Khanti - Wat Pah Nanachat

can imagine how little privacy he would have had. Anybody
could just knock on this door, including any laypeople coming
into the hall. So Luang Por Sumedho was living in that room,
and it wasn’t as extensive as it is now, and he had a project of
making a bowl stand. Of course with the entrance into the rains
retreat all kinds of projects, including ones like this were halted
for three months. So he was determined to get his bowl stand
completed before entering the rains, and he was getting more
and more frustrated, and was making more and more mistakes
because he was rushing, wanting to get it finished. He had just
got to get this done. So he relates how he stopped, realised the
state his mind was in, and made a deliberate determination to
put the whole thing down – an eighty percent or whatever
finished bowl stand – and what’s more, to put it in full view by
the side of his shrine, so that he could see it every day and be
forced to develop the ability just to be with something which is
not quite finished. I have always admired that as a practice. It
may not be in one of the lists of the special ascetic practices
(dhutangas), but it really is a tough one to do. When there’s
something that’s not quite finished, that sense of unresolved
business is annoying, isn’t it? You want it over and done with,
you want the tidiness and resolution, and everything be as it
should be. It’s important not to believe in that, but to see it as a
defilement of mind, as something that leads you to be sloppy,
take shortcuts and to be impatient and lacking in precision and
care. It is the practice of khanti that can expose, illuminate this
kind of movement of mind. Through not following this craving
for ‘closure’ we see how it conditions dukkha.
Keep noticing that it is not that we’re bad or that there
is anything wrong with this tendency; it’s completely normal
and natural for the mind to shy away from the unpleasant and
to move towards the pleasant. But as long as we’re doing that,
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