..续本文上一页give up all thinking and doubting, give it up completely, all of it. You should just take body, speech and mind as it is, as the basis for the practice and nothing else. Contemplate the conditions of the mind, and don”t lug the textbooks along with you. There are no textbooks within where you are doing the practice. If you try to take them in there with you, everything goes to waste, because they won”t be able to describe how things are as you actually experience them.

　　People who have studied a lot and have all the theory down pat, tend not to succeed with meditation because they get stuck at the level of information. In actuality, the mind isn”t something which you can really measure using external standards or text books. If it”s really getting calm, allow it to become calm. In this way it can proceed to reach the very highest levels of tranquility. My own knowledge of the theory and scriptures was only modest. I”ve already told some of the monks about the time I was practicing in my third rains retreat; I still had many questions and doubts about samadhi. I kept trying to work it out with my thoughts and the more I meditated, the more restless and agitated the mind became. In fact it was so bad that I would actually feel more peaceful when I wasn”t meditating. It was really difficult. But even though it was difficult, I didn”t give up. I kept on practicing, just the same. If I simply did the practice without having many expectations about the results, it was fine. But if I determined to make my mind calm and one-pointed, it would just make things worse. I couldn”t work it out. “ Why is it like this

　　”, I asked myself.

　　Later on I began to realize that it”s the same as with the matter of breathing. If you determine to take only short breaths, or to take only medium size breaths, or to take only long breaths, it seems like a difficult thing to do. On the other hand, when you are walking around, unaware of whether the breath is going out, you are comfortable and at ease. I realized that the practice is similar. Normally, when people are walking around and not meditating on the breath, do they ever suffer because of their breathing

　　 No. It”s not really such a problem. But if I sat down determined to make my mind calm, it would automatically become upadana (attachment), there was clinging in there too. I became determined to force the breath to be a certain way, either short or long, that it became uneven and it was impossible to concentrate or keep my mind on it. So then I was suffering even more than I had been before I started meditating. Why was that

　　 Because my determination itself became attachment. It shut off awareness and I couldn”t get any results. Everything was burdensome and difficult because I was taking craving into the practice with me.

　　On one occasion I was walking cankama (walking meditation) sometime after eleven o”clock at night. There was a festival going on in the village, which was about half a mile from the forest monastery where I was staying. I was feeling strange, and had been feeling like that since the middle of the day. I was feeling unusually calm and wasn”t thinking very much about anything. I was tired from walking meditation, so I went to sit in my small grass-roofed hut. Then just as I was sitting down, I found I had barely enough time to tuck my legs in before my mind went into this deep place of calm. It happened just by itself. By the time I got myself into the sitting posture the mind was already deeply calm and I felt completely firm and stable in the meditation. It wasn”t that I couldn”t hear the sounds of people singing and dancing in the village; I could still hear them. But at the same time, I could turn my attention inwards so that I couldn”t hear the sounds as well. It was strange. When…

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