If you want a chicken to be a duck, and a duck to be a chicken, you will suffer.
AJAHN CHAHIn cultivating generosity, we are only oppressing our greed and attachment. This allows our true nature to come out and become lighter and freer.
More Ajahn Chah Quotes
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Things are simply the way they are. They don’t give us suffering. Like a thorn: Does a sharp thorn give us suffering?
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Sati is life. Whenever we don’t have sati, when we are heedless, it’s as if we are dead.
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Peace is within oneself to be found in the same place as agitation and suffering.
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Meditation is like a single log of wood. Insight and investigation are one end of the log; calm and concentration are the other end. If you lift up the whole log, both sides come up at once. Which is concentration and which is insight? Just this mind.
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Letting go a little brings a little peace. Letting go a lot brings a lot of peace. Letting go completely brings complete peace.
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Isn’t it wonderful how the sky can take that dirty water and change it into pure, clean water? Your mind can do the same with your defilements if you let it.
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Happiness and suffering do not depend on being poor or rich, they depend on having the right or wrong understanding in our mind.
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Know and watch your heart. It’s pure but emotions come to colour it. So let your mind be like a tightly woven net to catch emotions and feelings that come, and investigate them before you react.
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Regarding this Dhamma, it is not something that we can simply talk about or take another’s word for it.
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Wisdom is in yourself, just like a sweet ripe mango is already in a young green one.
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We will come to understand that everything in the world is our teacher.
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Remember you dont meditate to get anything, but to get rid of things.
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The mind is intrinsically tranquil. Out of this tranquility, anxiety and confusion are born. If one sees and knows this confusion, then the mind is tranquil once more.
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Read yourself, not books. Truth isn’t outside, that’s only memory, not wisdom. Memory without wisdom is like an empty thermos bottle – if you don’t fill it, it’s useless.
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Another man understands that nature of the river is to change constantly, regardless of his likes and dislikes, and therefore he does not suffer.
AJAHN CHAH