About This Teaching
Welcoming a multicultural gathering, Ajahn Dtun begins with refuge in the Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha and with confidence in kamma. Seeing the harm of unwholesome speech and action leads people to keep precepts, which calm body and speech. Yet the mind, which identifies the body and its emotions as self, still suffers through aging, sickness and death.
Meditation is hard at first because the mind has been left to roam for so long, but with patience it becomes peaceful, and body and mind feel light. Mindfulness then sees that thoughts and emotions are not the mind, and wisdom keeps filtering out greed and aversion moment by moment. This daily work never ends while the body is still taken as self, so one must contemplate the body through death, its parts, its unattractiveness or the elements. He recalls Kondanna, who understood that whatever arises must cease and so entered the stream. Lay people should do their duties well within the five precepts and live a life worthy of this human birth.