About This Teaching
Visiting a monastery of Ajahn Chah's lineage, Ajahn Dtun speaks to novices and monks about why they are there and how to train. Like rivers from many lands that take on one colour and flavour in the ocean, monastics from different cultures follow one discipline, using its rules to wear down conceited views. He urges respect between juniors and seniors, contentment with the requisites, metta toward one another, and restraint of speech.
Continuous mindfulness and concentration are the base. Sense contacts arise anew every day, so letting go of liking and disliking is never finished, unlike a roadside fire that burns the straw once. When the mind is peaceful it takes up the body, through its parts, its unattractiveness or the four elements, until it sees the body is not the mind.
He then traces the path through to the end: after attachment to the body is gone, the mind must see feeling, memory, formations and the knower as impermanent, destroying the knower so that only purity remains. He closes by urging patience and determination, taking the great teachers as examples.