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 monastic life.
Learning to adapt myself to a very strict and conservative monastic lifestyle included learning to eat food that I didn’t particularly like. Villagers would bring nice little curries with chicken, curries with fish, curries with frog. But in those days, Ajahn Chah would dump them all into a big basin and mix it up. It was horrible. Or the nuns would glean things from the forest for us to eat, things like tree leaves. I remember writing my mother, "I’m living on tree leaves." She wrote back a letter of great concern.
At first, I couldn’t eat the food. It made me sick to even look at it. Fortunately, it was mango season, and there were big trays of mangoes. I managed to live on mangoes and sticky rice for an entire month, but after the mango season ended I kept getting thinner and thinner. Finally, I started learning how to eat the food. It is surprising how well we can adapt. I began to think, If I can learn to eat this food, I can live anywhere on this planet. Food couldn’t possibly be any worse than this.
Sometimes all the monks would ride into town in the back of a big truck. We would then walk through town on an almsround with Ajahn Chah. This was a grand experience, the whole population lining the main street. People had all kinds of nice dishes ready and would offer them into our almsbowls. When the bowls were filled up, a man would come around and we’d pour the food out into his big basket and continue on. When we got back to the monastery, we could choose what we wanted to eat from whatever was left in our almsbowl. This was such a rare occasion that it made us go really crazy in our minds. Once, a woman put a nice little cake into my almsbowl, and later as I dumped out all the rest of the food into the man’s basket, I tried to hold onto the cake. I didn’t want him to know what I was doing, so all kinds of devious thoughts came to mind. It was amazing to see the anxiety and the effort I put into holding onto this little cake. I’d become obsessed with it.
I also found myself obsessed with sweets. We live a celibate life, so any kind of sexual activity is forbidden. That limits the pleasure we can have. We can also eat only one meal a day, oftentimes without any really delicious food. But we are allowed sugar and honey as medicine, if it is offered. One time, Ajahn Chah gave me a bag of sugar. I was so happy. I thought, I’ll just take a little taste. I opened the bag, scooped out a teaspoonful, and put in it my mouth.
Within fifteen minutes I had consumed the whole bag.
I couldn’t stop myself. Sometimes I would dream about sweets: I’d go to a pastry shop, sit down at a table and order delicious looking pastries. Just as I was about to eat one, I’d wake up.
The mind plays a lot of tricks. When you are living a life in which you can’t simply fulfill your wishes and do what you want, strange feelings and incredible forms of obsessive greed can arise over things that had never really seemed a problem before. When I had been a layman, my greed was spread over a wide range of things, but in monastic life it was all focused on sugar and sweets. Here I was, an ordained monk trying to lead a spiritual life, acting like a hungry ghost, dreaming about sugar. Another American monk even had his mother send big boxes of sweets and chocolate cakes.
Because the greed was so focused, I could easily contemplate it. Learning to reflect on these desires, these obsessions of the mind, is very important. It’s here that we often need the precepts to stop us from following our habits or whatever is easiest to do. Precepts help us to see our impulses, how we follow them, and the results. The restraint and restriction of the precepts give us a sense of stopping. With reflective awareness, we begin to notice how strong the mind’s impulses and compulsions can be. We see them as mental objects rather than as needs we must fulfill. Even though the mind sometimes screams, "I can’t take any more of this," the truth of the matter is that we can take more. Human beings have amazing powers of endurance. If we learn to endure and not just be caught in the momentum of impulsivity, then we begin to find a strength in our practice. We don’t have to be a slave to habits and impulses.
The many rules of monastic life were based on this restraint. One of rules that used to really irritate me in the beginning concerned the wearing of robes. We were given three robes when we became a monk. The custom in the Thai forest tradition is to wear all three robes when going out on the morning almsround. The mornings were hot, and we usually had to walk quite a long distance through paddy fields and villages. By the time we got back, all our robes were soaking wet with sweat. The robes were dyed with natural, jackfruit dye, so after a while, the mixture of sweat and jackfruit dye begins to smell really terrible. Life centered around robes—using the robes, washing the robes, sewing the robes. I didn’t want to live around robes; I wanted to meditate.
I found this incredibly frustrating. I remember saying to one of the other monks, "This is a stupid custom, wearing all these robes. All we need is one thin robe; it covers us adequately. It is very difficult to make our heavy, double robes. It takes a lot of cloth, and by wearing it every day out in the heat, it easily deteriorates. Then we have to make another one—more material, more dying, more sewing." I made a very good case for not wearing all three robes, being the very reasonable man that I am. But I was really just whining and complaining.
Well, the monk told Ajahn Chah, so I was called to see him. I felt so embarrassed. Suddenly it dawned on me: Why make a problem out of this? Just wear the robes. It’s not worth making a scene about. I can bear it. It isn’t going to ruin my life. What is ruining my life is my whining mind: "I don’t want to do this, this is stupid, I can’t see any point." This complaining was eating me up from inside—whining, blaming, holding strong views, getting fed up, wanting to leave, not wanting to cooperate, griping about life. That’s the suffering that I couldn’t bear. I came to see that even throughout much of my life before becoming a monk, even in the midst of a comfortable lifestyle, I had a habit of complaining and endlessly looking at things through a critical eye.
These are the things we can contemplate. We can’t control what arises in the mind, but we can reflect on what we are feeling and learn from it rather than simply being caught helplessly in our impulses and habits. Even though there is a lot in life that we can’t change, we can change our attitude towards it. That’s what so much of meditation is really about—changing our attitude from a self-centered, "get rid of this or get more of that" to one of welcoming life as it is. Welcoming the opportunity to eat food that we don’t like. Welcoming wearing three robes on a hot morning. Welcoming discomfort, feeling fed up, wanting to run away. This way of welcoming life reflects a deeper understanding. Life is like this. Sometimes it’s very nice, sometimes it’s horrible, and much of the time it’s neither one way nor the other. Life is like this.
