Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo
“Poisonous snakes”
here stand for passion, aversion, and delusion, which have a painful poison
that seeps into the minds of run-of-the-mill people. When it reaches the heart,
this poison can kill you.
As for “fires,” there
are two kinds: forest fires and house fires. A forest fire doesn’t have any one
owner. It arises of its own accord, by its nature, and spreads its destruction
far and wide, without bounds, until it dies out on its own. This stands for the
fires of birth, aging, illness, and death, forms of suffering that arise in the
bodies of all living beings. This fire can burn up both our worldly treasures
and our noble treasures (i.e., the goodness of the mind that we otherwise would
be able to develop). As for house fires, those are the fires that arise from
within the heart—defilements, ignorance, craving, and clinging—the hindrances
that get in the way of the goodness that comes from training the heart and
mind.
The “great thieves” or
“500 most wanted criminals” stand for our five aggregates: form, feeling,
perception, thought-constructs, and consciousness, which are constantly robbing
us, killing us, and oppressing us, destroying both our worldly treasures and
our noble ones. In addition, there are the underground criminals that keep sneaking
up on us without our realizing it: material gain, status, praise, and pleasure
from external things. Whoever gets duped by these criminals finds it hard to
work free. This is why they can destroy the goodness that we’d otherwise be
able to attain in the area of the heart and mind.
All of these poisonous
snakes, fires, and criminals pose a tremendous danger to the heart. They keep
destroying our goodness every moment. If we’re not wise to them, we’ll have
trouble gaining release from them. The only way to prevent these dangers is
through the power of the Dhamma: in other words, the practice of meditation,
using our powers of directed thought and evaluation within ourselves to the
point where we give rise to the discernment that clearly knows and sees the
truth of all fabricated things. When we can see the dangers on all sides, we’ll
learn to be careful and on our guard, to look for ways of destroying them or of
escaping from them. When we can do this, our lives will be happy.
When we practice the
Dhamma it’s as if we were going through a lonely, desolate forest on the way to
a goal that’s the highest form of happiness and safety. To get through the
forest, we have to depend on the practice of concentration, with our
mindfulness circumspect on all sides. We can’t be heedless or complacent. We
must make the effort to cut away all the concepts and preoccupations that come
in to destroy the goodness of the mind. When we know that there are poisonous
snakes, fires, and the 500 most wanted criminals lying in wait for us along our
way, we have to be mindful, alert, and wakeful at all times, and to get good
weapons ready so that we can fight them off.
At the same time, we
need provisions to help us on our way—in other words the factors of jhāna.
Directed thought is what focuses the mind on what it wants to know. Evaluation
is what kills off the Hindrances. These two qualities are like fixing dinner.
But if we have only these two qualities, it’s as if we’ve prepared our dinner
but don’t yet know the flavor of the different kinds of food we have. If we can
still the mind until it’s one with its object, that’s like eating and
swallowing our food. That’s when we’ll know its flavor and be able to gain a
sense of fullness and nourishment from it: in other words, a sense of rapture,
pleasure, and singleness of preoccupation. The heart will then be able to gain
full strength, just like the body when it’s had a nourishing meal.
Outer food is what
nourishes the body and gives it strength. When the body has strength, we can walk
or run anywhere we want. Whatever we want to do, we’ll have the strength to
succeed. As for inner food—the Dhamma—that’s what nourishes the heart and mind.
When the heart and mind are well nourished, the power of the heart is made
resilient and strong. Whatever we set our mind on will succeed in line with our
thoughts. If the mind is deprived of the food of the Dhamma, it gets feeble and
weak. Its thoughts meet with no success, or at best with success in some things
and not in others, not fully in line with our hopes. That’s why we have to
shore up the strength of our own minds as much as we can, for the strength of
the mind is the most important thing within us that will take us to our goal of
the highest happiness.
As long as you’re
still alive and breathing, don’t let yourself be heedless or complacent. Don’t
let time pass you by to no purpose. Hurry up and accelerate your efforts at
developing goodness—for when there’s no more breath for you to breathe, you’ll
have no more opportunity to do good ...
You should focus
exclusively on whatever thoughts help make the mind firm so that it can give
rise to goodness. Don’t dally with any other kinds of thinking, regardless of
whether they seem more sophisticated or less. Shake them all off. Don’t bring
them into the mind to think about. Keep the mind firmly set in a single
preoccupation: that’s your true heart, the true heart of the Buddha’s
teachings.
***
From Snakes, Fires,
& Thieves in Starting Out Small: A Collection of Talks for Beginning
Meditators, by Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo.
https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/StartingOutSmall/Section0000.html
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