About This Teaching
Gaining intellectual knowledge about the path can come to seem more important than walking it. Ajahn Chah compared this to poring over a map without making the journey, or reading the label on a medicine bottle without taking the medicine. He and his contemporaries worried that book learning stirred restless, speculative tendencies and created expectations that hindered meditation.
One of his best-known injunctions to newcomers was "Don't read books, read your mind." One may know how to write the word greed, but greed arising in the mind does not look like the word; when anger arises, there is no time to read anything. Correct knowledge must be brought inward.
On reaching calm, the scholar tends to reach for the texts to interpret it, asking whether this is the first jhāna yet. That wanting is craving, and the mind withdraws from the calm. So he advised throwing away thoughts and doubts, bringing only body, speech and mind into practice, and leaving the scriptures outside, since nothing in books is the same as in experience.