Ajahn Chah 's Talks on Dharma
15) Time is our present breath.
14) There are people who are born and die and never once are aware of their breath going in and out of their body. That’s how far away they live from themselves.
13) If our body really belonged to us, it would obey our commands. If we say, "Don’t get old," Or "I forbid you to get sick" does it obey us? No! It takes no notice. We only rent this "house", not own it. If we think it does belong to us, we will suffer when we have to leave it. But in reality, there is no such thing as a permanent self, nothing unchanging or solid that we can hold on to.
12) Conditions don’t belong to us. They follow their own natural course. We can’t do anything about the way the body is. We can beautify it a little, make it look attractive and clean for a while, like the young girls who paint their lips and let their nails grow long, but when old age arrives, everyone is in the same boat. That is the way the body is. We can’t make it any other way. But, what we can improve and beautify is the mind.
11) If the body could talk, it would be telling us all day long, "You’re not my owner, you know." Actually it’s telling it to us all the time, but it’s Dhamma language, so we’re unable to understand it.
10) The "One Who Knows" clearly knows that all conditioned phenomena are unsubstantial. So this "One Who Knows" does not become happy or sad, for it does not follow changing conditions. To become glad, is to be born; to become dejected, is to die. Having died, we are born again; having been born, we die again. This birth and death from one moment to the next is the endless spinning wheel of samsara.
9) If you’re afraid of illness, if you are afraid of death, they you should contemplate where they come from. Where do they come from? They arise from birth. So, don’t be sad when someone dies - it’s just nature, and his suffering in this life is over. If you want to be sad, be sad when people are born: "Oh, no, they’ve come again. They’re going to suffer and die again!"
8) If you’ve trained properly, you wouldn’t feel frightened when you fall sick, nor be upset when someone dies. When you go into the hospital for treatment, determine in your mind that if you get better, that’s fine, and that if you die, that’s fine, too. I guarantee you that if the doctors told me I had cancer and was going to die in a few months, I’d remind the doctors, "Watch out, because death is coming to get you, too. It’s just a question of who goes first and who goes later." Doctors are not going to cure death or prevent death. Only the Buddha was such a doctor, so why not go ahead and use the Buddha’s medicine?
7) Death is as close as our breath.
6) The Buddha told his disciple Ananda to see impermanence, to see death with every breath. We must know death; we must die in order to live. What does that mean? To die is to come to the end of our doubts, all our questions, and just be here with the present reality. You can never die tomorrow; you must die now. Can you do it? If you can do it, you will know the peace of no more questions.
5) When one does not understand death, life can be very confusing.
4) Why are we born? We are born so that we will not have to be born again.
3) You’d think that people could appreciate what it would be like to live in a person’s belly. How uncomfortable that would be! Just look at how merely staying in a hut for only one day is already hard to take. You shut all the doors and windows and you’re suffocating already. How would it be to live in a person’s belly for nine months? Yet you want to stick your head right in there, to put your neck in the noose once again.
2) Our birth and death are just one thing. You can’t have one without the other. It’s a little funny to see how at a death people are so tearful and sad, and at a birth how happy and delighted. It’s delusion. I think that if you really want to cry, then it would be better to do so when someone’s born. Cry at the root, for if there were no birth, there would be no death. Can you understand this?
1) A good practice is to ask yourself very sincerely, "Why was I born?" Ask yourself this question in the morning, in the afternoon, and at night…every day.