About This Teaching
For lay meditators, Ajahn Chah's guidance began with generosity as training in letting go. In his example, a person with two apples who means to share notices the wish to keep the larger one; giving away the big apple brings a brief twinge, then a victory over oneself.
Defilements, he taught, are like a cat that keeps coming back if fed; refuse it and within days it stops visiting. Keeping the five precepts was a minimum, since harming others brings remorse that undermines practice, while pure sila brings an ease likened to a heaven realm.
He warned that happiness breeds heedlessness, and that meditators should reflect on its instability rather than settle for what he called the "thin-skinned peace" of refined states. It ends with his instruction to stay with present awareness and see everything arising in the mind as an impermanent state, not to be clung to.