Part Three:

　　Inner Release

　　The Truth & its Shadows

　　Undated, 1959

　　The Dhamma of attainment is something cool, clean, and clear. It doesn”t take birth, age, grow ill, or die. Whoever works earnestly at the Dhamma of study and practice will give rise to the Dhamma of attainment without a doubt. The Dhamma of attainment is paccattam: You have to know it for yourself.

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　　We should make a point of searching for whatever will give rise to discernment. Sutamaya-pañña: Listen to things that are worth listening to. Cintamaya-pañña: Once you”ve listened, evaluate what you”ve learned. Don”t accept it or reject it right off hand. Bhavanamaya-pañña: Once you”ve put what you”ve learned to the test, practice in line with it. This is the highest perfection of discernment — liberating insight. You know what kinds of stress and pain should be remedied and so you remedy them. You know what kinds shouldn”t be remedied and so you don”t.

　　For the most part we”re really ignorant. We try to remedy the things that shouldn”t be remedied, and it just doesn”t work — because there”s one kind of stress that should simply be observed and shouldn”t be fiddled with at all. Like a rusty watch: Don”t polish away any more rust than you should. If you go taking it apart, the whole thing will stop running for good. What this means is that once you”ve seen natural conditions for what they truly are, you have to let them be. If you see something that should be fixed, you fix it. Whatever shouldn”t be fixed, you don”t. This takes a load off the heart.

　　Ignorant people are like the old woman who lit a fire to cook her rice and, when her rice was cooked, had her meal. When she had finished her meal, she sat back and had a cigar. It so happened that when she lit her cigar with one of the embers of the fire, it burned her mouth. ”Damned fire,” she thought. ”It burned my mouth.” So she put all her matches in a pile and poured water all over them so that there wouldn”t be any more fire in the house — just like a fool with no sense at all. The next day, when she wanted fire to cook her meal, there wasn”t any left. At night, when she wanted light, she had to go pestering her neighbors, asking this person and that, and yet still she hated fire. We have to learn how to make use of things and to have a sense of how much is enough. If you light only a little fire, it”ll be three hours before your rice is cooked. The fire isn”t enough for your food. So it is with us: We see stress as something bad and so try to remedy it — keeping at it with our eyes closed, as if we were blind. No matter how much we treat it, we never get anywhere at all.

　　People with discernment will see that stress is of two kinds: (1) physical stress, or the inherent stress of natural conditions; and (2) mental stress, or the stress of defilement. Once there”s birth, there has to be aging, illness, and death. Whoever tries to remedy aging can keep at it till they”re withered and gray. When we try to remedy illness, we”re usually like the old woman pouring water all over her matches. Sometimes we treat things just right, sometimes we don”t — as when the front step gets cracked, and we dismantle the house right up to the roof.

　　Illness is something that everyone has, in other words, the diseases that appear in the various parts of the body. Once we”ve treated the disease in our eyes, it”ll go appear in our ears, nose, in front, in back, in our arm, our hand, our foot, etc., and then it”ll sneak inside. Like a person trying to catch hold of an eel: The more you try to catch it, the more it slips off every which way. And so we keep on treating our diseases till we die. Some kinds of disease will go away whether we treat them or not. If it”s a disease that goes awa…

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