Lessons In Practical Buddhism - Sirimangalo.Org

will disappear and with them so will the stress and suffering.
When we are brave enough to face our worst fears, we will
come to see that there’s nothing to fear at all, that the most
horrific experience is still just an experience. As a result,
there will be no experience that can cause us any suffering
whatsoever. Patience is thus another important part of our
practice, especially in terms of understanding the nature of
proper meditation practice.
People often misunderstand meditation practice as being a
pleasurable experience, wherein one is able to escape all of
one’s problems. Meditation, it is thought, must be pleasant,
stable, and calming at all times, free from difficulty and
disturbance. When pain arises in meditation or when
something comes to disturb one’s state of mind, a common
assumption is that something is wrong and that one must
find a way to “fix” the situation so it becomes pleasant and
agreeable again.
All physical ailments – heat, cold, hunger, thirst, and even
the most excruciating physical discomfort – are simply
physical realities. They don’t have any bearing on one’s
state of mind, and so they need not necessarily cause
suffering if one is clearly aware of them as they are. Often, it
is by facing such difficulties that true insight can arise.
A well-known Buddhist story is taught in the Satipaṭṭhana
Sutta commentary about a monk named Tissa who left home
as a rich man, relinquishing all of his wealth to his younger
brother and ordaining under the Buddha to practice
meditation in the forest. His younger brother’s wife,
however, was so intoxicated by her new-found wealth that
she became obsessed with the fear that the elder brother
might return to reclaim it should he later find life as a monk
unsatisfying.
In order to prevent such an event from occurring, she
resorted to hiring a group of mercenaries to seek out
Venerable Tissa and murder him in the forest. The villains
she hired found Tissa meditating under a tree and told him of
their aim. Tissa asked them to return in the morning, since
he was engaged in intensive meditation and hoped at least
to be able to practice one more night before being forced to
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