Q: How do you practise contemplation of the citta (approximates to "mind", except that it is not cerebral, nor is it located in a place in the body. The word refers to the sense of mind consciousness)?

A: Well it's just like a mood; vedana (feeling) is attractive, repulsive or neutral, but citta can be quite fuzzy - you can feel emotionally confused or hesitant, or muddled or just dull and very nebulous feelings of moods. If you're practising citta vipassana you're really aware of what your citta is like. But sometimes people in meditation develop a technique, and they do it no matter what. They aren't aware of their actual mood or what's affecting them. They become conditioned to a meditation technique: "It's 8.35 - time to do my anapanasati," and then they're not aware. They've just been on the telephone, and their Mother told them that their Father ran away with the secretary and that the electricity bill wasn't paid so the lights go out and there are all these things that make you upset -and then they wonder why: "I couldn't meditate last night, I was too upset; I just couldn't concentrate on my breath!" But if you're meditating properly, then if some horrible thing happens, you can watch your citta. Don't think you've got to do anapanasati at that time -I mean its not going to be much use. No wonder. There's a lot going on here that you have to accept and notice. You can do anapanasati when nothing much is disturbing you.

People ask me, they say: "I've been trying to do anapanasati for years, I haven't gotten anywhere" They have this idea that to do anapanasati is a good practice, but they, don't reflect on other factors in life: what kind of work they do, what kind of family situation they're in and all the things that are going to influence and affect their mind and heart. Maybe for a moment you might be able to suppress everything out, but it all comes exploding back into your mind again. So the more quiet you get, the easier it is just to concentrate on the breath.

When I first started meditating I couldn't do anapanasati at all. So I did mantras. Something like mantras I found very helpful to calm - like fighting fire with fire. My mind was such an obsessed thinker that I needed a thought. I couldn't contemplate on anything as subtle as my breathing, So I made up this mantra - "Let go" - and it worked. After a while, I just kept saying this mantra: "Let go" The first month of my meditation when I was a novice was an utter hell realm for me really. Suddenly I found myself living a very lonely life in the monastery, all alone. Nobody to talk to, nowhere to go. I'd just sit there and wait for them to bring me the meal. I became obsessed about the food - really ridiculous. And then try to do this anapanasati. In the end I thought, "Let go, just say: 'Let go'" So I did that, and I found through obsessing my mind with those two words eventually the thinking began to still - I'd get moments when I wasn't actually thinking; there was a moment of calm. And I'd notice it. And then the mind went back into obsession, and I'd say: "Let go, let go, let go" Eventually it was really like a machine gun! And after a while my mind became much more calm, so I could just more or less casually go about it. That's working with the mind. Then after a while mantras seemed ridiculous - I had no need for them - and then anapanasati became something I really enjoyed, I really liked to do.

Q: If consciousness and the khandhas** cease in a Tathagata, in a Buddha, in someone who becomes enlightened, who exists, what kind of existence is there left? Is there anything, is there nothing, or what?

A: There's no delusion, about it any more. There's consciousness -the buddha was conscious, he wasn't unconscious - and he had a body and he had perception. He had vedana and he had sanna sankhara, vinnara. He had sense organs, and could see, hear, smell, taste, touch, think, and he had vedana,- there was vedana but there was no desire from that, coming from, ignorance. There was the ability to respond, to teach out of compassion for other beings, but there was no self to do it: there was just the remaining of what was left of that lifetime. He lived over forty years after his enlightenment, for the welfare of others beings. Language gets very confusing, because cessation sounds like annihilation to us-but it isn't. It's the ceasing of ignorance, the cessation of ignorance.

**Khandhas - body or form (rupa) and mind, which is made up of feeling (vedana), perception or recognition (sanna), mind creations (sankhara), and consciousness dependent on the six senses (vinnana)

Q: If there is no desire, if there's parinibbana, doesn't that mean everything ceases?

A: That's it. There's the nibbana of non-grasping while the bodies still living, and then there's the parinibbana the final relinquishment; there's nothing to get reborn. You see, when people die still unenlightened they desire to be reborn again. If you identify with the body, then you try to hold onto it as long as possible or there's the desire to be reborn into something else. You can see it just in a day here when you want something to stimulate you - that's rebirth actually. There's all this desire that will always take us to doing something, absorbing into something else. Well, apply that to when the body is dying. If you're frightened of death, and you've not really contemplated life and you're still attached to all these views about yourself, then there's a lot of desire going to come for rebirth. What you're attached to you tend to absorb into - the things you're used to, what you like, what you find attractive. You tend to go for that all the time; seeking people that you like, or seeking the place or the things, the thoughts and memories which are familiar. People will even hang on to misery and pain, because they're used to it.

As I said last night, when you're miserable at least you feel alive. To feel persecuted makes you feel really alive. Hating people makes you feel alive, doesn't it? If you really hate somebody, then you know you're really alive and you feel energised. Some people get very dull when they don't hate people, when they don't have any lust or greed for something, or any ambition to get somewhere. Why do people want to climb Mount Everest, or be the first one to sit the longest in a tub of baked beans? (There is actually someone - it's in the Guiness Book of Records. Imagine the danger of being reborn from that one!) Taking revenge, seeking vengeance, is sometimes what keeps people alive. I've never been in an English pub because all my life in England I've lived as a monk -but in American ones, I remember you'd go and you'd argue. You can get very heated about political things that you really don't care about very much-, it makes you feel alive to win an argument, or to support and defend a particular viewpoint.
Now contrast that to what we're doing here where the attention is on such ordinary things. There's nothing much: the passions are let go of - greed, hatred, delusion. You're conscious of breathing now, conscious of feeling - neutral feeling - Conscious of causes. You're bringing into consciousness the way things are. Now one doesn't feel this desire: the desire to go after extremes falls away. Most of us would really not want to argue about political views, or go to pubs, or climb Mount Everest, or sit in a tub of baked beans. So this is where most of our life is: it's the same for everyone really. The extremes are brief moments, but most of our life is like this: it's eating, walking, sitting, lying down, feeling, waiting for the bus, waiting for somebody to telephone, waiting for the bell to ring, waiting for the next event. And all that time we're breathing and there's feeling, and there's consciousness. In the practice of awareness, we're bringing consciousness to the ordinariness because we're not Usually conscious of that: Usually the ignorant person is conscious only in the extreme moments.

Q: How would you describe the nature of the pure mind?

A: This is where the Buddha was very careful, because when you're trying to describe the indescribable, or define the indefinable, or limit the unlimited, you can get yourself into a lot of delusion. The only thing I can say is that as you let go of things more and more, and realize that all that arises ceases - you realize the cessation of things - then you realize the Unconditioned.

There's the conditioned, the Unconditioned; the created, the uncreated. You can't conceive uncreatedness. You have a word but there's no perception for it. There's no kind of symbol that one could grasp. You could have a doctrine about it, so religion tends to make these metaphysical doctrines that people believe in. But, since the Buddhist teaching is a non-doctrinal teaching in which you're to find things out for yourself, it leaves you without any real metaphysical doctrine in order for the realization to happen.

The conditioned realm only arises and ceases. It has no eternality or infinity to it. It's only a movement in the universal. So that whatever word you get or concept you have can be very misleading. We've had dialogue with Christians, and I notice Christian meditators now are moving more towards the Buddhist position and saying quite outrageous things like: "God is nothing or no-thing." But yet, for Buddhists, we would understand that and that .. "no-thing" is probably a fairly accurate description: whereas trinitarian Christianity is always giving God attributes as a Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

So you're always having these conditioned attributes that you're looking for, you're perceiving as God. And yet, you know in mystical Christianity you transcend this trinitarian view very much; and that is where you talk about mystery, or not knowing. Christian mystics don't have the psychological vocabulary that we do in Buddhism, so they tend to put it in a different way, But if you get beyond the terminologies they use, it's very much the experience of the mind that is free from a self-view - and from a binding to the conditioned world. So one sees the potential in all religions to point beyond themselves.
The danger is always in attachment to the conventions. Even with Buddhism, as beautiful and clear a teaching as it really is, not many Buddhists use it to be enlightened. They tend to attach to a certain part or a certain thing in it. But I think now there's more potential for awakening to this truth - which isn't Buddhist in fact - it is beyond conventions. But Buddhism is clearly stated as a convention. It's not an absolute. It's a tool to use. At least with Buddha-Dhamma you're not asked to support a convention in itself, you're encouraged to use it for mindfulness and wisdom. And I can see that in Christianity also.

Hinduism and Islam have this in some form or another. Then ther's the perennial philosophy. There's a lot of this really clear thinking going on now among human beings that is quite wonderful - the mental clarity and use of wisdom that is happening in different places on the planet. No matter how gloomy and pessimistic the newspapers sometimes are about the state of the world, I can't help but feel more optimistic. I can see that it is changing and that in just my own lifetime theres been a remarkable change in the development of a spiritual understanding and wisdom, compared with say twenty-five years ago.

Q: Why do monks and nuns not claim attainments?

A: The rules for the monks and the nuns were made for particular instances. From my own experience of being a Buddhist monk, I can see how wise that is because it really makes you quite careful about how you say things. Sometimes you can get very enthusiastic about your practice, or you have insights and the thoughts do come up: "Oh, I'm enlightened" And if you go round telling everyone, then that can be very misleading.

In fact when monks would get that way my teacher, Ajahn Chah, would say- "OK, now you stay off in your little kuti and don't talk to anyone until you calm down"

The tendency to interpret these experiences from self - view - "I am" - is the danger; not that the experiences are wrong but you really need to be non-attached to the memories of them or to an interpretation of them from this position of "I AM ..."

There is suffering and there is the end of suffering: that's all the Buddha ever really said. The Brahmin priests were always trying to push him into making metaphysical statements, ultimate doctrinal statements about the I AM, or THE ONE and so forth. And he would always say: "I teach there is suffering, there is the end of suffering" Sometimes the Brahmin priests would say: "Well obviously he doesn't know, otherwise if he knew he could tell us" But then by telling people, as with all the metaphysical, doctrinal teachings of religion, what happens? People tend to just grasp the doctrine.

So if you believe in a metaphysical doctrine, then how you tend to interpret life will come from that belief. The Buddha approached it from existential experience - experience of existence - suffering and the end Of suffering. However, the danger from that is to become nihilistic: to say that there's no God, nothing, that there's just the arising and ceasing, empty phenomena rolling on, meaningless nothing and so forth. That's the opposite of the eternalist view where there is a God and eternal life. The Buddhist approach is to neither extreme but to this penetration in the present, through the here and now, through mindfulness. And the key, the clue, is that suffering: the experience of suffering and the experience of non-suffering.

Now how many of you realize non-suffering? You don't suffer all the time, but are you really aware when you're not suffering? Just question yourself in that way, because the unenlightened human being tends to assume that one is a person that has suffered a lot in one's life. This kind of basic assumption from the personality position, tends to colour everything that we do. We can be living in a situation where we're not suffering at all but assuming that we suffer - even when there isn't any suffering. But through mindfulness, you're noticing non-suffering; I always bring to my attention as much as I can to the non-suffering. Before, I would assume that I was a person who suffered a lot. And so even in the most pleasant situations, if something was really nice and there was no suffering, then I'd tend to grasp: "Well what'll happen when I lose it?" Whenever this habit of I AM starts, you know "What'll I do if I lose this? What if it changes, or it's taken away from me, or I get sick, or something changes in a way that I don't want?" - with that habit, even when things are going along very nicely, one is creating suffering around the possibility of suffering in the future. What the Buddha's saying is notice now, be aware, and that even in situations that one might interpret as suffering - for example, physical pain, cold, hunger, disease, loss of loved ones, one needn't suffer. The more mindful you are, and reflective an that, then you're not creating suffering onto the actual misfortune, or the unpleasantness, or the pain that you're experiencing. Through this awakened mind you're not creating, not complicating the way life happens to be with this ignorance, this projection.

Q: How does mindfulness become a reality in one's life in the world?

A: Mindfulness is the ability to be awake and aware wherever you are. As lay people you don't generally have the supporting encouragement to practise mindfulness. People around you where you work may be not interested in Dhamma at all. Whereas in a monastery you have a conventional form that encourages you: thats the advantage of monastic life.

But people need to be mindful of the way things are in their lives rather than making the assumption that they can't be mindful unless they have a lot of supportive conditions for that. What you can't expect is a lot of tranquillity and simplicity if you're working where there's a lot of pressure on you to be a certain way or do something. Then you'll find these things will not be very helpful in tranquillizing your mind or in leading towards simplicity or peacefulness with the external forms. But you can be mindful of it and through that you find something within yourself that is peaceful in spite of the agitation and stressful conditions that surround you.

You can idealize monastic life: sometimes you have a very nice group around you where you get on well, and everybody's quite mature and sincere in what they're doing, and it's very, very pleasant to have people who you can trust and respect. And you get very attached to that. Then somebody comes in who is very disruptive, and you find yourself getting angry with them and you think: "I don't like this, we've got to get rid of this person so we can hold on to this nice community where everyone gets on. We don't want any disruptive, unpleasant things coming into it." That itself is a miserable thought. So we train ourselves to expand our minds to include disruptions.

You can get very attached to silence, like on a meditation retreat. But in a silent room, where everybody's still, any sound is magnified. Just the rustle of a nylon jacket ... or somebody; gulps too much, swallows too loudly or something like that, you can feel very annoyed. You think: "Oh, I wish that person would stop making those noises." What you're doing is, you're creating anger in your mind, aversion towards the way things are, because you want this total silence and you don't want it to be disrupted. But when it is disrupted, You see that you're attached to that. Yet to include all possibilities for disruption within any situation doesn't mean you go out and try to have disrupting things happen; but you've already opened yourself to - the possibilities rather than held onto an idea of what you would like.

Mindfulness allows us to open the mind to all possibilities, both for what we like and what we don't like. Then you can begin to more or less accept life's flow and movement, the way it changes, without being angry or fed up when it isn't what you want.

In fact, you begin to feel quite at ease with life when you can accept the whole of it as it is. A lot of people become very fussy and cowardly and timid out of just not wanting to get involved in anything that might agitate or create unpleasant feelings in their mind. You think: "Oh, I can't go there because it'll just upset me" But when you're mindful then you don't mind being Upset. Being Upset is part of living! You don't go round seeking to be upset but it does happen. And you learn from it. It's a part of lifes experience.

Q: If one looks inward, too much, does one miss out on the lessons the outside can teach?

A: Well, because of the sensitivity of this human form, you're impinged on by other people. But the emotional states and the sensitivity involved in being in this state are to be reflected on rather than taken personally. So you begin to see what selfishness is in your relationships.

In monastic life, for example, you have to share everything everythings communal - so a good part of our experience of life are the reactions we have to each other. There are different types of characters and different ways of doing things; some people you find more attractive and others less attractive. All of this is observed, so that you're not just following these habits, but you're beginning to really see a lot of these selfish attitudes and biases -and feelings of being threatened by others.

I remember experiencing this years ago with one of the monks. Intellectually, I liked him very much, but whenever he started coming near me I had this tremendous fear arise. He was a very kind person - never hurt me - but whenever this particular monk came into my field of vision I started feeling fear. And then, because I was puzzled about it, I started realizing that the particular way he moved and carried himself conveyed aggression to me. It was not his intention, but the actual movement of the way he walked and carried himself converged to this mind some aggressive force.

I hadn't been aware of that because I tend to be very abstract about people: you know "this one is this way and he's good natured, he's kind"; but then you get confused by these irrational reactions that don't fit into your intellectual perception. The way people move sometimes has a very strong effect on us that we're not always aware of.

The convention of the Buddhist monk puts the male into a non-aggressive, harmless form; one of the important parts of the training is in harmlessness. The whole appearance - the shaven' head, bare feet, the robes - is to remind the individual man himself he is a monk, and also to convey harmlessness to the society around. This is why I think, once you get used to Buddhist monks as a perception, you feel devotion and respect: if the life is lived properly then it represents compassion, harmlessness, restraint - good virtues. Now if you take skinheads - they don't convey harmlessness, do they? Their whole expression is to convey aggression and brutality. They develop a way of walking, and looking, and moving, and they put on things that make them look aggressive and mean. This tends to bring fear into the mind.

The training of the Buddhist nun is to put the female form into a state where, it's not trying to attract men or arouse jealousy in other women. So the proper training of a Buddhist nun is one of not trying to draw attention to herself.

By training in these ways, we become, aware of conditioned tendencies in ourselves. If I had no such convention I would probably never have thought of it much. In Thailand, as a monk, I became very aware of the reaction people had to me, and I began to wonder why they would jump back when I had onlly good intentions. I wanted to be friendly, and yet when, I came directly to them they backed off. Why? Then I began to see that, for one thing my size could appear overwhelming, and that it was also because of the habitual movement of the body.

Living in Thailand for a number of years, I developed a genuine appreciation for that particular respectful way of living, where you're trying to bring out the best in people -rather than arousing things like greed, or anger, or aversion, or envy, or lust. You're no longer moving out into the society with the intention of arousing these kind of states of mind in people, but you're living in the soceity trying to - be that which is nonaggressive, harmless - that which conveys to the mind the possibilities for the human being to be peaceful and awake, mindful, wise, and restrained.

Q: You said that worry is what we produce when we don't have any faith in travelling beyond pleasure and pain, Can you say a bit more about that?

A: I am a great worrier! When we first came to England everything was very uncertain: how would we survive as Buddhist monks in a non-Buddhist country? Would we be beaten up and attacked by people, would anyone give us alms-food, or what would happen? But in actuality my life here in this country has been a good one. I began to see that even when everything is going right, once you are caught in this habit of worry, you still worry. It became obvious that people were interested in the Dhamma and they were going to feed us and we were going to survive and monasteries were going to be supported; but then when there wasn't anything to worry about, one could find something else! And being in a responsible position - like the abbot of a monastery, you get into positions where you can't just hide behind someone else. In Thailand I could hide behind Ajahn Chah's robes, and because I wasn't a native Thai I could get out of a lot of things, so that there were certain advantages. But being here I always felt that I was the focal point, and so there were tendencies towards doubt and anxiety.

In reflective meditation you go out to the feeling of worry. I would begin to open to that very feeling of worry or doubt, uncertainty, rather than try to suppress it through affirmation. but I found that the way out of worry was not by suppressing it but by totally accepting the feeling of it. The insight that came from that was that in the sensory realm there is an awful lot to worry about. It wasn't just a neurotic hang-up! In this realm of pleasure and pain and personality and success and failure, there is a lot to worry about. You could trip and break your leg, you could have a heart attack, you could be beaten up or there could be a nuclear holocaust, there could be an IRA explosion and all kinds of things. Then because you have a memory you can hold on to things of the past: "This happened to me five years ago and what if it happens again?"

A country like Britain has developed to try to give us a sense of security - you have a stable government, you have welfare, medical services, education, all these things laid in for us -and still we worry! So I've realized, that that sense of insecurity and uncertainty is just the way life is.

But if you go to the actual feeling of insecurity, you find it peaceful. It's a kind of paradox: when you are reacting to that feeling, you get worried and frightened by it; but as you open to that uncertain, insecure feeling that you have and the violent reaction to it, and bear with it - you will find its peacefulness. You will find a sense of peace with yourself. Worry, if skilfully used, takes us to serenity of mind; because when you're with that very feeling of insecurity, your thinking, mind - with its "what if this happens, what if that happens? - will stop operating. Then you will begin to recognize emptiness of mind, which is a state of mind which is very receptive to the way things are. Then you have perspective. You begin to have real faith that you will be able to cope with the problems of life that you experience.

For example, I realize the potential at any moment for having a heart attack, or being beaten up, or the ozone hole growing bigger, or all the whales disappearing in the ocean, or being taken over by the Communists, or whatever.... But what I know now is that I trust that whatever happens I will respond to it appropriately, because these things are not the important issue any more. One is in tune with something transcendent, rather than thinking, "Well if I don't have this I'll just die, and if this happens I won't be able to stand it". I realize that whatever happens I'll stand it!

Q: What advice would you give to somebody who has suffered a sudden calamity?

A: To really accept he way it is; that is, to bring it to consciousness rather than to push it aside, or to just indulge in emotion, or to resist it. To just notice and accept that this is the way it s, and to bear the feeling of sorrow, or sadness that's there. Then you'll be able to let it go - which doesn't mean it will go when you want it to, but it means that you'll not be making any problems about it.

Life is like that. All of us, all human beings, experience the loss of someone they love. It's just part of our human condition, and human beings have always experienced that. We have to watch our parents die. Maybe we have to experience the death of a child, or someone who dies prematurely - a good friend who is in an accident. Sometime we have to accept horrendous things in life.

But then when we are mindful we have already accepted all possibilities one still feels the anguish, but, one can accept that feeling. That has its own peacefulness too; the experience of life has a sad quality to it. Every morning the monks and nuns chant: 'All that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will become otherwise...' You think: 'What a horrible thing to say.' But it's a reflection that what we love, what pleases us, is going to change. We suffer when we think it shouldn't and we don't want any changes. But in the mind that's open to life, it's often in the times when we suffer a lot that we grow a lot to.

People that have had life too easy sometimes never grow up; they just become kind of spoilt and complacent. It's where you've had to really look and accept thingsthat are painful that you find yourself growing in wisdom and maturing as a person.

I was invited to give talks to people with AIDS in the San Francisco area in California. Of course that is a very traumatic disease, and has all kinds of ugly things connected to it. It's like having leprosy; having your immunity system pack up is probably one of the most miserable things that can happen to a human being. So there is the tendence to take it all personally, with bitterness and resentment, or with a tremendous guilt and shame and remorse - because the homosexual communities are mainly the ones that have it. There is often self-hatred and guilt connected to it.

But yet, this very thing could be seen as an awakening. You could determine it as 'God's justice', punishing you for living an immoral life - that's one interpretation. Or you can feel just terribly mistreated, and life has given you a pretty bad lot to handle and that you hate God because he gave you this terrible thing. You've always felt like a misfit or whatever. You can shake your fist at the heavens and curse them. You can just involve yourself in self-pity and blame. Or you can look at it as a chance for awakening to life, and to really look and understand.

When you know you're going to die, sometimes that can make the quality of the remainder of your life increase considerably. If you know you are going to die in 6 months, then that's 6 months. If you have any wisdom a all you're not going to go around wasting 6 months on frivolities, where you might, if you're perfectly healthy, think: 'I've got years yet ahead of me. No point in meditating right now because I can do that when I'm older. Right now I'm going to have good time'. But if you know you're going to die in 6 months ... in one way that can be a very painful realisation, but also it can be what awakens you to life. That's the important thing, the awakening and the willingness to learn from life, no matter what you've done or what's happened. Every one of us has this ever present possibility for awakening, no matter what we may have done.

I see our life in this form as a human being more as a kind of transition. We don't really belong here. This is not our real home. We're never going to be content with being human beings. But it's not to be despised either and rejected, but it is being awakened to and understood. You can say you've not wasted your life if you awaken to it.

If you live a long life - say 100 years - following foolish ideas and selfishness, then 100 years have been wasted. But if you've awakened tom life - maybe the length of it's not so long but at least you have not wasted it.

Q: How about non-attachment within a relationship?
A: First you must recognise what attachment is, then you let go; then you realise non-attachment. However, if you're coming from the view you shouldn't be attached, then that's still not it; it's not to take a position against attachment s a kind of command, but to observe: What is attachment? Does being attached to things bring happiness or suffering? Then you being to have insight, you being to see what attachment is, and then you can let go.

If you're coming from a high-minded position of thinking that you shouldn't be attached to anything, then you come up with ideas like: 'Well I can't be a Buddhist because I love my wife, because I'm attached to my wife. I love her, and I just can't kind of let her go. I can't send here away. I can't throw her into the volcano. That's coming from the view that you shouldn't be attached. But the recognition of attachment doesn't mean that you get rid of your wife, it means you free yourself from wrong views about yourself and your wife. Then you find there's love there, but it's not attached; it's not distorting, clinging and grasping.

The empty mind is quite capable of loving in the pure sense of love and caring about others, but any attachment will always distort that. If you love somebody and then start grasping them, it tends to go off; then what you love becomes painful for you. For example, you love your children - but if you become attached to your children, then you don't love them any more, because you're really with them as they are. You've got all these ideas about what they should be and what you want them to be. You want them to obey you, and you want them to pass their exams. And then you're no longer loving them. Then if they don't fulfil all your wishes, you feel angry and frustrated and averse to them.

So attachment to children no longer allows us to love them. But as you let go of attachment, you find that you natural way of relating is to love, and you are able to be aware of them as they are, rather than having a lot of ideas of what you want them to be.

Talking to parents .. they say how much suffering there is in having children, because there's a lot of wanting. You know, when we're wanting them to be a certain way, not wanting them to be another way and so forth, we create this anguish and suffering in our minds. But the more we let go of that, then we find out that we can have an amazing ability to be sensitive and aware of children as they are. Then, of course, that openness allows them to respond, rather than just react to attachment. A lot of children, you know, are just reacting to: 'I want you to be like this.' And they get to that stubborn stage: 'I'm not going to be what they want.' It's just reaction going on.

The empty mind or the pure mind is not a blank kind of 'zero land' where you're not feeling or caring about anything. It's that effulgence of the mind, brightness, truly sensitive and accepting - an ability to accept life as it is. And then, because we accept life a it is, we can respond to the way we're experiencing it in appropriate ways, rather than just reacting out of fear and aversion.

Q: (Ajahn Sumedho replies to a question on attachment and self-view.)

A: Grasping is the problem. If you see grasping and understand that, then you have solved life's problems completely. If you really reflect, it's the grasping of the sensory world that makes it all go wrong. In itself the material world is all right. There's nothing wrong with humanity or the universe. It's the grasping that makes us suffer from it.

The Buddha pointed to this grasping. In the first Noble Truth he said: 'There is suffering.' He stated the problem that we all have: there is this suffering, this dukkha that we all experience. Then the second Noble Truth is that we suffer because of grasping. Then the insight is to let go of things; and then the realization of non-attachment follows. So if there's peacefulness and calm, then you're aware of non-grasping. The sense of 'me' and 'mine' depends on grasping things. When you think back in your life, the memory part is from being able to remember moments of grasping. You can't remember the moments you were not grasping something. So then you're always having to do things to remember. That's why excitement, romance, adventure, all these things are so powerful for us because when we grasp them then we have these memories. We feel alive. Human beings identify with and grasp memory as self.

You feel alive when you're angry and you hate somebody. Indignation makes you feel alive - that you are somebody. Greed makes you feel you're going to get something you want. To want something and get it gives you a sense of being alive. Envy and jealousy: to be somebody who other people are jealous of is important, isn't it? To have a better car than the neighbours or to have a beautiful house, or lovely clothes, or be someone who has status in a community - the grasping of that ....

You suffer because you're always in this position of being somebody. And then there's always going to be a reaction from somebody else. So if I am a rich and famous person, then the grasping of that perception means that there are going to be a lot of people who want either to challenge me, or take away my wealth, or criticize me. Or people are going to try to delude me, flatter me and make friends with me because they want the things that I have. So that whole form of grasping leads to suffering.

But actually, having status and wealth and a new car and all this - there's nothing intrinsically bad or wrong with that, but it's the grasping of it that will bring the suffering. And conversely, with poverty: grasping the idea that I'm a poor person, I'm low class, I'm worthless - grasping that view is suffering.

At least when you think: 'Well, I'm poor and I'm the lowest, meanest, most unlovable person in the society' - at least nobody's going to envy you for that. But it's still a position that one's going to suffer from attachment. When the attachment is seen through, then it doesn't matter. What your status is, whether you're at the top or the bottom, or in the middle - these are not the important issues of our life or spiritual development. They're not important to us.

The Buddha established the Sangha in a way that avoids all that. If you're from the aristocracy, or if you're from the working class or whatever, when you come into the Sangha it's of no importance. You're just Sumedho Bhikkhu, Sobhano Bhikkhu, Sucitto Bhikkhu - you're just bhikkhus, and you don't know whether they were Lord so and so, or Prince of Princess, or any of these things. Such things are of no importance in the holy life. But in worldly life, to have a Ph.D., to be someone who's well-educated, or who comes from a good family: these are highly valued by people in the society.

Or they're criticised. You can be an egalitarian, thinking: 'I hate the aristocracy - Lords, Ladies and Counts and Countesses - it's all rubbish.' But that means that you still think it's something. To call it rubbish means that you actually believe it is something important - because as a condition, it's just what it is, you don't have to call it rubbish. It's nothing bad in itself or wrong to be a Lord or a Lady, or a Count or Prince, but it's the attachment to any view about it that leads to suffering.

With something you really love, then attachments form quite easily. And you always know when you're attached, because you're suffering. One time, I'd become very devoted to Ajahn Chah. I'd become very attached to him, actually. This gave me a lot of happiness, because I hadn't had anyone who I really felt that love for in my life. So it all went to Ajahn Chah, and it was a very inspiring and wonderful feeling for me. But then I noticed that I was suffering a lot, because if anybody criticised Ajahn Chah or implied that there was a better teacher somewhere else, I'd get incredibly angry about it.

And so I'd watch this. At first I believed it. I'd say: 'If you think the other teacher's better than Ajahn Chah, go to that other teacher' - that kind of thing. But then I'd reflect and see that it was not a very nice mental state, and I'd watch the suffering that was coming from that. And then I'd realise the attachment.

Then the tendency was to think, 'I shouldn't be attached.' So I'd say: 'I'm not really attached. Other teachers are just as good as Ajahn Chah. They're all the same ....' But I was still attached; out of idealism I was just pretending not to be attached.

So you still suffer, though you're pretending to be completely tolerant and non-attached. Then you realise the attachment is an emotional one. So you begin to go to the feeling of attachment and really study attachment, rather than just trying to suppress it and say: 'I'm not attached.' You go to that place in yourself and you investigate it. You learn from it; and through that you let go of it. Because once you see it, then attachment's gone. The attachment is out of ignorance. You're never attached out of wisdom. So once there's wisdom then there's no attachment.

You can be attached to the idea of not being attached. Krishnamurti, for example, would always emphasise not to be attached to anything. He would say, 'Monks, this is all wrong. Religion, monks, all this is wrong. It's not the way.' Then people listening to that would attach to his view, and they weren't aware of the attachment they had to Krishnamurti's view. So the problem is not the view, but the attachment. A view is a view. You can see if you're attached to a view, for or against it. Then the actual practice is to not being attached to any view, and you are very much investigating what's going on.

With wisdom you're free to be a monk or not to be a monk, but you're not attached to it. You have no opinion. I can see if there's an attachment to being a monk, then I suffer from it, from being a monk. But when there's no attachment, then one feels that it's an offering. One presents this monastic form to others as an offering. It's a gift, it's a beautiful form in itself. It's not me.

It would still be an attachment if I felt, in order to prove I'm not attached to being a monk, I should disrobe. That's still an attachment from the self, isn't it? To prove that I'm not attached, I'll have to disrobe to see what happens to my mind when I'm not a monk. That's attachment. But if you're just with the moment as it is, then being a monk, the form itself, is just a beautiful form, a beautiful convention that one feels is of great use and can be a great offering to the society we're in. Beginning with ignorance, there's this imposition, this going out, out of fear and desire and ignorance. So that is the compounding of the whole process, and then attachment comes from that, and one builds a whole realm of attachment in one's mind.

Now when there is the ending of ignorance, then the world that is created out of ignorance falls way. Then there's what we call Dhamma - the way things are. So then monks and nuns and lay people, and Buddhist conventions and all these things, are what they are. They're dhammas for us, rather than attachment.

The Western mind tends to assume that non-attachment means 'getting rid of something'. For example, a woman said to me once: 'I could never be a Buddhist because I'm attached to my children.' I'd say: 'Well, what do you mean, not be attached to your children? Throw them off a cliff or something to prove you're not attached to them? Or just desert them so that you won't be attached to them?' That's not Buddhism. But the ability to not be attached to your children means that you can love your children. When you're attached to your children, you can't love them any more - because attachment destroys that. Any love you have is destroyed by attachment, because attachment blinds and is painful and is suffering. Whereas love born from wisdom is joyful.

Forest Sangha Newsletter:
October 1988, Number 6;
January 1999, Number 7;
July 1989, Number 9;
October 1989, Number 10;
January 1990, Number 11;
October 1990, Number 14.