Khanti - Wat Pah Nanachat

actively dissuaded from teaching contentment because it was
considered by the authorities to be an obstacle to national
development. The idea was that if people were content they
would be very bad capitalists and the material progress of the
country would suffer. This foolish idea arose from a laziness or
unwillingness to look at the primary sources of the Buddha’s
teachings on the subject of contentment, the Buddha’s
discourses (suttas). Because when you look at the discourses,
you find that wherever the word contentment arises, it’s always
coupled with a dhamma such as viriya (effort), or heedfulness
and non-laziness. The Buddha always makes it very clear that
contentment does not mean laziness and complacency. Quite
the opposite. And then of course there is the quite startling
dhamma of discontent, discontentment with regards to
wholesome dhammas which have already been developed. The
Buddha said that that particular quality was one of the most
immediate causes of his enlightenment. So in looking at the
texts we see a more complex picture: contentment is always to
be seen in conjunction with other dhammas which stress effort
and application, and it is also emphasized that it is in
relationship to material things rather than wholesome mental
states.
I am giving you this particular rather well known
example of contentment to demonstrate how individual
dhammas can be explained and defined point by point, but that
is not enough. Regarding the whole structure of practice we
have to be able to see what a particular dhamma does, what it’s
role is, what it’s relationship to other dhammas is. If we
compare it to the simile of the chariots, it’s to ask, where does
this dhamma begin, and where does it end.
With patient endurance, one of the important things to
remember, of course, is that the wisdom faculty has a very
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