Khanti - Wat Pah Nanachat

3. The Real Practice
It was quite a revelation to me that the vast majority of
Ajahn Chah’s Dhamma-talks were not about meditation, or
jhanas and ñanas 31 and how to be a sotapanna 32 and what it is
like to be an arahant. They were very much more down to
earth. They were about things like korwat and od ton.
What those words mean: ‘korwat’ means the monastic
regulations, conventions, the guidelines how we live our lives
together in a community. ‘Od ton’ means patient endurance.
Those were major themes in the way that Ajahn Chah set up
his monastery and in the way that he taught his disciples. And
they were founding principles on which Wat Pah Nanachat
itself was established. In fact from the very beginning of Wat
Pah Nanachat attitudes to that kind of training and that kind of
emphasis have varied in their appreciation of the use of korwat
as a means of training, or the relative importance of the use of
od ton in spiritual development of patient endurance. And for
all the western monks particularly this has very much been
bound up with the question:
“What is practice really all about? What’s the real
practice?”
There have always been a number of monks that say, ‘I
don’t want to stay at Nanachat. It’s a good place when you start
out, but it’s not where you can do the real practice. The real
practice is over there…, the real practice is in a cave in Chiang
31 ñanas: special knowledges
32 sotapanna: stream enterer, the first of four stages of enlightenment
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