HISTORICALLY THERE HAVE BEEN differences of opinion about the relative merits of Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism and, if you read much of the literature, they would seem to be quite divergent in their approaches toward Buddhist practice – yet there also seem to be some tremendous affinities.

When I arrived at the International Forest Monastery in Thailand, I had never read any Buddhist books and I wasn’t actually in search of becoming a Buddhist monk. I was a wanderer, a free-lance spiritual seeker, and I just happened to turn up at this forest monastery that Ajahn Sumedho had established a couple of years before, basically as a place for a free meal and a roof over my head for a few nights. Little did I expect, some twelve or thirteen years later, that I would be doing what I am doing now. But when I went there and asked the monks about Buddhism, to explain things a little bit for me so that I could get a feel for what their life was about, the first thing one of them did was to give me a copy of a book of talks by a Zen Master, and he said, ‘Don’t bother trying to read the Theravada literature; it’s terribly boring, very dry. Read this, it is pretty much the same thing that we’re doing, and it will give you a sense of what our practice is about.’ And I thought, ‘Well, obviously these guys are not too hung up on their tradition.’ The book was Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

So, one could see right from the beginning that, even though there is a strength to the particular form within any Buddhist country, one is not necessarily constricted or limited by that. I was there for months before I even heard of ‘Theravada’ and ‘Mahayana,’ let alone the differences of opinion between them. It seemed that when you actually lived the life there really wasn’t any great disparity, but if you thought about it a lot, and if you were the kind of person who wrote histories and books and had got into the political side of religious life, then that was where the divergences occurred.

I have heard Ajahn Sumedho recount a few times over the years that, for the first year of his monastic life, he had been practising using the instructions from a Ch’an meditation retreat given by the Ven. Master Hsü Yün, and that he had used the Dharma talks from that retreat given in China as his basic meditation instruction. When he went to Wat Pah Pong, Ajahn Chah asked him what kind of meditation he had been doing, at first he thought, ‘Oh no, he’s going to get me to give this up and do his method.’ But, when Ajahn Sumedho described what he had been doing and mentioned that it had had excellent results, Ajahn Chah said, ‘Oh, very good, just carry on doing that.’

So, one sees that there is a very strong unity of purpose; even though there might be historical differences between the two traditions, they are very much in accordance with each other. And one begins to see what the different Buddhist traditions are talking about. They get sectioned out into Hinayana or Mahayana or Vajrayana, as different types of Buddhist practice, but they are basically just different labels which are talking about attitudes of mind and, when the traditions are used wisely, then they will address all aspects of our mind, from the most selfish and mundane to the most exalted. They address all the different levels of our life, and it’s only when they are not understood, when people take them as fixed positions, that there is any conflict amongst them.

The Dhamma talk was given on the 20th of June 2018 at the World Fellowship of Buddhists

The topic for this evening is ‘Not Sure!’ Sitting on Sukhumvit Road and not moving in a vehicle, with the evening scheduled to begin at 6:30 and realizing it had already passed that time, I thought: ‘That’s a very good introduction for this evening – Not Sure! – When’s Ajahn Amaro going to arrive? Is he going to arrive? What will happen? It’s uncertain (My Naer). We don’t know. It’s not a sure thing.’ So that was an unplanned but useful preparation for this evening because this is the principle we are investigating here. It’s a part of all of our lives. So, I will offer a few reflections this evening on this theme and hopefully some of the things that I say would be useful for you.

When we meet with a feeling of uncertainty usually what we do is we feel worried, we feel threatened. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future so what we tend to do is to try to fill up that unknown with a plan or a hope or a belief. We fill it with ideas of what might happen.

We often distract ourselves: ‘I don’t want to think about the future. I don’t want to worry about that. So, I’ll just look at my phone and catch up on my Facebook friends or see what communication I have coming through Line, what’s on the news or something.’ We thus deal with that feeling of worry or uncertainty with choosing distraction or, alternatively, we just switch off – we go blank, go numb and shut the world down, disengage all together. We do this because the feeling of not being sure is something that most of us don’t like and we relate to it as a problem, that feeling of anxiety, uncertainty. We automatically think of it as a problem, something that’s unwelcome.

From a talk given on the winter retreat, Chithurst, February 1991

Gotama Buddha said, when he was an old man, “This body is like an old cart, held together by straps; this body only keeps going by makeshift repairs. The only way I can feel comfortable is to absorb my mind into signless concentration.”

For all of us, the Buddha included, we are faced with the inevitable presence of dissatisfaction and physical discomfort. Ever present is the danger of pain and disease, because we are born. Because there is a physical birth, there must be physical decay, the two have to go together, they are one thing. Thus our only true refuge is the Deathless, that which is not subject to disease, not subject to defilement, not subject to time or to limitation, that which is unsupported. In this way, returning to our source, the Deathless, is our only way to cure disease, the only way to pass beyond it.

This returning to the Source, or realizing the Deathless, is the sense of coming to know the source of our life, the origin of our life. Because it is the very fabric of our life, the basis of our existence, it is something that has been exerting a power of attraction on us all through our life, the attraction of Truth, of the Real, the completely satisfying, the completely safe.

This story is intended to be both a partner to the novel The Pilgrim Kamanita, written by Karl Gjellerup in 1906, and a tale that stands on its own. There is no need to have read the earlier book in order to make sense of this one; however, should you wish to go to the source from which many of the characters and scenes of this tale have sprung, an English version of it is to be found at: https://www.amaravati.org/dhamma-books/the-pilgrim-kamanita/