About This Teaching
Most people, Ajahn Dtun observes, seek happiness through wealth, praise, fame and sense pleasure, yet such happiness is fleeting and nothing can be taken along at death. A few go against the stream and choose to cultivate themselves, seeing that birth leads to aging, sickness and death. The way is sila, samadhi and panna: virtue, concentration and wisdom. The five precepts keep greed and anger from turning into harmful action, and even three to five minutes on a meditation object can quieten unwanted thoughts.
With concentration, the mind separates from its moods and can see feelings at the senses as impermanent and not self. Asking whether we can order the body not to sicken, age or die shows that the body is only four elements. Seeing this loosens coarse attachment, so illness and death no longer shake the mind. Lay people are encouraged to do their work well while building the perfections. In a closing answer he explains that at death a vision arising from one's predominant kamma carries the mind to its next birth.