About This Teaching
Ajahn Dtun's father carried his letter to Ajahn Chah and taped the reply. Ajahn Chah said the experiences came from strong conditioning carried over from past practice, but by then the young monk had already settled his own doubt. The tape was forgotten and, years later, found recorded over with music.
A month or two later emotions began to stir again. Attachment to material things had dropped away completely, so that two umbrellas the monks asked him to compare seemed no different, both just the four elements, yet he saw he had been contemplating unattractiveness more outside than inside, and turned back to his own body. When a friend told him to see a cup's impermanence by imagining it broken, his mind already saw that without effort.
Back at Wat Pah Pong, where life in the huts was very simple, he intensified his meditation, knowing the path was sīla, samādhi and paññā at a more refined level and that he must contemplate his own body more. At a large Songkran almsgiving he closed his eyes, asked what the true condition of the crowd was, and saw everyone and everything decay and fall apart, then rebuild, leaving his mind still and equanimous. On meal invitations he practised seeing the senior monks as corpses and skeletons, noting that contemplating one's own body is harder.
One morning he could hardly breathe and lay in his hut without fear; he declined the medicine a friend brought, as in his first four years he took none unless travelling with diarrhoea, and called this too severe. That friend gave him a small book by a meditation teacher from the Nong Khai area, and reading it he recognised that the way he had been practising was the four foundations of mindfulness.