About This Teaching
Ajahn Chah explains that letting go must be done with knowing and awareness; otherwise it is no different from the letting go of cows and water buffaloes. In the early stages, he says, one should hold firmly to the Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha and train the heart, which cannot yet be trusted while it is covered with defilements.
When training makes us feel hot and bothered, we assume something is wrong, but he says this heat is the defilements being challenged, a sign of practising rightly. People fall off the path on either side, into self-indulgence or self-torment, and are knocked back and forth like the clapper of a wooden bell.
The middle way sets down both happiness and unhappiness. Those who crave existence keep skipping over the centre, going down to be bitten by a dog or up to be pecked by a vulture. The path beyond good and evil, pleasure and pain, is the way of a peaceful sage, and the Dhamma is known directly by the wise for themselves.