The Best Introduction to the Buddha's Teaching: Ajahn Chah

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T H E  F O U R  N O B L E  T R U T H S

All the Teachings can be said to derive from an essential matrix of insight:
The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of Truth (Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta,
SN 56.11). In this brief discourse the Buddha speaks about the nature of
the Middle Way and the Four Noble Truths. It takes only twenty minutes
to recite, and the structures and forms he used to express this teaching
were familiar to people in his time.

The Four Noble Truths are formulated like a medical diagnosis in the
ayurvedic tradition:

1. the symptom
2. the cause
3. the prognosis
4. the cure

The First Truth is the ‘symptom’. There is dukkha – we experience
incompleteness, dissatisfaction or suffering. There might be periods of
a coarse or even a transcendent happiness, but there are also feelings of
discontent which can vary from extreme anguish to the faintest sense
that some blissful feeling we are experiencing will not last. All of this
comes under the heading of ‘dukkha’. This First Truth is often wrongly
understood as: ‘Reality in every dimension is dukkha’. That’s not what is
meant here. If it were, there would be no hope of liberation for anyone,
and to realize the truth of the way things are would not result in abiding
peace and happiness. These are noble truths in the sense that they are
relative truths; what makes them noble is that, when they are understood,
they lead us to a realization of the Ultimate.

The Second Noble Truth is the ‘cause’. Self-centred craving, taṇhā
in Pāḷi means ‘thirst’. This craving, this grasping, is the cause of dukkha.
There are many subtle dimensions to it: craving for sense-pleasure; craving
to become something or craving to be identified as something; it can
also be craving not to be, the desire to disappear, to be annihilated, the
desire to get rid of.

The Third Truth is the ‘prognosis’. Cessation: dukkha-nirodha. The
experience of dukkha, of incompleteness, can fade away, can be transcended.
It can end. Dukkha is not an absolute reality, it’s just a temporary
experience from which the heart can be liberated.

The Fourth Noble Truth is the ‘cure’. It is the Path; it is how we get from
the Second Truth to the Third, from the causation of dukkha to the ending
of it.

The cure is the Eightfold Path: virtue, concentration and wisdom.

T H E LAW O F KAMMA
The Buddha’s insight into the nature of Reality led him to see that this is
a moral universe: good actions reap pleasant results, harmful acts reap
painful results. The results may come soon after the act or at some remote
time in the future, but an effect which matches the cause will necessarily
follow. The key element of kamma is intention. As the Buddha expresses
it in the opening verses of the Dhammapada:

‘Mind is the forerunner of all things: think and act with a
corrupt heart and sorrow will follow one as surely as the
cart follows the ox that pulls it.’

‘Mind is the forerunner of all things: think and act with a
pure heart and happiness will follow one as surely as one’s
never-departing shadow.’
(Dhp 1-2)

This understanding is something that one comes to recognize through
experience, and reference to it will be found throughout the Dhamma talks
in these pages. When Ajahn Chah encountered westerners who said that
they didn’t believe in kamma as he described it, rather than dismissing it
as wrong view, he was interested that they could look at things in such
a different way – he would ask them to describe how they saw things
working, and then take the conversation from there. The story is widely
circulated that when a young Western monk told Ajahn Chah he couldn’t
go along with the teachings on rebirth, Ajahn Chah answered him by saying
that that didn’t have to be a problem, but to come back in five years to
talk about it again.

E V E R Y T H I N G I S U N C E R T A I N
Insight can truly be said to have dawned when three qualities have been
seen and known through direct experience. These are anicca, dukkha and
anattā – impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and ‘not-self’. We recognize
that everything is changing, nothing can be permanently satisfying or
dependable, and nothing can truly be said to be ours, or absolutely who and
what we are. Ajahn Chah stressed that the contemplation of anicca is the
gateway to wisdom. As he puts it in the talk ‘Still, Flowing Water’; ‘Whoever
sees the uncertainty of things sees the unchanging reality of them … If you
know anicca, uncertainty, you will let go of things and not grasp onto them.’
It is a characteristic of Ajahn Chah’s teaching that he used the less
familiar rendition of ‘uncertainty’ (my naer in Thai) for anicca. While
‘impermanence’ can have a more abstract or technical tone to it, ‘uncertainty’
better describes the feeling in the heart when one is faced with
that quality of change.

C H O I C E O F E X P R E S S I O N : ` Y E S ' O R ` N O '
A characteristic of the Theravāda teachings is that the Truth and the way
leading to it are often indicated by talking about what they are not rather
than what they are.

Readers have often mistaken this for a nihilistic view of life, and if one
comes from a culture committed to expressions of life-affirmation, it’s
easy to see how the mistake could be made.

The Buddha realized that the mere declaration of the Truth did not
necessarily arouse faith, and might not be effective in communicating it to
others either, so he adopted a much more analytical method (vibhajjavāda in
Pāḷi) and in doing so composed the formula of the Four Noble Truths. This
analytical method through negation is most clearly seen in the Buddha’s
second discourse (Anattalakkhana Sutta, SN 22.59), where it is shown how
a ‘self’ cannot be found in relation to any of the factors of body or mind,
therefore: ‘The wise noble disciple becomes dispassionate towards the
body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness.’ Thus
the heart is liberated.

Once we let go of what we’re not, the nature of what is Real becomes
apparent. And as that Reality is beyond description, it is most appropriate,
and least misleading, to leave it undescribed – this is the essence of the
‘way of negation’.

Ajahn Chah avoided talking about levels of attainment and levels of
meditative absorption in order to counter spiritual materialism (the gaining
mind, competitiveness and jealousy) and to keep people focused on the
Path. Having said that, he was also ready to speak about Ultimate Reality
if required. The talks ‘Toward the Unconditioned,’ ‘Transcendence’ and
‘No Abiding’ are examples of this. If, however, a person insisted on asking
about transcendent qualities and it was clear that their understanding
was not yet developed (as in the dialogue ‘What is Contemplation’), Ajahn
Chah might well respond, as he does there, ‘It isn’t anything and we don’t
call it anything – that’s all there is to it! Be finished with all of it’, (literally:
‘If there is anything there, then just throw it to the dogs!’)

R I G H T V I EW A N D V I R T U E
Ajahn Chah frequently said that his experience had shown him that all
spiritual progress depended upon Right View and on purity of conduct.
Of Right View the Buddha once said: ‘Just as the glowing of the dawn sky
foretells the rising of the sun, so too is Right View the forerunner of all
wholesome states’ (AN 10.121). To establish Right View means firstly that
one has a trustworthy map of the terrain of the mind and the world – an
appreciation of the law of kamma, particularly – and secondly it means
that one sees experience in the light of the Four Noble Truths and is thus
turning that flow of perceptions, thoughts and moods into fuel for insight.
The four points become the quarters of the compass by which we orient
our understanding and thus guide our actions and intentions.

Ajahn Chah saw sīla (virtue) as the great protector of the heart and
encouraged a sincere commitment to the Precepts by all those who were
serious about their search for happiness and a skilfully lived life – whether
these were the Five Precepts of the householder or the Eight, Ten or 227 of
the various levels of the monastic community. Virtuous action and speech,
sīla, brings the heart directly into accord with Dhamma and thus becomes
the foundation for concentration, insight and, finally, liberation.

In many ways sīla is the external corollary to the internal quality of
Right View and there is a reciprocal relationship between them: if we
understand causality and see the relationship between craving and dukkha,
then certainly our actions are more likely to be harmonious and restrained;
similarly, if our actions and speech are respectful, honest and non-violent,
we create the causes of peace within us and it will be much easier for
us to see the laws governing the mind and its workings, and Right View
will develop more easily.

One particular outcome of this relationship of which Ajahn Chah spoke
regularly, as in the talk ‘Convention and Liberation’, is the intrinsic emptiness
of all conventions (e.g. money, monasticism, social customs), but the
simultaneous need to respect them fully. This might sound paradoxical,
but he saw the Middle Way as synonymous with the resolution of this
kind of conundrum. As he once said, ‘The Dhamma is all about letting
go; the monastic discipline is all about holding on; when you realize how
those two function together, you will be fine.’ If we cling to conventions
we become burdened and limited by them, but if we try to defy them or
negate them we find ourselves lost, conflicted and bewildered. He saw
that with the right attitude, both aspects could be respected and in a way
that was natural and freeing rather than forced or compromised.
It was probably due to his own profound insights in this area that he
was able to be both extraordinarily orthodox and austere as a Buddhist
monk, yet utterly relaxed and unfettered by any of the rules he observed.
To many who met him he seemed the happiest man in the world – a fact
perhaps ironic about someone who had never had sex in his life, had no
money, never listened to music, was regularly available to people eighteen
to twenty hours a day, slept on a thin grass mat, had a diabetic condition
and various forms of malaria, and who was delighted by the fact that Wat
Pah Pong had the reputation of having ‘the worst food in the world.’