Birmingham, UK.
11
March 1988
Dear
Melvin,
Thank
you so much for your letter. I often think of you and wonder how you are
getting on in Singapore. I am always very happy to hear from my students and
learn how life is going with them.
I can truly understand your pain and frustration you are facing right
now. It isn't easy, is it ? It isn't just trying to adjust back to your normal
life after a few years abroad which is a problem. I think your major turmoil is
the fact that you are parting from your girl friend, your loved one and see no
future in the relationship which makes life much more unbearable for you.
It would be easy if living had some sort of formula to follow in order
to make us successful and happy. The truth is that there isn't any magical
formula. Everyone's problem is individual and has to be treated individually.
My advice is certainly not an answer to your problem. In the end, you have to
be the one who sorts your own problems out. What I have been doing all along in
my Tai chi class is merely sharing my experiences to my students. I have had
this privilege to share because a lot of those experiences were all about how
to combat my mental turmoil, the knowledge I have been learning directly from
Buddhism.
You might not be able to link and see clearly what you learnt from my
Tai chi class in relation to your problems right now. In fact, they do connect.
The feeling of losing your direction in life is very common among people
in the world nowadays especially your age group. Please don't worry, you are
not alone. Through our modern
culture, people automatically assume that making a lot of money and gaining
power or status are the goals of life and that is the direction one should
pursue. This is the easy option or a clear option rather because everyone can
identify with it. But it is also responsible for turning the world into what it
is right now, a chaos with more and more unhappiness among people.
I would
like to think that your frustration about the direction in life has a lot to do
with what you learnt in my Tai chi class. I would not be surprised at all if I
am the one who is responsible for your frustration right now. In fact, I have
thought about it a lot and do feel responsible for it. With all the new
concepts about life I drum into my students, I urge them to think and find
mental stability from a new angle which of course is based on the Buddha's
teaching; some students are bound to take it in. The problem is that the nature
of my class does not allow much time for questions and debate. I solved the
problem by arranging trips to a Buddhist temple, a walk, a weekend retreat and
also allowing students to come to my house for my home cooked meals so that
they can feel closer and
maybe learn more from me. Nevertheless, I don't think I can do enough for them
and that includes you. The time I spend with my students is not enough for them
to grasp the fundamental concept of life as well as the core practice. Even
though I don't waste a minute in class in trying to steer the practice into the
right direction, I still do not have enough time with them to nurture the
seedling into a stronger and independent plant. I have lost a great number of seedlings
in between the process but there are few who manage to nurture themselves and
get stronger everyday. But please believe me that the last thing I want is to
confuse you all. I can vividly remember the frustrating time when I first found
Buddhism. I knew that it was good and nothing was better than the medicine the
Buddha gave us. The enormous frustration arise when the theory and the practice
do not match and not compatible.
At one point, I am sure a lot of people feel that they wish they never
know about the Buddha's teaching so that they can just follow their heart and
carry on doing what the rest of the world is doing, finish education, get a
job, get married, bring up a family, struggle along and so on. Why bother to
think too deeply and cannot really put into practice. The point is that when
people manage to have some glimpse of the Buddha's profound wisdom(I don't mean
understanding Buddhism on the cultural or the intellectual level where there is no practice
involve), they have actually bought themselves a one-way ticket. Our life indeed has only one ultimate goal. It is indeed this one-way ticket that
frightens us at times when the practice haven't developed into a firm ground.
In one hand, a thought tell us to let go and denounce the worldly values, on
the other hand, another thought tell us how on earth we can carry on with our
lives without all those values. Basically, we want to be reasonably rich and
being recognised, (not necessary have to be very famous) as well as having
opportunity to do meditation and live at peace. While we are young and haven't
achieved all the worldly values, we can't just let that dream and ambition slip
away that easily. We even feel strongly that it isn't right after all the hard
efforts we put in during our university years. We subsequently think that we
can manage to have both worlds which are the world full of ambition and
competition and the world of spiritual freedom. I can genuinely have sympathy for those who are in this interim stage. I've been
there and that's why I can sit here and tell you all these tale about
frustration concerning this situation. Having gone through a lot of mental
pain, I am lucky to get out of it alive with my sanity still intact.
You know well that I never force anyone to believe me but I want to
share this experience with you. From where I am standing right now, I can see
quite clearly that those two world cannot share the same seat. It is as if playing musical chair; one chair
can only be for one person. Ajarn
Khemananda gave us a very good metaphor. He said it is like asking
whether we could put a hungry tiger and a little lamb in a same cage or not. I know that this is not
what people want to hear. I didn't want to hear it then either; I wanted to
bury my head in the sand and pretend to be utterly ignorant about the
whole thing. My frustration was
that bad until I didn't even want to finish my degree and want to live a
monastic life. Then, I had my dearest mother who could not understand my radical
way of thinking and got all upset and deeply hurt . I ended up hurting the
feeling of the person I love most in the world. I just could not believe the
situation I was in at that time. How could I find any peace of mind at all if
my mother could not give me a blessing. Against all the odds, I had to leave
home and lead a monastic life for a brief period of time as I talked about in
my first book. Maybe I would have had more choice if I was a man. Thai society
did not have much room for a young woman like me to fly freely on her own. I
think Ajarn Khemananda, at that
time, was partially responsible for this due to Thailand's political upheaval
though his thought changed some years later.
The pain I went through during my student years made me become more
aware of what I say to my students and results my strategy of teaching here.
Though I denounce our whole
philosophy of modern education, I never tell my students to turn their back on them but use the intellectual
knowledge wisely to help people instead of one's own benefit. I just know that
if these students can truly understand the practice, the world will
have some real quality people who know exactly what is what. These are the
group of people who can steer the world into a more peaceful direction.
Obviously, you are more aware of your own thoughts and feelings. You
begin to question philosophically the meaning of your further study, of work and
possibly of life in general. The trouble is as I said earlier, your theory and
your practice are not compatible and that cannot stop your mind from wandering
or thinking rubbish as you put it. Please do not worry, you are not alone. We
are all in the same boat.
Well, Melvin.....there is different ways which we can use to deal with
the repeated failure while walking along this difficult road. The one I use
most is using the pain I am experiencing as lessons to learn more about this
spiritual knowledge. While your
vipassana-bhavana is not spontaneous enough to come out from your mental
holodeck and result pain and
turmoil, I suggest you learn from it by telling yourselves this is what you get
if you don't have enough practice. The practice at that stage is very much like
a wounded dog who is forced into a corner. The poor animal cannot do anything
but sit there and keep on licking his own wound until he gets better. This is
exactly what you have to do. Persevere even though you have to meditate with
tears and more tears. Don't blame others for our pain. We are our own enemy.
The more you can see your own pain, the more you can appreciate the
enlightenment of the Buddha. This is about reading your own big book. Where can you learn suffering
from if it isn't from your own ? According to The Four Noble Truth, the noble
truth of suffering is to be identified. In the deeper sense, you can only
identify the true face of suffering when you actually see it in your heart. So, don’t be afraid of the
mental pain because it is your teacher.
Another
way of doing it is by thinking about
the Buddha and find the inspiration from him. Our spiritual teachers all told
us to look how much suffering the Buddha went through to give us this
precious knowledge and we can't even pay him back just a little by putting into
practice. Another one is telling
us that we just have this one life to gamble with, a life which we are lucky
enough to be born as a human to understand the sublime teaching of the Buddha.
How can we even want to waste another moment which can help us to get a bit
closer to our final destination.
Sometime we have to comfort and cajole ourselves but sometime we need to
shout and condemn ourselves to put
us back on the right tract again. This all depends on what kind of thoughts and
feelings you are facing.
There
is one more important thing. Through our Buddhist culture in Thailand, we are
all familiar with the saying listening
to the dhamma. When people are unhappy, they will relate to listening
to the dhamma as a solution to
make them feel better. They can listen to the dhamma by going to their
favourite temple and listen to their favourite monks to tell them the dhamma.
Television also have dhamma program on Sunday morning. The devout followers will have collection
of tape-cassettes containing dhamma talks of different famous spiritual
teachers who do not necessary have
to be monks. Then, we also have dhamma books.
Dhamma in general meaning is the teaching of
the Buddha, it can also refer to everything in the universe. Some are pisitive dhamma and some are negative dhamma. The ultimate meaning has to be the ultimate state or
Nirvana. However, practitioners who can clearly see the host mind, have the
path and the fruit or having dhamma in them even though they haven't reached the
ultimate state as Nirvana.
Now, the
point is that the spiritual ability in people is all different as the Buddha described by using the metaphors
of four different types of lotuses. To nurture this young seedling to grow into
a strong plant, some people need to listen more dhamma to make them grow
stronger, some might need to listen a bit and can easily carry on with the
practice and a number of the Buddha's disciples who listened just one sentence
before they reached their Aranhantship. As for the group of people who need to listen more to be able
to grow stronger; if they don't listen to the dhamma, it will be quite
damaging. The Buddha compare this group of people as baby who need to suck milk from his mother's breast to
enable him to grow. We are like baby in this respect, we need to be nurtured by
hearing more dhamma to enable our growth. I can understand this very well. Ever
since I knew Ven. Buddhadasa, Suan Moke monastery and Ajarn Khemananda, I had
such strong desire to listen and read dhamma book. I used to travel for 12
hours on a train to Suan Moke by
myself and 34 hours on a train to find Ajarn Khemananda on a
small island in the Songkhla province. When he was in Bangkok, I used to pay
regular visit and listen to his talk for hours on end. I never get bored. I
must have roughly a hundred hours of dhamma talk in my tape cassettes
collection, half of those are belong to Ajarn Khemananda’s. My desire to listen to dhamma tapes was exactly
like the Buddha said about a baby who can only find happiness in sucking his
mother's breast milk. I needed to listen, to understand more and I was
genuinely hungry for those knowledge. This went on so many years indeed. I used
to choose between studying for my exam and reading dhamma book. However, the reading and listening was weaned off a bit when my practice
progress. I can understand now that it was because I was reading the big book instead. Now, I don't have
much time to read dhamma book any more but I still listen to Ajarn Khemananda’s tapes, let's say 300 days
in a year and more than twice a day. When I cook and clean in the kitchen, I
listen. When I drive to work, I listen. I might just leave three tapes on my
kitchen table and I will listen over and over for weeks before I change to other topics.
People who listen to dhamma talk or read dhamma book will know that the
more we do, the more we get out of it as well as knowing how enjoyable it is to
be enlightened by those dhamma words. The joy from listening to dhamma is
nothing like the worldly joy people adore when they can indulge more material.
I just cannot imagine how I could live my life without our dhamma culture.
My hunger for dhamma during the first stage of my practice was purely
meant for chasing away my ignorance. There are a lot of new concepts I needed
to understand. The second stage was more like checking up on my practice
whether the way I read my own big book
was correct or not. The
reading was much less at that
stage because there were more joy
in the practice. The intensive listening to Ajarn Khemananda’s tape right now is both for the joy of knowing
dhamma which seems to have no end to it. It is as if a seedling has finally
turned into a strong tree but still need to produce young leaves, new buds and
flowers. The other reason is for
the benefit of my literary work for my students. Ajarn Khemananda is a one off,
he has depth and extremely analytical. When this unique quality meet the teaching
of the Buddha, it is like a nuclear reaction; the explosion of wisdom. I adore
Ajarn Khemananda because my need
is compatible to what he gives. His talks have sparked off lots and lots of new
ideas for me to share with my students but there is no specific topics in his
talks. There might be just one sentence or one metaphor which Ajarn Khemananda mentioned in the tape, I
subsequently use my own analytical approach to generate that sentence into a
ten page chapter. There is one chapter I called Uncle: why does everything have a
name ? This very sentence was casually brought up in his talk. I use
that sentence to generate a whole chapter on its own and this resulted me to
find a new term for the right context. I've been using that term ever since and
that is the innocent perception.
There is a fact about this practice which can be compare to two parallel
tunnels; one leads to an abyss and one leads to a vast opening. Complacent people like to think that when they are less busy,
they will do the practice. Dhamma
doesn't work out like that. If we keep on with the practice, we will know more
and more. Vice versa, if we are
complacent, we will know less and less. We cannot suddenly jump over the tunnel
because they are running in parallel. We can't think that maybe when we get
older, we will automatically become wiser and know by ourselves. We might be in deep water or staring
into an abyss before we realise it and that is too late. That's why the
Buddha's last sermon was simply telling his disciples not be to complacent. The
term might sound very simple and without depth. As time goes by, I just know
that the last sermon is, in fact, the heart of this spiritual success and we
cannot afford to take it too lightly. I can only say that please make a point
to involve dhamma into your daily life in whatever way you can. Even though
your meditation session turns out rather disappointing because you just cannot
focus, you must never be put off by it. Please persevere because it will be different next time or the time
after.
I never use soppy words with my students by telling them that I love
them and so on. I am still quite a chinese in this respect. Deep down, my heart
reach out to everyone of you. I can only wish that I can make everyone
understand the practice and that they can be at peace. Of course, it is
impossible. I can only do my best
by trying to work out the easiest and most short cut way for you all. Well,
your letter has urged me to do more for my students by creating meditation
evening in my own living room for those who have high potential and need to do
more and listen more and my literary works are for them to take with after they graduate. If they still keep
in touch, I will do my best to talk to them through letter writing just like I
am talking to you now. My problem is I can't seem to keep my text short and
writing has taken up a lot of my time. It doesn't matter as long as there are
people benefit from them.
Well, Melvin....I hope this letter can help you to feel a bit better.
Please be strong and bring back all the things you have been taught in my Tai
chi class. I enclosed herewith some of my new chapters, I hope you will find
time to read and put into practice. Only you can help yourself. I am sure when
you can find a proper job, hopefully the one you are happy with, you will be
more settled and then you will certainly view everything differently. I will
always be here for everyone of you whenever you need me. Please do not be
hesitate to write and tell me your problem if you have it. Please be patient
and keep on reading your big book.
Love,
Supawan