08/26/2025
The Middle Way
Ajahn Chah
When people are born into the world they are without names once born, we name them. This is convention. We give people names for the sake of convenience, to call each other by. The scriptures are the same. We separate everything with labels to make studying the reality convenient. In the same way, all things are simply sankhara1 (Formation, compound).
Their original nature is merely that of compounded things. The Buddha said that they are impermanent, unsatisfactory and not-self. They are unstable. We don't understand this firmly, our understanding is not straight, and so we have wrong view. This wrong view is that the sankhara are ourselves, we are the sankhara, or that happiness and unhappiness are ourselves, we are happiness and unhappiness. Seeing like this is not full, clear knowledge of the true nature of things. The truth is that we can't force all these things to follow our desires, they follow the way of nature.
Here is a simple comparison: suppose you go and sit in the middle of a freeway with the cars and trucks charging down at you. You can't get angry at the cars, shouting, ‘Don't drive over here! Don't drive over here!’ It's a freeway, you can't tell them that. So what can you do? You get off the road! The road is the place where cars run, if you don't want the cars to be there, you suffer. It's the same with sankhara. We say they disturb us, like when we sit in meditation and hear a sound. We think, ‘Oh, that sound's bothering me.' If we understand that the sound bothers us then we suffer accordingly. If we investigate a little deeper, we will see that it's we who go out and disturb the sound! The sound is simply sound. If we understand like this then there's nothing more to it, we leave it be. We see that the sound is one thing, we are another.
One who understands that the sound comes to disturb him is one who doesn't see himself. He really doesn't! Once you see yourself, then you're at ease. The sound is just sound, why should you go and grab it? You see that actually it was you who went out and disturbed the sound. This is real knowledge of the truth. You see both sides, so you have peace. If you see only one side, there is suffering. Once you see both sides, then you follow the Middle Way. This is the right practice of the mind. This is what we call straightening out our understanding.
In the same way, the nature of all sankhara is impermanence and death, but we want to grab them; we carry them about and covet them. We want them to be true. We want to find truth within the things that aren't true. Whenever someone sees like this and clings to the sankhara as being himself, he suffers.
The practice of Dhamma is not dependent on being a monk, a novice or a layman; it depends on straightening out your understanding. If our understanding is correct, we arrive at peace. Whether you are ordained or not it's the same, every person has the chance to practice Dhamma, to contemplate it. We all contemplate the same thing. If you attain peace, it's all the same peace; it's the same path, with the same methods.
Sankhara: Formation, compound - the forces and factors that form things (physical or mental)
