Ajahn Chah: study, practice, and attain

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

Here, c'mon, have some fruit. Good to see ya!

With the Dharma, it’s like going to the home of friends or family and they give you fruit. When you take the fruit in your hand, you don’t know whether it’s sour, sweet, or unripe.

In other words, if you simply hold the fruit, you can’t know its taste. To know its taste, you have to bite into it and savor it. That’s when you’ll know that it’s sweet or sour or what its various flavors are, in line with your own perceptions.

It’s the same with the Dharma, the Truth the Buddha made known. In everything, the Buddha has you take yourself as your own witness. You don’t have to look to anyone else.

Three things lead to full enlightenment.

The affairs of other people are hard to judge because they are the affairs of other people. If something is your own affair, however, it’s easy—because the truth rests within us. It has you as its witness, not anyone else.

When you hear the Dharma -- strange, never-before-heard Truth -- you have to meditate on it to be complete in three things: study, practice, and attainment.

1. Study is pariyatti, to make the effort to know.
2. Practice is patipatti: After you know, you apply it.
3. Attainment is pativedha, when knowledge in line with the Truth we've studied and practiced arises within us [as certainty, as verified faith, so that we know our confidence in the Buddha was well placed].

If we simply listen, our knowledge is just perceptions and concepts [mental fabrications, ideas, assumptions, distortions]. If we talk about it, we speak in line with our concepts. We aren’t bringing the actual Truth out to talk about. This means we haven’t reached the Dharma, haven’t contemplated the Dharma.

Our heart isn’t Dharma, but we can speak the Dharma and act as if we were Dharma. This is called being incomplete according to the standards of the Buddha’s teachings.