About This Teaching
Speaking to monks of various monasteries, Ajahn Dtun begins with right view: happiness and suffering arise in one's own heart, not from the sky or the stars, and defilements do not belong to any country. Keeping precepts closes the outlets through which defilements drive speech and action, but sila alone is like one army that cannot yet govern the mind, so the army of samadhi must be added.
As concentration matures, mindfulness and wisdom see that mental states are separate from the mind and keep letting go of greed, aversion, liking and disliking. The root of defilement is taking the body as self, so the body is contemplated through death, its parts, its unattractiveness or the elements. He describes this attachment being removed in coarse, moderate and subtle portions, noting that at the later stages five precepts are no longer enough. Finally, even the subtle clinging to feeling, memory, formations and consciousness must be seen through.
He closes by stressing right view from the start, like choosing the correct fork in a road.