About This Teaching
Ajahn Chah tells how he learned less from study than from watching his own heart. He advises those who think too much to wrap up their theoretical knowledge and store it in a chest: the word anger written on a blackboard is nothing like anger engulfing the heart. He admits to once listening disrespectfully to a wandering meditation monk, only later finding every detail of that teaching true in his own practice.
The priority is to set the wheels of practice turning; the one who eats is the one who gets full. Defilements are like an old fellow telling the same lies again and again. He gives simple instructions: follow the breath, perhaps with Buddho, without controlling it; do not fear lights, visions, or the breath seeming to stop. Learn to calm the mind anywhere, even on a train, then use that calm to see every sense experience as impermanent, unsatisfactory and not self, tossing it into these three rubbish pits. That, he says, is the heart of vipassana.