..续本文上一页eve it, for one endures through the unendurable ... to find that one can endure anything.

　　So we”re not here to find my teacher, but to be willing to learn from everything – from the rats and the mosquitoes, from the inspired teachers, from the depressed ones, from the ones that disappoint us and the ones that never disappoint us. Because we”re not trying to find perfection in conventional forms, or in teachers.

　　Last year, I went back to Thailand and saw Ajahn Chah very ill, not the same ebullient, humorous, loveable man I used to know ... just like a sack of flesh sitting there like that ... and I would think, ”Oh, I wish Ajahn Chah weren”t like that. My teacher ... Ajahn Chah is my teacher, and I don”t want him to be like that. I want him to be like the Ajahn Chah I used to know, that you could sit and listen to, and then you could tell Ajahn Chah stories to all the other monks.” You”d say, ”Do you remember Ajahn Chah said this, this wonderfully wise thing

　　” Then somebody else from another tradition says – “Well, our teacher said this.” So you”d have a competition as to who”s the wisest. Then when your teacher sits there like a sack of flesh, you say, ”Ohhh ... maybe I chose the wrong teacher ... ” But the desire to have a teacher, the best teacher, the teacher that never fails you – it”s suffering, isn”t it

　　The point of the Buddhist teaching is to be able to learn from living teachers or from dead ones. When Ajahn Chah dies, we can still learn from him – go look at his corpse! You might say, ”I don”t want Ajahn Chah to be a corpse. I want him to be the ebullient, humorous, loveable teacher I knew twenty years ago. I don”t want him to be just a rotting corpse with worms coming out of his eyes.” How many of you are willing to look at your loved ones when they are dead, when you want to remember them at their best

　　 Just like my mother now – she has a picture of me when I was 17 years old, graduated from high school, wearing a suit and tie, with my hair nicely combed – you know how they take pictures in professional studios so that you look much better than you ever really do. So this picture of me is hanging in my mother”s room. Mothers want to think of their sons as always being clean-cut and handsome, young ... but what if I died and started rotting away, maggots coming out of my eyes, and somebody took a picture of me and sent it to my mother

　　 It would be monstrous – wouldn”t it

　　 – to put it beside the picture of me when I was 17 years old! But this is like holding onto an image of Ajahn Chah as he was five years ago, and then seeing him as he is now.

　　As a meditator, one can use this life as we experience it by reflecting on it, learning from it, rather than demanding that teachers, sons, daughters, mothers or whoever remain in their perfect form always. We make that demand when we never really look at them, never really get to know anyone very well, just hold onto an ideal, an image that we preserve and never question or learn from.

　　For a meditator, everything is teaching us something ... if we”re willing to learn to coexist with it, with the successes and failures, the living and the dead, the good memories and the disappointments. And what do we learn

　　 – that these are only conditions of our mind. They”re the things that we create and attach to – and whatever we attach to is going to take us to despair and death. That”s the ending of whatever begins. So we learn from that. We learn from our sorrows and grief, our disillusionment, and we can let go. We can allow life to operate following the laws of Nature and witness this, freeing ourselves from the illusion of self as being connected with the mortal condition. And so all conditions take us to the Unconditioned – even our sorrows and grief take us to emptiness, freedom …

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