Living Dhamma by Venerable Ajahn Chah

Returning to an Authentic Voice

The adage you get what you pay for is not always true. Sometimes it reflects more about our society and its values than about the true worth of something.

Living Dhamma, printed by the Buddhist Association of the United States (BAUS), is freely distributed and is worth more than many commercially published books. Copies can be requested by writing to baus.book@gmail.com. Free PDFs can be downloaded from ajahnchah.org.

Between 111 pages and 134 pages (depending on your source and pdf) it is a compilation of nine transcribed talks that I find myself returning to again and again. Insight comes slowly. Repetition is necessary for the teachings to gradually soak in.

Ajahn Chah was a Thai Theravāda Buddhist master and a monk in Thailand’s Forest Tradition. Deeply loved and respected for his wisdom, his monastery attracted many Western students. Through his Western disciples—most notably Venerable Ajahn Sumedho—Ajahn Chah played a pivotal role in establishing Theravāda Buddhism in the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe, and throughout the British Commonwealth.

(See my review of The Four Noble Truths by Venerable Ajahn Sumedho.)

The fact that these authentic voices and teachings are freely available to us—through BAUS and many other sources online—is precious.

When I began learning yoga and meditation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they had not yet become the monetized commercial enterprise they often are today. There were certainly exceptions, but my experience—and that of many of the founders of American Buddhism—was one of generosity and freely shared teaching. If there were fees, they were nominal. Donations (dāna or guru dakṣiṇā) were never demanded but were simply an invitation to give what one wished or could afford.

Goenka’s Vipassanā teachings continue in that tradition today.

As I look at the current landscape from here in the United States, I feel an immense depth of gratitude to my teachers and mentors for what they gave me over many years without ever asking for money. They would have been horrified at the thought, and the monks could not accept money anyway. What they gave me is priceless.

Reading Living Dhamma reminds me of the authentic, original, and non-formulaic voices of my own teachers and mentors.

Yet we live in a different time, culture, and economic reality. People need to earn a living. The packaged business of spirituality can certainly be profitable for well-known teachers. They offer products that people genuinely want and need in forms that feel relatable and relevant. There is an expanding market for this.

It is precisely because of this that non-Western masters like Ajahn Chah are so important. He speaks simply as himself. He has no interest in whether you come back, whether you become repeat business, or whether you like what he says. As a monk, he is free from having to cater to the expectations or preferences of those who come to hear him. He teaches what needs to be learned and points out what needs to be seen. He is not concerned with pleasing his audience or softening difficult truths. He does not need you; it may be you who needs him.

The Book

Living Dhamma was never intended to be a book. It consists of transcribed talks, originally given to Thai villagers and monks and only later translated for English readers.

There is almost nothing theoretical or philosophical about it. Yet it is profoundly practical, because it had to be. The teachings were meant to be lived in the ordinary circumstances of daily life—in the here and now of work, family, aging, illness, and death. Dhamma is a way of seeing, living, and being.

Why It Is Different

It therefore reads very differently from books by most Western Buddhist authors. Those writers are composing, revising, and carefully constructing arguments for readers they cannot see. As I am doing while writing this review.

These are not either-or choices. We can benefit enormously from both.

Ajahn Chah was speaking, often to someone specific: a dying woman, a group of doubting monks, or a crowd arriving by the busload hoping to accumulate merit. Merit (puñña in Pali; puṇya in Sanskrit) is a familiar concept throughout much of Asia. Ajahn Chah does not hesitate to expose the hypocrisy of those who seek merit while ignoring the state of their own minds.

The skeleton story is hilarious and very effective at examining our fears versus reality! His imagery comes from village life—buffaloes, dirty dishrags, tree stumps, false teeth—not from psychology or philosophy. Reading these talks, you can almost imagine yourself sitting beneath a tree or in a simple monastery hall, listening alongside everyone else to the voice of an elder master, unvarnished and largely unedited.

A senior monk in an Asian monastery also carries a kind of moral authority that few contemporary Western teachers can command, largely because of the very different societies in which they teach.

Going to the Source

There is a real advantage to this.

You receive the teaching before it has passed through another mind that has organized it into themes and chapters for a Western audience.

Ajahn Sumedho, Ajahn Amaro, and other Western monks who trained under Ajahn Chah are excellent teachers, but their books are necessarily one step removed—they are reflections on the teaching. Here you encounter something much closer to the original voice. Some meaning will inevitably be lost in translation, but there is considerably less filtering.

(Please also read my review of The Four Noble Truths by Venerable Ajahn Sumedho, another freely available and deeply practical book.)

Frankness and Authority

Ajahn Chah clearly did not manage people’s feelings in the way that a modern teacher, concerned about liability or negative reviews, might.

He tells grieving disciples that crying at death but not at birth is backwards—a point that His Holiness the Dalai Lama has also made. He tells a woman seeking enlightenment that the very desire for enlightenment prevents her from finding it.

Part of this freedom undoubtedly came from his unquestioned authority within that cultural context, and part from a society that does not instinctively begin with emotional validation.

Yet it is worth noticing that he was not uniformly blunt. The talk Our Real Home, given to a dying woman, is gentler and softer without becoming sentimental. Rather than saying, “It’s okay to feel sad,” he gently points out that the body was never a permanent self to lose in the first place and offers the breath as a refuge.

That is a different expression of compassion. It steadies rather than soothes.

I think this is one of the most significant differences between much Western Dhamma writing and the teachings of Ajahn Chah—not simply differences of personality, but differences in how compassion itself is understood.

It is also entirely possible that what works in one culture may not work in another. On retreats I have attended in the United States, I have noticed that participants often need considerable validation. They appreciate detailed explanations and tend to share much more of their personal experiences. In many Asian settings, the style is quite different. Neither approach is necessarily better; they simply reflect different cultures.

The Nine Talks

The nine talks gradually move from the foundations of ethical living toward increasingly subtle forms of non-clinging.

• Making the Heart Good opens by puncturing spiritual bypassing. People chase merit while never examining their own minds. Ethics comes before everything else. This emphasis is not unlike the yamas and niyamas of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras or even the Ten Commandments. Sīla is foundational for Buddhist practice—and indeed for any serious contemplative practice.
• Why Are We Here? turns to aging and the body’s inevitable decline—his own failing teeth and laboured breathing—to force the question of identity into direct experience. Who am I? Why am I here? These are not uniquely Buddhist questions. Ramana Maharshi recommended sustained inquiry into Who am I? Nisargadatta Maharaj repeatedly returned to the same question. Even the biblical “I AM THAT I AM” points toward it. Ajahn Chah opens the door but leaves the question alive.
• Our Real Home is the moving talk given to a dying woman—acceptance without either despair or false optimism.
• The Four Noble Truths is the only explicitly doctrinal talk, yet even here Ajahn Chah continually returns to everyday experience—ducks and chickens, alarm clocks, irritation, and anger—never allowing doctrine to become abstract.
• Meditation offers practical instruction on sati (mindfulness) and sampajañña (clear comprehension), illustrated through memorable village imagery rather than philosophical explanation.
• Living in the World with Dhamma relocates practice to the places where irritation, criticism, praise, disappointment, and attachment actually arise—not merely on the meditation cushion.
• Tuccho Pothila tells the story of “Venerable Empty Scripture,” the monk who knows everything intellectually yet has realized nothing, exposing the gap between knowledge and practice.
• Still, Flowing Water and Toward the Unconditioned bring the collection to its most subtle point, pointing toward non-dual awareness and eventually letting go of even the practice itself.

Ajahn Chah profoundly influenced many Western Buddhist teachers, including Jack Kornfield. Reading his original voice reminds us why.

I find myself returning to these talks again and again. Each reading reveals something I had overlooked before. They ask nothing of the reader except honesty and careful attention.

In a world where so much is marketed, branded, and sold, there is something deeply moving about wisdom that is simply offered, freely and without expectation. That generosity may be one of the teachings itself. It is to be cherished. “The gift of the Dhamma surpasses all other gifts.”