About This Teaching
This long talk begins with a lay listener admitting to slack meditation practice, and Ajahn Dtun's reply opens with death: reflecting that one could die at any time stops days, months and years drifting by. From there he lays out the path of sīla, samādhi and paññā. The five precepts restrain speech and action but cannot calm the mind; for that, concentration on the breath or the word Buddho is needed. Without it the mind is like tall grass bending with every wind, and merely "watching the mind" never cuts thoughts and emotions at their source.
Concentration is compared to sharpening a blunt knife and recharging a flat phone battery. The body is examined as earth, water, air and fire, and hair is shown to be unclean with a memorable image of adding a pinch of it to a stew. He tells the story of two men digging for water, one giving up at ten metres and one persevering to a spring, and pictures sīla, samādhi and paññā as a Dhamma army retaking the city of the heart from the defilements.
“The path is none other than sīla, samādhi and paññā.”
Ajahn Dtun