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We should all train our heart, look after our mind. Our mind, when it’s not trained, is like a small, innocent child that doesn’t know anything. Whatever it comes across, it pounces. If it comes across water, it pounces on the water. If it comes across fire, it pounces on the fire. It keeps causing harm to itself. When you see the harm of what you’re doing, you can stop. You watch it until you can stop, until you can give it up. It’s like lighting a lantern and letting your child loose. The child doesn’t know anything. It crawls over and tries to catch hold of the flame. Then it’ll start crying. The next day, if you try to take the child to the flame, it won’t touch it, for it’s seen the harm from the day before. It’ll stop trying to catch it. Right here is where insight helps us. We really see. Whatever we really see, we can really let go.

I’ll tell you a story about the Supreme Patriarch, something I’ve heard from other people. He went to China and, when he arrived, the Chinese gave him a teacup. It was really beautiful. There was nothing like it in Thailand. And as soon as he received the teacup, he suffered: Where was he going to put it? Where was he going to keep it? He put it in his shoulder bag. If anyone touched his shoulder bag, he’d say, “Watch out. Don’t break the teacup. Watch out for the thing that can break in there.” So he was always worried about it, suffering from it: suffering from having and then clinging. That’s what made him suffer. One day a novice let the teacup slip from his hand and it broke. The Supreme Patriarch said, “At last. That’s the end of my suffering.” This is called events happening to free him from his suffering.

When you make merit, what is merit? It’s correctness. In other words, it’s bringing the mind to peace, away from all kinds of evil. All of you lay people have gathered to make merit, but when you look for the merit, each of you has to look for yourself. These things you’ve brought here are objects—lots of different objects. It’s like eating. You gain delicious tastes because of objects. But when you’re full, where is the fullness? You don’t know. The fullness doesn’t have any substance, but everyone knows that you feel full. Some people don’t see merit. Not seeing merit is like not seeing the fullness from eating. Suppose that we all eat a meal. We use up the curry; we use up the rice; we use up the sweets. And what do we gain? Fullness. Fullness isn’t a thing, but it appears in the mind. That’s what we gain. What does it come from? It comes from objects, from the activity of eating the objects.

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Silena bhoga-sampada: A person with virtue has wealth. In terms of external wealth, all the things that we search out for our livelihood will be Right Livelihood. The things we gain from Right Livelihood, even if they’re not much, are large. They’re large because they have value. That’s why they count as bhoga-sampada: consummation in terms of wealth. Like diamonds and jewels: Even tiny pieces have a high price because they’re free of things that are worthless. All the things that we use to maintain our livelihood: If they’re free of harm, they have value. They’re wealth.

As soon as there’s anything unskillful in your thoughts, words, and deeds, remove it. Don’t let it hang around for a long time. It’s like a wound appearing in your body, or a thorn sticking into your foot. You want to remove it, but would it be better to remove it today or tomorrow? Or how about taking it out next week? Or suppose you get a stomachache today. A stomachache is painful, and you want the pain to go away. But do you want it to go away today, or would tomorrow be better? Or would you rather wait for a week for it to go away?

All languages come together in the language of the Dhamma. I’ll give you a simple example. When we boil water for tea so that it’s hot, the word ‘hot’ in Thai is rawn. In Isaan it’s hawn. In English, they say, hot. That’s the way it is. Languages are like that. Each person speaks in his or her own language, even though it’s all the same heat. If you want to find where all these languages come together, the language of heat all comes together where we stick our finger into the tea. If you get a Chinese person to stick his finger into the tea, the heat is no different from when you get a Westerner or an English person to stick his finger into the tea. The only difference is in the language of the words. Heat is the same for everybody. When you know heat, it means that you know how it is for everyone.

The teachings of the Buddha get rid of people and give rise to venerables. In other words, they get rid of what’s wrong in the mind. Only then can what’s right arise. They get rid of what’s evil so that goodness can arise. As when your house is dirty: If you sweep it out and wipe away the dirt, it’ll be clean—because the dirt is gone. As long as what’s wrong in the mind isn’t gone, what’s right can’t arise. If you don’t meditate, you won’t know the truth. The Buddha’s Dhamma is very powerful. If it couldn’t change your heart, it wouldn’t be a Dhamma with any power. But the Dhamma can turn ordinary people into noble ones, because it enables people with wrong views to give rise to right views.

Tranquility is stillness that lasts only for a little while. The stillness is the foundation for insight. Insight is seeing clearly, understanding more clearly than you did before. Insight is not simply still. The stillness of tranquility is like running away from noises to a wilderness where there’s no noise. If you have lots of children, you run away to a wilderness where there are no children. When you don’t see your children or don’t hear any noise, you find stillness. But that kind of stillness is like having a wound, stitching it up, and covering it up with a bandage until it looks like it’s healed. But actually there’s still an infection inside. When the infection flares up, you cut it open, stitch it up again, put medicine in it, and the wound heals over. But there’s still infection inside. It’s not really healed. That’s tranquility. With insight, you have to remove all the infected tissue so that it can heal from the inside.

Knowledge is like a knife. You hone it until it’s sharp—really sharp. Then you put it away. The knife can cause both benefits and harm. When a person of discernment uses it, it’s sharp. A person of discernment can get lots of benefits from it because it’s sharp. But a person without discernment can use it to destroy the nation, destroy happiness, destroy harmony—all kinds of things. And he can do it easily because the knife is sharp. When knowledge comes to a fool, it’s like putting a weapon in the hands of a bandit or an evil person. He’ll shoot people all over the place, kill all over the place. When knowledge comes to a wise person, the nation and its people get along easily. These days we pin our hopes on knowledge. We worship knowledge. We rarely worship goodness or correctness.

Your duty is to plant a tree, water it, and fertilize it, that’s all. Whether it’s going to grow fast or grow slowly, that’s not your duty. It’s the duty of the tree. You can stand there complaining about it until the day you die, but it won’t get you what you want. Where do your thoughts go? ‘Maybe the soil here isn’t good.’ So you pull up the tree. Its roots are just beginning to grow, but now they’re torn off. You keep pulling it up, again and again, until it finally dies. Why do you want it to grow fast? Your desire for it to grow fast is craving. Your desire for it to grow slowly is craving. Are you going to follow your craving, or are you going to follow the Buddha? Think about this every day. What you’re doing: Why are you doing it? If you’re not at your ease, you’re doing it with craving.

It’s like a mourning dove we keep in our home. We never ask the dove if it’s enjoying itself or not. We give it rice to eat and water to drink, but everything is in the cage. And yet we think that the dove is satisfied. Have we ever stopped to think: If someone gave us rice and water and put us in a cage, would we be happy?.

In the same way, we’re caged in this world. ‘This is mine, I have this, I have that’—all kinds of things. But we don’t understand our own condition. Actually, we’re gathering stress and suffering into ourselves because we don’t look deeply into ourselves, in the same way that we don’t look deeply into the dove. It looks like it’s living comfortably. It can drink water and eat food, and we think that it’s happy.

The same with us: Even though we live in extreme pleasure and comfort, once we’re born we’ll then have to grow old; when we’re old, we’ll then have to grow sick; when we’re sick, we’ll then have to die. This is suffering. This is the way we suffer.

Samadhi is firm concentration. If you’re firm in your practice, it’s a kind of concentration, but it doesn’t yet give you the fruit. It’s still just the flower—but out of the flower comes the fruit, big or small. The potentials of people are not the same. Things that are buried inside, we don’t yet see. Like the seed of a jackfruit: Suppose that you eat some jackfruit and lift out a seed. When you do that, you’re lifting a whole jackfruit tree, but at the moment, you don’t see it. You don’t yet know it. Even if you were to split open the seed, you still wouldn’t see the tree because it’s subtle. When you don’t see it, you feel that there’s no tree in there. Why? Because it hasn’t been mixed with the right things. If you plant a jackfruit seed in the dirt, then it will start growing.

With the Dhamma, it’s like going to the home of friends or relatives and they give you some fruit. When you take the fruit in your hand, you don’t know whether it’s sour, sweet, or unripe. In other words, if you simply hold the fruit in your hand, you can’t know its taste. To know the taste, you have to bite into it and chew it. That’s when you’ll know that it’s sour or sweet or what its various flavors are, in line with your own perceptions. It’s the same with the Dhamma. In everything, the Buddha has you take yourself as your own witness. You don’t have to take anyone else. The affairs of other people are hard to judge because they’re the affairs of other people. If something is your own affair, it’s easy—because the truth lies within you. It has you as its witness.

When people are deluded, they deludedly see that hair of the head, hair of the body, nails, teeth, and skin are wonderful things. Beautiful. It’s like a fish biting a hook. Whether it’s biting the hook or biting the bait, it doesn’t know. It wants to bite the bait, but what comes into its mouth is the hook, snagging its mouth so that the fish can’t get away. No matter how much it wants to get away, it can’t. It’s stuck. It’s the same with us: When we see hair of the head, hair of the body, nails, teeth, and skin, we like them. We fall for them—and we’re already stuck on their hook. By the time we realize what’s happened, it’s already hooked into our mouth. It’s hard to get away. If we think about getting away to ordain, we’re worried about our children, our belongings—worried about all kinds of things. And so we don’t get away. We stay right there until we die.

The crude, beginning level of the practice is a little hard to maintain, but the refined levels of virtue, concentration, and discernment all come out of this. It’s as if they’re distilled from this same thing. To put it in simple terms, it’s like a coconut tree. A coconut tree absorbs ordinary water up through its trunk, but when the water reaches the coconuts, it’s sweet and clean. It comes from ordinary water, the trunk, the crude dirt. But as the water gets absorbed up the tree, it gets distilled. It’s the same water but when it reaches the coconuts it’s cleaner than before. And sweet. In the same way, the virtue, concentration, and discernment of your path are crude, but if the mind contemplates these things until they’re more and more refined, their crudeness will disappear. They get more and more refined, so that the area you have to maintain grows smaller and smaller, into the mind. Then it’s easy.

What do stress and suffering come from? It’s like lifting this bowl and feeling that it’s heavy. If you put it down, it’s not heavy any more. As soon as you lift it up again, it’s heavy again. So what does the heaviness come from? We feel heavy because we’ve lifted this thing. So we put it down. We put down the cause of its heaviness and we’re light. Right? Know stress. Know the cause of stress. Know the cessation of stress. Know the path of practice leading to the cessation of stress. That’s all you do. Just put down the cause, and the stress and suffering ceases. That’s the practice. When we start out, we don’t understand anything. We lift this up, and it really feels heavy. Why is it heavy? We don’t understand. Why is it heavy? Because that person looks down on us; because this person criticizes us. All kinds of things. We don’t know what we’re holding in our own hand. But if we put it down and stay still, we’re not heavy. See? We’re not suffering because we’re not lifting anything. That’s all there is to our practice.

When you construct a house, then when it’s finished, only the construction of it is finished, right? The next step is that you have to live in the house and always keep cleaning it. It’s not the case that when you finish constructing the house you can rest at your ease. That’s not the case at all. You have to keep cleaning the house continually. It’s the same when you practice concentration. When you do concentration, you can’t think that you’ve finished doing it and now you can stop. You have to use your knowledge and mindfulness to be aware of the preoccupations that will disturb and destroy your concentration. You have to know these things. When standing, walking, sitting, and lying down, you have to keep mindfulness in charge at all times. Getting the mind into concentration isn’t hard. But to keep maintaining concentration is hard. Constructing a house isn’t hard. In just a few years you’re finished. But you have to keep on cleaning the house for many, many years until it falls apart.

Buddha wanted us to get our foundation in good shape first, get everything clear and clean first. It’s like building a house or a building. We have to inspect the ground, the area where we’re going to put up the building, so that it’s in proper shape. Or like dyeing cloth: If you want to dye a piece of cloth, you have to look it over to see if it’s dirty. If it’s dirty, you have to wash it in detergent until it’s clean. Only then will it take the color when you dye it. In other words, wash it until it’s clean, and then it will take the dye. It’s the same with making merit. You first have to make your mind clean. Making your mind clean means letting go of evil thoughts, letting go of everything that’s wrong and evil. That’s when you can do good, do what’s correct. With everything, the foundation has to be clean first, and then whatever you do will give rise to merit.