About This Teaching
Speaking at a merit-making gathering attended by monks and lay people from three monasteries, Ajahn Dtun explains that confidence in the Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha leads to belief in kamma: wrong actions bring suffering and good actions bring happiness, now and in the future. Giving turns outer wealth into inner wealth that can follow us and works against stinginess in the heart, while the five precepts are the qualities of a good person and restrain body and speech.
Precepts alone cannot calm the mind, which is driven by delusion and keeps proliferating thoughts and taking moods to be itself, so he encourages meditation. The Buddha himself attained awakening while attending to the in- and out-breath, and with patience and effort scattered thinking settles until the mind is peaceful, with lightness, pīti and happiness. That peace becomes the basis for seeing that moods are only conditions of the mind.
Greed and suffering burn in the heart like fire; to put the fire out one develops sīla, samādhi and paññā. Wisdom shows the impermanence and not-self of mental states and of the body, whether through recollecting death, the parts of the body, or the four elements. Reflecting on death is not meant to cause fear but to keep one heedful and doing one's best with work, family and the mind. He closes by recalling the great disciples who reached Nibbāna by following this path.