Ajahn Chah: "No pain, no gain"?

Ajahn Chah (ajahnchah.org) via Ven. Sujato, Ellie Askew, Dhr. Seven (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly

All of this samsara (wandering on through cyclical death and rebirth) is nauseating.

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Samsara: Rebirth/Death Cycle

At first there is difficulty in practice. But in anything we undertake, we have to pass through some difficulty to reach ease.

In Dharma practice we begin with the truth that all things in existence are disappointing (dukkha), marked by a pervasive unsatisfactoriness/inability to fulfill.

But as soon as we experience a taste of this pain, we lose heart. We don’t want to look at it.

Disappointment is really the truth [that could awaken us from ignorance to enlightenment]. But we want to get around it somehow.

It’s similar to the way we don’t like to look at old [and sickly] people. We prefer to look at the young.

If we don’t want to look at disappointment, we will never understand disappointment, no matter how many rebirths we undergo.

How the quest begins

I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired!

Disappointment is an ennobling truth -- one of four that, when realized, lead to spiritual awakening.

If we allow ourselves to face it and how pervasive it is, we will start to seek a way out of it.

If we are trying to go somewhere and the road is blocked, we will think about how to make a pathway.

Working at it day after day we can get through. When we encounter problems, we develop wisdom like this.

Without seeing disappointment we won’t really look into and therefore resolve our problems. We just pass them by indifferently.