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Eight teachings from the Thai forest master whose radical simplicity, fierce compassion, and gift for pointing at the deepest truth with the most ordinary words changed the lives of everyone who came near him.
Hello there, friend.
In the forests of northeastern Thailand, in a small monastery called Wat Nong Pah Pong, there lived a monk whose teachings spread across the world without him ever trying to spread them.
Ajahn Chah, born Phra Bodhinyana Thera in 1918, ordained as a monk at twenty, a wandering ascetic through the jungles of Southeast Asia, and eventually the teacher of thousands across dozens of countries, taught in a way that resists transcription. He taught through stories, through silence, through the kind of direct pointing that lands in the body before it reaches the mind.
He died in 1992 after a decade of illness during which he could barely speak. His students say that his final years of silence were themselves a teaching. He was showing them, without words, what he had spent a lifetime saying with them: that peace is what remains when you stop adding things.
These are the teachings I carry from him.
The Glass Is Already Broken: Everything Precious Becomes More Precious When You Accept Its Impermanence
Ajahn Chah kept a glass near his teaching seat. He would pick it up during dharma talks and say, in substance: I already consider this glass broken. Because it is. One day it will slip from my hand, or fall from the shelf, or chip at the rim. And when that day comes, I will say, of course. That is what glasses do.
But because I already know it is broken, I can enjoy it completely right now. The tea in it. The way the light moves through it. The coolness of it in my hand. None of that pleasure is diminished by knowing it will end. It is actually deepened by it.
“If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you will have complete peace.” — Ajahn Chah
This is impermanence, anicca in Pali, offered as a practical orientation rather than a philosophical doctrine to every single thing in your life. Your health will change. Your relationships will change. The phase of life you are in right now is already becoming something else.
The question is whether you can hold all of it the way Ajahn Chah held the glass. With full appreciation. With full presence. With the kind of love that comes from knowing that nothing lasts, which paradoxically makes the having of it more vivid and more real.
Clinging does the opposite. When you grip something tightly because you cannot bear to lose it, you cannot actually enjoy it. The anxiety of potential loss colonizes the present moment. The glass becomes something to protect rather than something to drink from.
“To understand is to let go.” — Ajahn Chah
This connects to what we explored in How to Harness the Power of the Tao: full intention, full action, full release. The glass is already broken. Drink the tea.
The glass is already broken. Knowing this deepens the pleasure of holding it. Open hands, always.
What are you currently gripping so tightly that you cannot fully enjoy it? What would it feel like to hold it gently, knowing it is already in the process of changing?
You Choose What You Feed the Mind: And Everything Depends on That Choice
One of the most vivid teaching images is the comparison of an untrained mind to a stray dog wandering the streets. It goes wherever its nose leads it. It eats whatever it finds. It generates enormous suffering in its constant, aimless movement.
The practice of meditation is the practice of calling the dog home. Of learning to give the mind a clear object of attention and returning it there, over and over, every time it wanders. This is the whole of formal practice, and the whole of an informal life of mindfulness: noticing where the mind has gone, and choosing what to feed it.
“Train your heart. Discipline your mind. This is the whole of practice.” — Ajahn Chah
What the mind is fed determines everything. A mind fed on comparison generates chronic dissatisfaction, because there is always someone ahead in whatever ranking you have chosen to live inside. A mind fed on resentment grows the resentment until it fills every available space. A mind fed on worry finds new things to worry about as fast as the old worries are resolved.
The practice is to see these tendencies clearly. To recognize the wandering for what it is: a conditioned pattern on old programming, separate from the essential nature of the mind. Underneath it all, something has always been still.
“The heart of the path is quite simple. No need to explain or theorize. Just watch your mind.” — Ajahn Chah
Watch your mind. This is the instruction. Every morning, every difficult moment, every interaction that pulls at something inside you. What is the mind doing? What is it feeding on? What story is it running? And underneath all of that, what is the quality of awareness that is watching?
This connects to the four immeasurables: metta practice is, at its most basic, the practice of feeding the mind on loving-kindness rather than on reactivity. You choose what the dog eats.
You choose what you feed the mind. The quality of your inner life is determined by what receives your sustained attention.
What has your mind been feeding on most consistently this week? What would you choose to feed it if you were choosing deliberately?
The Water That Flows Through a Dirty Pipe Is Still Clean: Your Awareness Has Never Been Contaminated
There is a teaching that keeps returning to me whenever I feel that my own confusion or difficulty makes me somehow unqualified for the path of practice.
The mind’s essential quality, what the Dzogchen tradition calls rigpa and what Ajahn Chah simply called the knowing quality, is like water flowing through a pipe. The pipe may be dirty. The pipe may be corroded or cracked or carrying residue from decades of use. But the water itself is still water. It has been unchanged by the pipe.
“We already have the most important thing. We have awareness. The Buddha-nature is already in each one of us.” — Ajahn Chah
The most common form of self-sabotage on the spiritual path is the belief that one is too confused, too distracted, too caught up in the ordinary difficulties of life to practice. That practice belongs to other people. Calmer people. More disciplined people.
Ajahn Chah says: the pipe is the pipe. The water is the water. You cannot clean the pipe by thinking about it. You clean it by running water through it.
Practice happens in the middle of your actual life. Your confusing, difficult, ordinary, gorgeous, heartbreaking, funny, irreplaceable actual life. That is the only place it has ever happened for anyone.
“If you are attached to anything, you are living in prison. But you can practice in prison. You can get free in prison.” — Ajahn Chah
This is precisely the teaching we explored in Everything You Need to Know About Dzogchen: rigpa, the awareness that was always already here, is the ground beneath all conditions. The pipe changes. The water remains itself.
The awareness that watches your confusion is itself unconfused. Begin where you are. The conditions are already right.
What belief about yourself have you been using as a reason to delay practice, growth, or becoming? What would it mean to begin anyway, in the middle of exactly the conditions you are in?
Doubt Is the Whetstone: The Teacher Who Makes You Sharper
In the Western world, doubt is generally treated as the enemy of spiritual life. Either you believe or you question. And the ideal is to move from doubt toward certainty, to resolve the questioning into settled conviction.
Ajahn Chah turns this completely around. Doubt, in his teaching, is a tool on the path. It is what sharpens the blade.
“Doubt is the doorway to understanding. If you do not doubt, you will never investigate. If you never investigate, you will never know.” — Ajahn Chah
The person who accepts everything uncritically, whose faith has skipped the testing of genuine questioning, carries something fragile. It breaks when the difficult moments arrive, and they always do.
The person who has passed through doubt, who has sat with the hard questions and kept sitting, who has let the uncertainty be real without trying to resolve it prematurely, has something durable. Their understanding is based on direct investigation rather than received authority. It is theirs.
This is why Ajahn Chah always insisted that his students investigate his teachings for themselves. He would point. He would tell stories. But he would ask them to look for themselves, to trust direct experience over doctrine.
“Do not believe what I teach. Test it. If it helps you, take it. If it does not, leave it. The teaching is a raft, not a destination.” — Ajahn Chah
The raft metaphor comes from the Buddha’s own teaching. The dharma is a means of crossing the river. Once you have crossed, you set the raft down. The teachings are tools. They point at the truth. They are the pointing; the truth lies beyond them.
Doubt sharpens. Genuine investigation is more valuable than inherited certainty. Test everything against direct experience.
What aspect of your own life, your own beliefs, or your own practice have you been accepting without investigating? What would genuine inquiry into that reveal?
Suffering Is the Invitation You Keep Trying to Return
One of the most radical and most practically useful things Ajahn Chah taught is a complete reframe of the relationship between suffering and practice.
Suffering, in his framework, is a teacher. It is the most reliable guide to exactly where the practice needs to happen. It points, with remarkable precision, to the places where clinging is occurring, where the mind is fighting with reality, where the gap between what is and what is wanted has become intolerable.
“If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. Suffering is just showing you where you are holding on.” — Ajahn Chah
This means that suffering, genuinely met rather than avoided, reveals something. It shows you the shape of your clinging. It shows you where the mind is insisting that reality be different from what it is.
Every time something causes more suffering than the situation objectively warrants, a teaching is available. Something is being held too tightly. Something is being demanded of the world that the world is declining to provide. Turning toward that, rather than away from it, is where genuine freedom becomes possible.
“The trouble is that people want to get rid of the suffering, not the cause of the suffering.” — Ajahn Chah
The cause of suffering is clinging. The clinging to pleasure, to comfortable views, to the self we have constructed, to the outcomes we have decided we need. When the clinging relaxes, even slightly, the suffering relaxes with it. And in that relaxation, something very quiet and very alive becomes available.
This connects to what we explored in The Power of Intention: the ego as the disconnector from Source. What Ajahn Chah calls clinging, Wayne Dyer calls the ego’s insistence. Both point at the same contraction, and at the same opening that becomes available when it releases.
Suffering is a precise map of where you are clinging. Turn toward it. Let it show you what needs to release.
What is causing you the most suffering right now? Where, specifically, is the mind fighting with what is? What is it demanding be different?
The Buddha Is Inside the House: Stop Looking Everywhere Else
Ajahn Chah had an extraordinary gift for cutting through complexity to the single essential thing. When students arrived with elaborate questions about doctrine and cosmology, he would often answer by pointing very simply at what was already present.
The Buddha, in this framework, is the quality of awakened awareness potential in every mind. It is here. Every moment of genuine presence, every moment of clear seeing, every moment of genuine kindness, is the Buddha nature expressing itself through a human life.
“The Buddha is within you. God is within you. Everything you are seeking is already here. Why do you keep looking elsewhere?” — Ajahn Chah
This teaching is simultaneously the most encouraging and the most demanding thing that can be said. What you are looking for is already present. Already the ground beneath your ordinary experience.
Most demanding because it means that every moment of distraction, every habitual turning away from the present, every reaching for the next thing rather than being fully here with this one, is a moment of choosing to ignore what is already available.
The practice is turning around and seeing what has been here all along.
“The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments.” — Ajahn Chah
This moment is the door. It is the whole thing. This connects to what the letter on the only moment that exists keeps returning to: the present moment is the only home that has ever existed. Everything else is memory or imagination. Come home.
Everything you are seeking is already here. The practice is turning around and seeing what has been present all along.
What are you looking for that you have been seeking elsewhere? What would it mean to look for it here, in this moment, in this ordinary life?
Peace Is What Remains When You Stop Adding Things
The final teaching, the one that contains all the others, is perhaps the simplest thing Ajahn Chah ever said. And the most difficult to actually live.
Peace is what remains when you stop adding things. When you stop adding stories to what is simply happening. When you stop adding judgments to what is simply present. When you stop adding the weight of past and future to what is only ever actually occurring right here and right now.
“Peace is within oneself, to be found in the same place as agitation and suffering. It is not found in a forest or on a hilltop, nor is it given by a teacher. Where you experience suffering, you can also find freedom from suffering.” — Ajahn Chah
This is the final and most quietly liberating of his teachings. The peace you are looking for is already inside the suffering. The freedom is already inside the constraint. The clarity is already inside the confusion.
Because all of these arise in the same awareness. That awareness, that knowing quality, that clean water running through the pipe, has always been completely free.
The practice, the whole of it, is learning to rest in that. To stop adding. To stop running. To stop trying to get somewhere else and to discover, with genuine surprise every time it happens, that where you already are is exactly the right place.
“Everything already exists within you. You are complete. You lack nothing.” — Ajahn Chah
You lack nothing. The seeking mind will produce a list of objections. But the seeking mind is the problem. What you genuinely are, underneath the seeking and the adding, lacks nothing at all.
This is what the Tao Te Ching means when it says the Tao does nothing and yet leaves nothing undone, and what we explored in the still point: the peace available in the silence before you add the first thought of the day. Return there. Often.
Peace is what remains when you stop adding things. You lack nothing. The seeking mind is the problem.
What are you currently adding to the present moment that is preventing you from resting in it? What story, judgment, or demand could you set down right now?
Eight Things Worth Carrying
01. The glass is already broken. Knowing this makes everything more precious. Hold what you love with open hands.
02. You choose what you feed the mind. The quality of your inner life is determined by what receives your sustained attention.
03. The Pipe and the Water Are Two Different Things. Your essential awareness is clean, complete, already whole. Begin where you are.
04. Doubt sharpens. Genuine investigation is more valuable than inherited certainty. Test everything against direct experience.
05. Suffering is a precise map. It shows you exactly where the clinging is. Turn toward it. Let it reveal what needs to release.
06. Everything you are seeking is already here. The practice is turning around and seeing what has been present all along.
07. Peace is what remains when you stop adding things. Stop running. Stop seeking. Stop adding. What is here when you do that?
08. You lack nothing. The seeking mind will object. But the seeking mind is the problem. What you genuinely are lacks nothing at all.
He spent his last decade in silence. Unable to speak. Unable to move much. His body failing in the ordinary way that bodies fail.
His students came from all over the world to sit with him. And they reported that the silence itself was a teaching. That being in his presence, even when he could do nothing, was still the most instructive experience available to them.
This is what a fully realized life looks like. The peace it has cultivated becomes its own transmission. It radiates without effort. It teaches without words.
Begin where you are. With what you have. In the life that is actually yours.
The glass is already broken. Drink the tea. Start today.
With love,
Paolo
Try This Today
- Pick up one object you use every day. Hold it for sixty seconds knowing it is already temporary. Notice how that changes how it feels to hold it.
- For the next hour, whenever your mind wanders, ask: what is it feeding on right now? Name it. Then choose what to feed it instead.
- Sit for five minutes and ask: underneath this confusion, underneath this difficulty, what is the quality of awareness that is watching all of it? Rest your attention there.
- Take one belief you have been holding uncritically and investigate it. Ask: is this actually true? What does your own direct experience say?
- Identify one thing causing you suffering right now. Ask: where exactly is the clinging? What is the mind insisting be different? Name it precisely.
- Sit for ten minutes in genuine stillness. Ask: what is here when I stop adding? What is present before the first story begins?
- Today, practice holding one precious thing lightly. Appreciate it fully. Grip it gently.
- Begin. Whatever you have been waiting until conditions improve to begin. The conditions are these conditions. The time is now.
Keep Going
- Everything You Need to Know About Dzogchen: The Great Perfection That Was Always Already Here
- The Four Immeasurables: A Complete Guide to Metta, Karuna, Mudita, and Upekkha
- How to Harness the Power of the Tao: Acting and Allowing at the Same Time
- You Are Always Living in the Only Moment That Exists