About This Teaching
A hunter who spots a deer is thrilled by everything about it: the ears, the tail, every movement. His body is light and alert, and his only fear is that it will get away. Once he has shot it and stands over the carcass, the ear is only an ear and the tail only a tail; it is just meat to cook and eat. Ajahn Chah uses this image for the way a man and a woman fixate on each other. Before the other is "captured," they seem unbearably beautiful; after living together, the excitement fades and people may even look for a way out.
A second image makes the same point: a cat stalking a mouse is keen and focused, but once the mouse lies dead it loses interest and walks off. Desire overestimates its object, and imagination makes things out to be more than they are. If one actually contemplates, there is not much there. This, he says, is where we perish, through our imagination.
He adds that ordained people must forbear more than others in the realm of sensuality, and that kāma here means desiring what attracts us, something difficult to get free of.