Sumedho - The Sound of Silence: The Selected Teachings of Ajahn Sumedho

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Table of Contents

Awareness is your refuge:

Awareness of the changingness of feelings,

of attitudes, of moods, of material change

and emotional change:

Stay with that, because its a refuge that is

indestructible.

Its not something that changes.

Its a refuge you can trust in.

This refuge is not something that you create.

Its not a creation. Its not an ideal.

Its very practical and very simple, but

easily overlooked or not noticed.

When youre mindful,

youre beginning to notice,

its like this.

Ajahn Sumedho

PREFACE

It is spring in southern England. Hertfordshire is blooming. May blossoms deck the hedgerows. Fifty people, including a few nuns and monks, multihued and peacefully intent, pace to and fro over rain-speckled grass.

Now its evening in the long, narrow central buildinglong since converted from a school dormitory to be the retreat center meditation hall. Ajahn Sumedho regales the group with tales of his faux pas as a novice, nearly forty years ago in Thailand. Heartfelt laughter billows through the fragile windowpanes, into the cooling night.

Amid dawn mist, shawl-wrapped, silent friends share a warming mug of tea on the benches outside the kitchenits almost time for the morning chanting. Its a snowy winter evening, three nuns and one of their novices scurry along the pathway to the temple, bundled up against the wind and the cold.

SUCH VIGNETTES ABOUND at Amarvat during the retreats that are held there. Some of these events are structured for the public, like the one that took place during nine days in May 2005; others are held more for the monastic community, and are ten times as long, such as that of the winter of 2001.

This book is a revised and expanded edition of Intuitive Awareness the original having comprised a collection of eleven talks, given by Ajahn Sumedho, during that winter retreat oaf 01. In this present edition these have been combined with and embellished by sixteen further talks, drawn from the spring session of 05. (Dates of the talks are listed in the appendix.)

Each of these two sets of times and occasions has its own ambience and style, as should be expected. The intention of bringing them together in this book, however, is that they should inform and complement each otheras if in one gallery were arranged an assortment of Monets many paintings of haystacks, progressing through their multitudinous lights and seasons, while in the neighboring gallery there hung a collection of his equally numerous waterlily compositions.

Just as a visitor to the exhibition would be treated to these two domains of the artists explorations, so too the reader here is treated to these two modes of Ajahn Sumedhos expositionsDhamma teachings for monastics and for the lay Buddhist communityand is invited to move back and forth easefully between these different realms.

Needless to say these two styles of teaching have a great deal in common, as in the analogy of Monets lily and haystack paintings. However, they also differ in tone and content, and, necessarily, different elements will be meaningful and useful to different people. For example, the additional talks presented here include two on the subject of mindfulness of the body, so very helpful in assisting us to slow down and to be grounded in the present, in a world grown increasingly frenzied; they also carry an increased emphasis on the precarious nature of reliance on conceptual thought (a tendency so endemic to the secular world) in the talks Views and Opinions and Thinking and Habits.

The wisdom teachings contained here are many and various; furthermore, it is the hope of the editors that, in this rich variety, there has been a broad enough range encompassed that as many dispositions as possible have been served by the insights expounded here.

The printed word is not the real thing: awareness (and all the other words contained here) is simply a complex of black symbolic marks fixed upon the white field of a page, it is not the quality of awareness itself. Nevertheless, what the Buddha referred to as the miracle of instruction (anussani-pihriya) is comprised of the fact that, when a receptive and well-primed heart hears or reads the Dhamma, a genuine transformation, a liberation, an awakening of that heart can be catalyzed. This is truly a miracle, and as the Buddha also said, of all types of miracle this one is supreme.

Therefore, may the hearts of all who have had the good fortune to encounter the wisdom contained in this small book be encouraged, prompted to awaken in this way and swiftly realize the end of all suffering.

Ajahn Amaro
Abhayagiri Monastery
California

INTRODUCTION

BY AJAHN AMARO

TWENTY YEARS AGO, in 1984, the germinal monastic community of the newly opened Amarvat Buddhist Centre settled into a cluster of barrack-like buildings on a windy hilltop in Hertfordshire. The name of the new monastery (meaning The Deathless Realm) was chosen both as a resonance of the ancient Buddhist city in Andhra Pradesh, in southern India, and as a counteractive force to the Mutually Assured Destruction of the nuclear arms race, then gleefully being pursued by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the Soviet Union.

The meditation space that we used at that time was a former school gymnasium and assembly hall. The windows were cracked, patched with plastic and tape, drafty or missing completely. Gym markings crisscrossed the cold wooden floor. A large golden Buddha image sat on the old school stage, spotlit and surrounded by filmy blue curtains that we had hung to beautify the shrine and suggest the quality of infinite space.

Since 1981, when the community was largely based at Cittaviveka Monastery, in Chithurst, West Sussex, it had been our custom to set aside the midwinter months, after the New Year, to be a time of communal retreat. At that time of year the English weather does not allow much in the way of building work to go on, visitors are few and the days are short and darkit is thus a perfect situation to use for turning the attention inward and taking time to cultivate formal meditation practice in a very thorough way.

Amarvat was opened in 1984 to provide living space for the burgeoning monastic community (group photos of the time show twenty or more eight precept postulants and forty nuns and monks) and a place where we could hold retreats for the public. So when this move was made it provided an even more expansive situation for the winter retreats, and for Ajahn Sumedho to continue to guide the community in his inimitably comprehensive and inspiring way.

The winters of 1984, 85, and 86 were spectacularly icy. Winds howled down from Siberia, seemingly uninterrupted by any solid object until they bit into our bones. It was not uncommon to be wearing six or seven layers of clothing through the day and then to climb into our sleeping bags at night still wearing most of them. We sat bundled in thick robes and blankets for meditation and to listen to instructional talks. The air was icy but vibrant, as there was a powerful and pervasive sense of community spirit among us.

Sometimes in those days it seemed that the main source of energy in the whole system, and certainly what our hearts were warmed and guided by, was Ajahn Sumedhos apparently limitless capacity to expound on the Dhamma, especially during the winter retreats. Naturally enough in that situation a lot of guidance was neededthe majority of us were fairly new to meditation and monastic training and we needed all the help we could get, particularly within a routine of noble silence and walking and sitting meditation all day. Thus Ajahn Sumedho gave extensive instruction, often two or three times a day. There would be morning reflections during the first sitting of the day before dawn, often more reflections after the breakfast of gruel and tea, sometimes questions and answers at afternoon teatime, and finally a formal Dhamma talk in the evening.

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