Life is Like This

　　by Ajahn Sumedho

　　Adapted from a talk given at Spirit Rock Meditation Center

　　May 10, 2005

　　Before I became a monk, I was teaching English in Bangkok. It was 1966, and there were a lot of American Air force bases in Thailand. One of the teachers at the language school was an American airman. Once, when he came back after an absence of a week or so, I asked him where he”d been. He said, "I”ve been to a place in northeast Thailand where the people are so poor they have to eat insects." I thought, I”m never going there. I imagined myself instead as a monk sitting in samadhi on the beach under a palm tree or in a cave among beautiful mountains, realizing the truth. Of course, I ended up as a monk in northeast Thailand for ten years, and it”s true—they eat insects.

　　The first year I spent alone in a monastery living in a little hut. I didn”t really associate with anybody—just practiced meditation. I pretty well set my own agenda. As a big, tall American, I could just puff out my chest, look fierce and get almost anything I wanted. During that year, I came to see that I had a lot of arrogance and the sort of character that needed limits. I had always been a very independent person, so I needed to learn how to obey somebody and how to serve in a community. I needed a teacher who wouldn”t put up with my behavior.

　　By chance, a monk from Ajahn Chah”s monastery—the only one who could speak English—visited the monastery I was living in. He ended up taking me back to meet Ajahn Chah. Living life in the Thai forest tradition was an ideal that I found very inspiring, so I decided to stay. At first I was entranced and felt uplifted by life there, but the realities soon appeared. The romantic honeymoon ended, and the old critical mind started operating. The weather got hot, the monsoon season started, and everything turned rotten and stinky. I began to hate the place. I remember sitting there thinking, Why am I here

　　In those days, Ajahn Chah loved testing our patient endurance to the point where we didn”t think we would be able to last another moment. This was a kind of koan for me.

　　I”d hear myself saying, I can”t take any more of this . . .I”ve had enough. This is the END!

　　Then I”d find out I could endure more. I began to distrust this inner, hysterical screaming in me that was always saying, "I”m fed up, I can”t take it." The monastic form and the conditions helped a lot.

　　But there were also a lot of habit patterns that were resisting the monastic lifestyle. Being an American brought up with an egalitarian ideal of freedom and equality, I felt an incredible frustration in being suffocated by the system. I was living in an hierarchical structure based on seniority. Because I was the most junior monk there, I had to perform certain duties for those who were senior to me. Learning to acknowledge and to take an interest in performing them was quite a challenge. There was a selfish side in me that wanted to live monastic life on my own terms. I was willing to perform duties if it was convenient for me, but much of the time it wasn”t. I felt a kind of resistance and rebelliousness.

　　At the same time, there was a continuous encouragement to really acknowledge what I was feeling—the resistance, the rebelliousness, the criticism. These are emotions that come up and that can be looked at in meditation. I became aware of my stubbornness and an immaturity that grumbled and complained if things didn”t suit me. The emphasis was on cultivating mindfulness of what I was feeling, so it was quite an interesting time for me. I wasn”t simply browbeaten into conformity like it was a military camp. Nobody had pushed me into this place; I chose to live there. My agreement was to conform to the discipline, to surrender to the form of monasti…

《Life is Like This》全文未完，请进入下页继续阅读…