being personally happy,” with all the personal investment in that happiness. It pides personal reality into categories.

　　When Ajahn Chah explained Dhamma, he would often give examples from nature, about the ants and the leaves in the forest and things like that. Although I myself grew up in the country, it would never have occurred to me to look at ants. What”s that got to do with Buddhism

　　 Ants and leaves

　　 This is where Ajahn Chah”s saying that ”all things are teaching us” has been so helpful to me. You know when I first heard it I thought, ”What does he mean, "All things are teaching us"

　　” He surely didn”t mean that all the talks were teaching us, he must indeed have meant all things.

　　Ajahn Chah used to emphasise the importance, for example, of trusting in one”s own intuitive wisdom. And of course I had no idea what this meant. I mean, wisdom teachings come to us from a teacher, we”re disciples of the Buddha, so what”s wisdom got to do with me

　　 In my search for wisdom, I would often recognise a need to be confirmed, or affirmed in what I knew or thought I knew.

　　I found Ajahn Chah”s response to this need rather difficult at the beginning, but I much appreciated it later on. He was the master of never giving a straight answer. When one went to him and tried to get a straight answer, he”d always take a different approach. At first I thought he was being a little bit, what do you say, not devious, ... but ... maybe he didn”t know ... or maybe he was trying to have fun with us, because he also had a sense of humour.

　　I realised later on that he was trying to point us back to ourselves, to that which is asking the question or seeking an answer. If we sought an answer out there in him, he would always point us away. So eventually if you followed him long enough, you”d come back to yourself. It is fundamental for Dhamma practice to be able to question our basic assumptions. We start off asking questions, but it”s perhaps more important to find out who is asking. Many times I would find out that my questions were coming from my ego. I would ask Ajahn Chah a question, but I then wanted him to give me my answer, or at least an answer that pleased me. I wanted my views to be confirmed. I wanted his answers to please me, to make me happy and to comfort me, and affirm my sense of self.

　　Answering in the way he did was his way of pointing us back to our own intuitive wisdom. We had to learn to bring up questions and just let them float for a while, not seeking an answer. It took me a while to realise that in the Buddha”s teaching, wisdom was not just about reading the scriptures but about understanding oneself, understanding the nature of oneself, the body, the feelings, the states of mind, mentality and physicality, nama-rupa. When the Buddha was trying to discover Truth, he sat and investigated himself. We never see a Buddha statue with the Buddha reading a book, do we

　　 He was meditating, and what he had to meditate with was just his own body and mind. He didn”t even have anybody else”s body and mind. Just his own. That”s where he found enlightenment. It wasn”t in a book, it wasn”t outside himself, it was right here in his own body and mind.

　　Having spent so many years, fifteen years …

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