Khanti - Wat Pah Nanachat

Physical pain is the grossest kind of discomfort, the
most tormenting, but there are also valuable lessons to be learnt
from bearing with mental and emotional pain. The reward or
value of it is the enhanced ability to see through pain, proving
to yourself that pain has an end. To see that one can come out
of pain like emerging from a tunnel, affects your attitude to
pain in general, and even to death. Most importantly, it helps us
in our investigation of the nature of dukkha. The texts say that
the reason why the characteristic of dukkha is not obvious, is
concealed from us, is because of change of posture. Being still,
being patient with the natural phenomena arising in the body
and the mind means allowing for the appearance of dukkha. By
doing so we can understand more clearly its all-pervading
nature. On this level it’s very clear that the constant small
movements and adjustments that we make to our meditation
posture are a reaction, a response to dukkha. I’m not saying
that we shouldn’t ever do this; that we never scratch an itch or
never move when we feel uncomfortable, but whenever we do,
we should recognize again and again, exactly why we are
doing so: this is dukkha. Every time we move, or we see
somebody else move, we can remind ourselves: this is dukkha;
this is the manifestation of dukkha in the various postures of
the five khandas 29 Wisdom can arise right here.
Now before going on to one or two other areas in which
khanti, patience, is exercised, it might be a good idea to give a
definition. What exactly is patience? One of the definitions that
I like and use myself was given by Luang Por Sumedho. It is:
“peaceful coexistence with the unpleasant”. I think that this is a
very skilful definition, in that it prevents us from looking at
patience as just gritting our teeth and just bearing with
something until the bell goes, or there is no longer a need. If
29 khandas: the five impersonal factors that make up a being: form,
feeling, perception, mental formations and sense consciousness.
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