About This Teaching
Everyone wants happiness and no one wants suffering, yet while greed, anger and delusion remain in the mind, suffering continues. Ajahn Dtun presents practice as developing the mind through sila, samadhi and panna (virtue, concentration and wisdom). With precepts as a base and patient meditation, restlessness lessens and the mind becomes one-pointed. A still mind, like clear settled water, lets one see every emotion and defilement within it.
He compares mindfulness to walking a path and kicking aside broken glass, nails and thorns: liking, disliking, greed and anger are seen and removed moment by moment. When the mind is free of emotions, the body is taken up for contemplation through death, the 32 parts or the elements. Attachment to the body is released in three stages, gross, intermediate and refined, and true happiness grows as the fires of greed, anger and lust go out.
Even then a subtle delusion remains: the mind takes feeling, memory, thought and consciousness to be itself. Like a mango seed that can still sprout, it is clean but not yet pure. Wisdom must see these as arising and ceasing, until the mind lets go of all five khandhas.