For Goodness Sake
December 27, 2019
A few weeks ago I was in Thailand. While I was there I went to pay my respects to Ajaan Uthai, a student of Ajaan Funn. When I arrived, there was already a group of laypeople visiting with him. He asked me a couple of questions about life here at Wat Metta. And one of them was, “When Westerners come to the monastery, what do they come for?” He’d been talking about virtue and generosity to the laypeople, so I mentioned that a lot of people don’t come thinking about generosity and virtue at the very beginning. Their first motivation for coming is to find peace of mind. One of the people in the other group said, “Ah, Westerners, they go straight to the top, right from the very beginning.” And Ajaan Uthai’s response was, “What do you mean straight to the top? Even common animals want peace of mind. If you want to be a human being, you have to develop virtue, good qualities of the mind, good qualities of the character. That’s what differentiates us from common animals.”