Good morning. We are very fortunate to have Ajahn Amaro here today to talk to us. Ajahn Amaro was, is a Theravadan monk. He was ordained by Ajahn Chah in 1979, spent a couple of years in Thailand, and then the intervening years mostly in England. traveling and giving Dharma talks probably in many countries and he's been coming to the United States for the past six years with the aim of setting up a forest monastery in Mendocino County and perhaps he'll say a little more about that plan which seems to be close to fruition so We are very pleased to have you today. Namo Tassa Bhagavato Arahato Samma Sambuddhassa Namo Tassa Bhagavato Arahato Samma Sambuddhassa

[01:45]

Namo Tassa Bhagavato Arahato Samma Sambuddhassa Buddham Dhammam Sangham Namassami I was very happy and very pleased to be invited to come to the Zen Center here in Berkeley. I visited here once or twice before, but I don't believe I've given a Dharma talk in this place. I've been to Green Gulch many times, and I'm close friends with Norman Fisher, so I have a slight acquaintance with the Zen tradition. Whatever I say today, please take anything that's useful and anything that is useless, please leave it behind.

[02:49]

So the way in which one listens to or receives Dharma talks is just to hold on to cherish that which is useful, but not to feel that it's put out in a sense of having to believe everything that is being spoken. Talking with Meili just before I came in here, I was asking her what it might be useful to talk about. And she suggested maybe a little bit of personal history as to how I came to be involved in this path and this particular mode of practice. So I don't want to spend the whole morning just talking about me.

[03:51]

which of course I could do. But thinking about it, one of the things that really pushed me onto the spiritual path was I was studying at London University. I was doing a joint major in psychology and physiology. Early on in the course we had a lecture on Freud. And during the course of this lecture, the tutor pointed to a quotation that comes, I think, at the end of one of Freud's earlier books. I think it's one of his first ones on hysteria, where at the end of the book, in an almost triumphal tone, Freud declares that his His method is capable of transforming our neurotic misery into ordinary human unhappiness.

[04:54]

And something in me snapped at that point, where if that was the most we could expect with human life, to be successful copers, I was not interested. So that stirred something in me, a deep sense that there had to be something more to life than that, and the urge to seek it, to find out what was the way to arrive at real human happiness, a fulfillment of life. After I finished university, I didn't have a particular interest in Buddhism, but I knew I needed to meditate. I knew I needed to look inward and to understand the nature of mind, which the psychology degree hadn't given me every... It hadn't given me all the knowledge that I had suspected it might.

[06:07]

The understanding about myself, my own mind. So I went to Asia, to Southeast Asia and started traveling basically to seek spiritual guidance and to learn how to meditate. And I wandered through Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, finally found myself in Thailand. And during this time, my basic ethic had been very much along the politics of ecstasy method. The more stoned you are, the closer you are to God and reality. And I had believed that quite wholeheartedly, but by the time I had been traveling and living in these beautiful places around Southeast Asia, I began to see that you could be living in paradise and be psychedelically very stimulated and alive, but yet experiencing complete desolation inside.

[07:24]

A sense of insecurity, meaninglessness, And that really came home to me in a deep way, that it didn't matter. I began to see that it didn't matter where you were, or what you did, or what the backdrop was, that if your mind was not really at peace, or the mind was not really in harmony with things, then nothing, no external conditions, no people that you're with, or a place where you were, or the activities that you did, would make a difference. And it wasn't really a logical thought, but it was something like a deep intuition that it was a matter of truly understanding our own nature and that true peace and fulfillment could never really be found. And that just by stimulating the mind and using chemical means to do that investigation was not going to

[08:28]

to be the way. And I began to see that the reason why I was so confused was because I kept confusing myself. Major insight. So, anyway, I left the western tourist scene and decided to go off into the countryside of Thailand, into the northeast, and in a few days' time I found myself in a Buddhist monastery where many western monks lived. I found myself very much at home there. So even though I was a very liberal, anti-establishment, anarchist type politically, to my amazement I found myself feeling incredibly at home within a hierarchical, ancient, orthodox, austere tradition of monasticism.

[09:36]

that staying there for a few days I began to feel a tremendous sense of homecoming and comfort, a delight. And it became clear to me that it wasn't the rules that you had to keep or the clothes that you had to wear that restricted one, but the state of mind. that is what restricts us, what inhibits our freedom and that the structures and disciplines and routines of something like monastic life are merely tools that are there in order to enable us to discover what it is that inhibits our freedom and to dissolve those obstructions to the point where we can experience our own true and innate freedom. Now along with that, the insight I had on the beach with realizing that it didn't matter where I could go or where I went or what I did.

[10:47]

Something in me knew that I was never going to be really happy until I understood and I could see that what was driving me in life was a longing for reality, a longing for authenticity. and that kind of security of truly knowing. And another thing that Meili mentioned before when we were talking was that Within the Buddhist world, there's oftentimes an interest in Buddhist practice, in meditation. We pick it up and use it in a somewhat therapeutic way, just to make our lives a little bit more comfortable, make our lives a little bit more easy to live, smoother flowing. And in making our life a little bit more comfortable, making our ordinary human unhappiness a little sweeter, we stop there or we take that as sufficient and we never really discover the depths of our own reality, of the reality of life itself.

[12:09]

This is an important question because it's really also what caused the Buddha to leave his home when he was Prince Siddhartha, that same that same kind of pondering of comfort and social stability, and whether that was really enough, whether that was really ever going to satisfy, whether that was really going to bring a quality of true fulfillment. And there's this passage in one of the suttas where he says, This is the Arya Pariesana Sutta, which translates as the Noble Quest, where he says, he's describing what motivated him to leave the home life, and he says, so I considered, here I am, subject to birth, aging, sickness, and death.

[13:18]

Why should I also seek that which too is subject to birth, aging, sickness, and death? Why don't I seek the unborn, the un-aging, the un-ailing, the sorrowless, the deathless. So I decided, yes, I will seek the unborn, the un-aging, the sorrowless, the un-ailing, the deathless. And that might seem a very simplistic way of casting it. You say, well, real life is more complicated than that. But I think this is in a way the essence of the spiritual aspects of life and the essence of the Buddha's teaching is pointing to and what the monastic tradition is about or how that has arisen is because of the The results of taking the born, the created, the conditioned as our abiding place, our comfort, our personality, our job, our family, the places where we habitually find our security and our sense of being, as soon as we make that sufficient and we make that where we establish our heart, then of course we are vulnerable because

[14:44]

things change. Big news that the job that we had we lose or the health that we have falls away. The relationships that we have tire and fade and fall apart. I don't need to go into the whole list but we are all well aware of things that we have held on to in our life and taken refuge in. And then when they go, the heart break. Literally, our heart is broken as the things break, as the relationships break, as our success fades, as our health goes, as our ability to think and see and hear, as the aging process rolls inexorably onwards. We experience heartbreak because we've taken refuge in that which is born, created, conditioned. Subject to aging, ailing and death.

[15:50]

So that I don't think it's naive to look at it in this way and to follow the Buddha's pattern. Because this is what he's saying is that The only way that we can arrive at true happiness, and also the only way that we can fulfill the potential of our human life, is through seeking enlightenment, through seeking the unborn, the unoriginated, the deathless, and discovering that, finding that. That is where we will find security. That's why we talk about the three refuges, the sarana, because in the material world, in our own psychology, in our personality, in anything which is conditioned and created, compounded, there is no security. My teacher, Ajahn Chah, he was very good at coming up with these neat aphorisms, which were very disarming.

[16:59]

He'd say, if you seek for security in that which is insecure, you're bound to suffer. Excruciatingly obvious. So, in that respect, The driving force behind spiritual life is this search for the unborn, for the deathless, for that quality of our own being. And this is not like something which is external. In Buddhist terms, in the non-theistic religions, this is never spoken of as anything that is outside. But it's a quality of our own being that we already possess, which it's our work to discover. I think a good friend of ours, Morris Walsh, who is the sort of archetype of the absent-minded professor, great Buddhist scholar, with a shock of grey hair and pens in his pockets, unpolished shoes.

[18:13]

Sweet, lovely man, been a scholar and a supporter of ours for many years. He says, well, rather than thinking of enlightenment, I rather prefer to think of it as dis-endarkenment. Because it's, I thought it was very accurate really, because it's not as though we are dark and we've got to get some light injected into us to make us enlightened, but it's rather our habits of attachment and identification are constantly endarkening what is naturally and intrinsically bright and pure and free. And if we stop endarkening it, then it will be bright. When we talk about enlightenment it can sound like a very remote thing or something that happens to other people or happen far off in the future and we read many Dharma books and they have these enlightenment stories and

[19:33]

our mythology is thick with those tales and so that one enters into Buddhist practice with this goal or this possibility dangling there. But it's an important aspect to recognize that enlightenment is not far away. that enlightenment is always here and now. And it's a question of being enlightened, being dis-en-darkened, than becoming. Because if we place enlightenment off in the future as a thing which I have got to get to, say that I have not got it now, it's over there, I've got to do this to go and get to it in the future. then rather like driving out to the supermarket, that's where the goal is and I haven't got it and I've got to do this, that and the other to acquire it.

[20:43]

But if we seriously consider that that is an intrinsic part of our nature then surely it's accessible to us at every moment. So what do we mean by enlightenment? What is enlightenment? There's an exchange that occurs between Ananda, who is the Buddha's attendant, and another monk. They are having a discussion, not an argument, just a discussion, about the nature of the deathless and the deathless state, the enlightened state. They're having this debate about what's the best way to describe it. And so anyway, as often happens in these situations, they say, well, let's go and ask the Blessed One. So off they trot to go and see the Buddha. And they recount the discussion they've been having.

[21:45]

And then they ask him, Venerable Sir, how would you describe the deathless state? And the way it's set up is almost like you're expecting this long, expansive philosophical analysis. And the Buddha comes up with this brief phrase. It's only about three or four words in Pali. And all he says is, the ending of grasping is deathlessness. When the mind is not grasping, the deathless state is apparent. Period. End of subject. And that's all he says. Now that doesn't mean to say like in some far off distant point in the future when the mind never grasped anything. But right here and now when our mind relaxes, when our mind is not contracted around a thought, a feeling, a hope, an excitement, an opinion, a perception, a color, a sound, a shape.

[22:58]

When it's not cathected and closed in around that and the mind is free from grasping, right there is the enlightened state. It's normality. It's not extraordinary. But because we're looking for something extraordinary, we're looking for kind of flashes and fireworks and ecstasy, then we miss it. Because it's so ordinary. That, like they say, they have the expression nirvana. Nirvana has no color. It doesn't announce itself. It doesn't shout at you. It doesn't catch our attention. The space in this room does not grab our attention. We see each other, we see the shrine, we see myself and everything. You don't come into the room and think, oh, what lovely space, what interesting space. You might feel it, but the thinking mind, the perceptual process says, oh, and it goes to the objects.

[24:07]

So realizing enlightenment, being enlightened is like noticing the space along with the objects, noticing the silence of the mind between the chattering of behind and permeating the chattering of our thoughts, permeating the perceptions of color and sound. Within movement there is stillness. Within sound there is silence. Within form there is space. This is not news to the Zen practitioners. This is what it means. As we recognize that, as we let go of our fixation upon the object and relax, To allow the mind is to rest in that open, peaceful state. That is the experience of nibbana, the natural peace of the mind.

[25:14]

Now the thinking mind says, well there must be more to it than that, I mean after all. But that is like what they call the fragrance of nirvana. It's like the fragrance wafting from the other shore. The more that we trust that, the more that we learn to not believe our opinions and not to attach to love and hate, success and failure, praise and criticism. The more we just let that be what it is and let the coming of night and day and cold and heat. The more we just allow it to be as it is, the more we rest in that open, undefinable quality. I was contemplating this question. What is enlightenment? I remember we received this spiritual magazine from the disciples of Andrew Cohen. He's a character up in Marin.

[26:17]

And their magazine is called, What is Enlightenment? That's one of his favorite things. And I was looking at that one day and I thought, well maybe it's not a question, maybe it's a statement. That what is enlightenment? And so I thought, oh that's neat. Because in a way it's that spaciousness within us which questions and which opens to the present that says, what is it? What is this? But that is the loosening of our preconceptions, our pre-constructions around reality, around our world. It turns it from my world, my mind, my body, into nature, into being just what it is. And that kind of questioning and inquiry, that which asks what, this is the very basis of of that method of meditation, that kind of method of meditation, those kind of koan practices of using a question like, Who am I?

[27:34]

What am I? In Korea they use the phrase, What is it? as their principal theme of meditation. that by posing that kind of a question in a still and alert mind, when we ask, who am I? Suddenly all of our preconceptions about what we think we are, they're illuminated. It's like the camera is turned round onto the photographer. And in that moment our presumptions about ourself are revealed and we realize, oh how amazing, I think I'm a personality. I think I'm my body, how ridiculous. And that presumption, the preconceptions are uncovered, are unveiled. And who starts to sound very strange and ridiculous? An I.

[28:35]

even worse. And that's just in entering to that question of what? What is it? What is here? Creates that openness. Because in every question, every question contains its own answer. By posing a question like that, We open to that in our heart, which already knows, which knows what. Our heart knows what we are, it knows reality. It knows the unborn, the deathless, the ultimate truth of our own nature and the nature of all things. But to find a way into that, to enter the realization of that, our preconceptions have to loosen, soften, be more transparent. This is not an easy

[29:48]

kind of practice the Buddhist path and the way to liberation is not easy because we actually don't like being liberated very much. Freedom is a challenge and oftentimes we prefer our own neurotic misery even to ordinary human unhappiness and that it's easier to be confined within me and my problems and my life and my family history. It's more comfortable to be in that than to experience limitlessness, openness. Because it's familiar, it's the devil we know. So it's a challenge, but it's also if we rise to that challenge, And they're not taken in by the anxieties of our egoic nature.

[30:56]

And we don't retreat from that. We find that that becomes more and more of our abiding sense. Like when Ajahn Chah was just about to fall ill, he had a stroke about ten years before he died and was unable to speak and teach the last message. He sent Ajahn Sumedho, who's the abbot of the monasteries in England. He'd lived with Ajahn Chah for 10 years. He sent his final instructions. And he said... He never wrote. Well, he could write, but he never did. But he asked one of the Western monks to take a letter, Santa Chito, And he dictated this little letter and it said, Whenever you have feelings of love or hate for anything whatsoever, these will be your aids and partners in building the paramitas. The Buddha Dharma is not to be found in moving forwards, nor to be found in moving backwards, nor is it to be found in standing still.

[31:58]

This, Sumedho, is your place of non-abiding. End of message. So, What that means is that we tend to take refuge in moving forwards or moving backwards or in being a person, standing still. But if we really want freedom, then it's a matter of abiding in the place of non-abiding, having no landing place. Just allowing the mind to rest in the open quality of awareness and trusting that. And when we have that kind of experience, maybe in a deep meditation or in retreat, we might experience that kind of spacious, open quality. And then you think, well, Ajahn Amara said this is being enlightened. Well, you know, I'm in their form. I must be enlightened. Oh, this is great. I'm free at last. This is like when Mara starts to rub his hands.

[33:02]

You've got a live one here. Because that's like if following desires is getting the hook in your mouth, believing I am enlightened is swallowing it. Because even though the mind might be at peace and there might be no kind of obvious attachments, the very framing of that in terms of I am free, I am enlightened, I have realized nirvana. That very phrasing that the mind creates indicates the clinging that is still there. It's being turned into me and mine, I. I am Ishvara, I am the one, I am the messiah. And even though there might be great powerful insights and tremendous psychic abilities or one might have tremendous shakti, powerful aura,

[34:05]

If the ego clings to it in this subtle way, then it creates a profoundly negative response. So the Buddha's teaching always points to self-effacement, renunciation, relinquishment, and keeping an eye open always for where the ego, where the I-sense will take hold and claim. to then let that quality of being play itself out in terms of our action, our speech, in terms of doing good, refraining from harm, in terms of kindness and sensitivity, unselfish action, which flows naturally forth from the free mind. wherever one sees the sense of ego, the sense of I taking root, to bring that light of wisdom onto that, to illuminate it, to release it.

[35:16]

And then that's the way that we can stay truly free and desireless, open and awake. So I will finish there and open things up for some questions. If there are any, please feel free to speak, either on what I've been talking about or anything else you might be interested in. passion helps somebody who you see as suffering, or I do, but at the same time, you know, it's very difficult to put it out in a way that doesn't make them start to chase around.

[36:39]

I like your talk a lot. Can you say more about skillful means of introducing Well, to begin with, there's a problem with English language in the way that we use terms like desire. Say, the term for selfish desire, the desire which is the cause of problems, difficulty, struggle, is tanha, which means craving, really. And that always has a negative result. That's the cause of suffering. But to do anything in life, you've got to put your mind onto it, you've got to be interested in it, and you've got to apply energy to do it. And that doesn't necessarily have to be tied up with craving.

[37:42]

Like, you know, if you want to do something to help other people, to go to the toilet, It's like the body indicates a certain need and then you follow through the response to it, or the body gets hungry so you find food. That can be associated with craving, but it doesn't have to be. And so the effort towards enlightenment requires interest, energy, But it's a matter of applying that interest, applying that energy and intentionality in a way that is not obsessed, in a spacious way. So it's like putting your heart into doing something and being prepared for it to work or to not work. It's like when you set out on a journey, when you get in your car to go someplace, you think you're going somewhere.

[38:46]

But if you're not prepared for the car to break down or for there to be a traffic jam, then you suffer when that happens. It's like, I can't sit here on the freeway. Oh, the traffic's all backed up. We're supposed to be there in half an hour. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. You suffer because you thought you were going somewhere. If you realize, well, now I'm getting into the car, let's see what happens. I know I'm heading to this appointment, and it's due to happen. But who knows how it will be? So you're applying your effort, you're paying attention, you've got your mind on your driving, but you don't know whether you're going to arrive or not. You know, there might be another earthquake, the brave bitch drops out, the journey is finished. See, I mean, that's what one means. It's like you're... If you have specific goals in mind that are fixed, you suffer.

[39:49]

If you just apply a direction and are open to whatever happens, then you don't suffer. Yes? Your teacher's last letter reminds me of a verse in the Dhammapada about letting go in the middle and letting go behind and letting go in front. It seems that the front and the behind are easier. How about dropping off the middle? Could you talk about that? Well, my take on this, what I think, if you want to know what I think, What it's talking about is about, it's a penetration of the nature of self and time. It's really what it's about. Because as long as I think that I exist as a person traveling through, from the past into the future, through the present, then you're creating a separate entity that is time-bound.

[41:03]

So you are shut off from the timeless and selfless dimensions of your own being. So that when Ajahn Chah said, he also phrased it, when you can't go forwards and you can't go backwards and you can't stand still, where do you go? It's like, to say you can't go forwards and you can't go backwards and you can't stand still, you've got a you and you've got a going. So that it's deliberately shutting off every door because it's saying, it's bringing you to the conclusion that, oh, I think that I am this person that exists in time. And the only exit that you're drawn to is to realize there is no self and that there is no time. It brings you to a realization of selflessness and timelessness. which is the dimension of, it's like the spacious dimension of being, the unborn, the unoriginated, the uncreated, that we miss all the time.

[42:14]

And it's a matter of, the practice is a matter of keeping both of those in mind, because it's not like saying, oh I am the unborn, I am the ultimate reality, ergo I can do whatever I like. You know, these kind of, these fools that are caught up in their own conditioning, that think that they're people, ha! Poor swine. They're not like me, who knows that I am the ultimate reality. Well that is, like I said before, that's what they call vipassana upakilesa. It's the defilement arising from insight. So whenever you meet the messiah, most messiahs suffer from vipassanupakilesa. I think the term used here is often the stink of Zen. Yeah, that's a good one. So it's a matter of keeping your eye on both realities. Because that was the thing, when I arrived at the monastery in Thailand, I'd always thought that freedom was like dismissal of all conventions.

[43:25]

And I spent years trying to be totally free. Just like following no conventions, just being a free being. And I was totally miserable. You know, trying to override my own sort of instincts, or my own kind of sense of right and wrong. Saying, no, no, don't let anything stand in your way, just do whatever you feel like doing. Let the world catch up with you later. I was doing that for five or six years, from when I was about 15 to 21. I was in a real mess. And then what struck me was that the Buddhist insight and what the style of the forest monasteries indicated was, yes, nothing is real. That's true. But whereas I had deduced before, nothing is real, therefore do whatever you like. Therefore nothing matters. The deduction in the monastery was, nothing is real, therefore be incredibly careful about every drop of water, every grain of rice.

[44:35]

How did you put your sandals down? Which door did you leave your sandals at? Notice everything, because as soon as you start to dismiss and not notice and leave things unattended, then what happens is that you're taking great care of the front of the house, but there's this stuff piling up in the back room. You don't know whether the doors are open or the windows are open and the weather's blowing in. and wild creatures and people are moving in behind you, because you never go in that part of the house. So it's not a matter of just fixating on the unconditioned, but also that bears itself out as a supreme sensitivity and frugality and alertness to the conditioned. It's like I was sitting in the front room, of the other house before we came in here.

[45:37]

And there's this picture of Bodhidharma hanging on the wall opposite. And then opposite the picture is a window. So I was sitting there in a chair and looking at Bodhidharma. But then actually, I'm looking at the picture of Bodhidharma and I thought, I can't see it very well. I think, oh that's because there's all this light from the window. And so actually when I looked at it, The majority of what I could see was the reflection of the window and Bodhidharma was going to get one eye that was clear. And so you had both Bodhidharma in the picture and then the window and then beyond the window the world outside. And so the process is very much the same. It's like you've got what's there in the picture in front of you and you've got what's reflected from from another dimension. And the two are there, you could focus on Bodhidharma, you could focus on the window, and they're both there in the same frame. It's not like one is real and one isn't. And that sensitivity to the conditioned and the unconditioned, like simultaneously, it's like having both those dimensions of reality in focus, simultaneously.

[46:51]

and not fixating on the conditioned and the time-bound, or not trying to fixate on the unconditioned. Speaking of the conditioned and the time-bound, and the emptiness in my stomach, I think we should wind up there, and I guess if After we've eaten, if people want to stick around and talk, they can chat to us then for a little while. I have to be back in San Francisco by 1.30, but we can be around for a little bit.

[47:31]

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