Curing Your Own Heart

a resonance between Epictetus and a Buddhist monk

Ajahn Pannyavaddho

I recently spent a week at Sitavana, a Buddhist monastery in the Thai Forest Tradition¹, which is the same monastic order I was a monk in twenty years ago². Its located in the mountainous forest outside of Kamloops, BC. I’ve known its Abbot, Ajahn Sona, for twenty-seven years now. The monastery is largely off the grid and is a miniature eco-paradise run primarily off solar. It’s a marvel of beauty, simplicity, and energy efficiency³, and is also a refuge to monastics and laypeople looking for a place for silent retreat.

The week I spent there was largely silent and I had no internet connection or cell reception (except one evening when I walked two kilometres from the monastery to find a choppy patch of one bar connection to check in on my family). While I was there I browsed some of the free books available- beautiful, high quality productions designed by the monks at the various monasteries of their lineage- that of Ajahn Chah⁴- in order to give away for free.

One of them, an oversized book called Dear Jane, contains a fascinating wealth of information for students of the Thai Forest Tradition. It’s a collection of letters on Buddhist practice sent in the 1960s from the late Ajahn Pannyavaddho (1925-2004) to an englishwoman named Jane Browne, who kept the letters and provides explanatory commentary to them in this edition. Ajahn Panya was the premier western disciple of Ajaan Maha Boowa (1913-2011), a towering figure in Thai Buddhism who was considered by many to be an arahant, or fully enlightened sage. In Thai Buddhism the recognition of this attainment in someone is rare and monks almost never claim it openly. For my Stoic readers, it approaches calling someone a “sage” in Stoic terms.

In the letters in this volume Ajahn Pannya gives Jane detailed advice about meditation practice and the training of the heart⁵, and also reports the answers to questions he put to Ajaan Maha Boowa about her practice. There are many interesting gems in the letters, but one I thought I’d share here struck me because of it’s resonance with the mind training of Epictetus. I think it’s an interesting example of the universal insights that human beings have even in very different contexts.

Ajaan Pannya writes:

“One thing you could try to develop over the years is to start relating things to your own citta, or heart. By doing this, ‘good or bad,’ ‘important or unimportant’ and so forth won’t be thought of in relation to worldy events, but in relation to your own citta. This is what determines the right path— the wrong path being putting the focus of your attention, and hence your judgement of good and bad and so on, upon worldy things and events. The Right Way is to assess values in relation to ‘curing your own heart.’ This the Ariyan Way⁶; there is no other.”

-(Ajaan Panyavaddho to Jane Roberts, letter, Dear Jane).

To summarize: everything should be related not to whether it is good or bad in worldy terms, but rather to the state of the mind/heart/character. The attention should be placed on what state the mind/heart is in, and what it is doing. What is important? The heart, the character. What is good? The state of the heart. What is irrelevant? Everything else. This reminds me of a saying of Ajaan Fuang Jotiko (1915-1986), my monastic teacher’s teacher, that when engaged in any task 9/10 of your attention should be on the state of your mind, and 1/10 on the task.

In Buddhist thought, the state of the mind and heart is determined by acts of attention, intention, labelling and choice. This is broadly similar to Epictetus’ hegemonikon. For Epictetus, We have no control over what happens around us, over the immediate states of our body or what phantasia (unbidden perceptions and thoughts) arise, but we do have control over what we attend to, what intentions we foster, how we label things, and what choices we make in our thoughts, words and behaviour.

Epictetus says that we should limit our desire to focusing on what is “up to us” (our interpretations and choices) and consider only what is up to us to be “good” or “bad” and everything else to be “indifferent.” I think it’s pretty clear here that Epictetus and Ajahn Pannyavaddho are counselling the same thing.

Both are suggesting the radical, liberating re-orientation that frees us to be in the world but not “of the world (John 17).” To be “of the world” means that our values, our sense of ourselves and what is important, are composed of states of the world that we are in, which we wish to be in. “We are the world,” but not in a good way. Our focus is external, and our desire is focused there as well. Our state is determined by what the Buddha called “the eight worldly winds”: pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, and fame and disrepute.

As the metaphor implies, the winds are always shifting. If we sail our boat by these winds we’re fucked, to put it impolitely. Now or later, today or tomorrow.

By contrast if we focus on our hegemonikon, our citta, we are focusing not only on the one thing that is responsive to our immediate will and where we have power, we are also doing the one thing that will actually lead to what the Buddha called “our long term welfare and happiness and the long term welfare and happiness of others.”

For Buddhists this shift is accomplished by means of mindfulness. One practices cittanupassana, or awareness of the states of the mind, with reference to whether those states produce wellbeing or suffering⁷. States conducive to wellbeing are enjoyed and fostered, and those conducive to suffering are disrupted, abandoned, and prevented.

In Epictetus’ model, one analyzes states of mind according to whether they concern things that are up to us or not. If the desire, aversion, or ratiocination concerns things that aren’t, we recognize that and drop them. If they are about things up to us (if they are analyzing our own Stoic practice or rationally assessing how to aquire something logically preferrable for us without falling into a passion) we try to develop them.

In practice I find I tend to combine these two approaches. In fact that was what I spent much of my time at the monastery doing, taking the time to think about— or better, to contemplatively experience— what activities inside me are causing me suffering in my life, and how to let them go.

1. A wilderness dwelling ascetic tradition started in Thailand in the late 19th century by Ajahn Mun Bhuridatta Thera (1870-1949). This monastery was in the lineage of Ajahn Mun’s famous disciple Ajahn Chah Subhaddho (1918-1992), who had many western disciples who know lead monasteries around the world.

2. I was not in the lineage of Ajahn Chah, but that of Ajahn Lee Dhammadharo (1907-1961), another disciple of Ajahn Mun.

3. I wrote an article about this aspect of the monastery here: https://tricycle.org/article/ajahn-sona-forest-monastery/

4. Ajahn Chah was a deeply respected and very effective teacher, see more here.

5. The “heart” translates “citta” (pronounced chitta) a word which covers what we mean by mind, heart, and character in english.

6. In the time of the Buddha the word “aryan” meant “noble” or “high class.” The Buddha used it in a way which freed it of any tribal or class connotations, asserting that “true nobility.aryan-ness” was found in training the mind alone. This is one of many examples of the Buddha doing this, for instance he insisted that a “true Brahmin” (member of the hereditary priest caste) was not one born a so-called “Brahmin” but one of any caste who lived a virtuous and discerning life.

7. In actual Buddhist practice there are several different states of mind one is watching for to foster or disrupt, but I am keeping things simple here. In essence its a question of happiness and suffering.