helping his students constantly develop new skills to see through
the cunning tricks of the kilesas and thus uproot and destroy them
once and for all. Only then would they be safely out of danger,
living contentedly without dukkha. They would no longer mean-
der through the round of saÿsãra, where one birth changes into
another continuously, but the dukkha, that is carried around in
the heart, remains unchanged – regardless of how many times
one is reborn. Since each new life is merely a new instrument for
one’s own destruction, no one should be satisfied with birth in any
realm of existence. It is equivalent to a prisoner changing cells
within the same prison: as long as he remains imprisoned, there
is no fundamental improvement. The wise well understand the
dangers of the cycle of repeated birth and death. It’s as though
with each new birth the heart has moved into yet another house
that is on fire: no matter where it’s reborn it can never escape the
threat of danger. This is but a small taste of how Ãcariya Mun
routinely taught his dhutanga disciples. Perhaps some of my read-
ers will discover an affinity for his style of teaching.
ON UPOSATHA OBSERVANCE days, when as many as forty to fifty addi-
tional monks attended from various locations, Ãcariya Mun gave
discourses on Dhamma that generally differed from those he gave
exclusively to the monks who regularly lived with him. Although
his uposatha discourses were often forceful and profound, they
could not match the ones given regularly to the monks living in
his monastery. Those talks were truly dynamic, and penetrating.
Each time he spoke, the impact of his Dhamma was so powerful
it seemed to dispel the kilesas from the hearts of his listeners, as if