EBOOK
About
In 1983, after a long search that led from village to village and finally from Myanmar into northern Thailand, Herman Schreuder found a Burmese monk living in a small wooden monastery without running water or electricity - and recognised him as his teacher. Twenty years later Wouter Doorn took that same path through Herman, and never left it.
Buddho is the record of more than twenty years of daily samatha meditation, shaped by retreat after retreat with Ahba: a teacher as direct as he is patient. Concentration is the foundation, he repeats; do not go looking for wisdom - that is only new desire. First make the mind clean and clear through samatha meditation; wisdom then comes by itself, very easily. No shortcuts and no quick results: only the steady development of the mind, buddho after buddho, day after day, alongside a job and a family.
The book follows a lay practitioner from a first retreat in a Thai forest monastery through several ordinations as a monk, twenty years of practice in an ordinary Dutch life, and long evenings at his teacher's feet. Ahba's lessons are reproduced as they were given - plainly spoken but very profound. Alongside them stand conversations with Herman Schreuder, a letter from Ahba to his first Dutch students, and a glossary of the Pāli terms used.
It is an honest book about what a concentrated mind encounters, including the parts that sit uneasily in a secular frame.
Ahba's teaching is rarely written down. It lives in the silence of the monastery, in the conversations between teacher and student, in the years of patient sitting that nobody sees. This book records what would otherwise be lost.
For readers who have tried mindfulness or vipassanā and felt that the foundation was missing; for anyone drawn to the Theravāda tradition as it is still practised and transmitted; and for those who suspect that the slow way is the only way.
With a foreword by Ajahn Sumedho.
Buddho is the record of more than twenty years of daily samatha meditation, shaped by retreat after retreat with Ahba: a teacher as direct as he is patient. Concentration is the foundation, he repeats; do not go looking for wisdom - that is only new desire. First make the mind clean and clear through samatha meditation; wisdom then comes by itself, very easily. No shortcuts and no quick results: only the steady development of the mind, buddho after buddho, day after day, alongside a job and a family.
The book follows a lay practitioner from a first retreat in a Thai forest monastery through several ordinations as a monk, twenty years of practice in an ordinary Dutch life, and long evenings at his teacher's feet. Ahba's lessons are reproduced as they were given - plainly spoken but very profound. Alongside them stand conversations with Herman Schreuder, a letter from Ahba to his first Dutch students, and a glossary of the Pāli terms used.
It is an honest book about what a concentrated mind encounters, including the parts that sit uneasily in a secular frame.
Ahba's teaching is rarely written down. It lives in the silence of the monastery, in the conversations between teacher and student, in the years of patient sitting that nobody sees. This book records what would otherwise be lost.
For readers who have tried mindfulness or vipassanā and felt that the foundation was missing; for anyone drawn to the Theravāda tradition as it is still practised and transmitted; and for those who suspect that the slow way is the only way.
With a foreword by Ajahn Sumedho.