Wise Awareness (​Kumāra Bhikkhu's Blog)

Part 3: Getting Through the Hardest Part How to Get My Parents’ Consent? Becoming a monk requires parental consent. Even if you’re 70 years old, so long as your parents are alive, you still need their consent. So, I had to think about this. Before that, I had to decide whether to end my course, as getting the certificate was unnecessary for the life that I wanted. I spoke to a few monks and they suggested that I finish it up, since it was just half a year to completion. I decided to follow their advice. So, I wasn’t in a hurry to get my parents’ consent then. A few months before the end of my course, my father came over to ask me to join a company which he was setting up with a friend. It obviously meant a lot to him, and I didn’t have the heart to say no. He must have seen my reluctance, and told me that it would be just for a start, and that I could leave later. Reluctantly, I said yes. Immediately after my final exams were over, I went to work with my father. One ...

Part 1: It Started in My Teenage Years From time to time, people ask me why I became a monk. The shortest answer I’ve given was:  Because I want to. But of course that’s not exactly what they want to hear. They want a story. So, I tell them there were some events that were directly or indirectly significant. The first one happened when I was 15. Something I Had No Name For I took public bus to school then. One day, when the bus stopped at the station, I suddenly snapped out of my daydream, and thought, “Wow… I’m already here!” “What was I thinking about?” I sat there wondering. I couldn’t recall. I remembered getting on the bus and then nothing else until I jerked back onto reality. It was like I lost time. As I reflected on what happened, I recalled that I had lost awareness like that many times before. I wondered, “Can I prevent myself from losing awareness?” So, I began to see how I can maintain awareness every time I took a bus to school. It was difficu...

Some people seem to consistently fail to do well in life, and this (you may say) has to do with kamma. But what does that mean? Does it mean that there’s nothing they can do about it, and so they’re doomed to be like that for the rest of their lives? When people speak of kamma, often they mean it like it’s fate. And that is not how the Buddha meant it. We need to bear in mind that kamma means action . Of course it can mean past action that is causing present results. But viewing it that way alone can be quite disempowering. Technically, when people speak of kamma like it’s fate, they are speaking of only the result of kamma, or what the Suttas sometimes call “old kamma”. When meeting old kamma, what we normally do is to respond badly, i.e. create new bad (unskilful or unwholesome) kamma. On the issue of consistently failing to do well in life, the old kamma here is the belief or perception (saññā) of being a failure, formed based on one’s repeated past experience of failure. Regardl...

In  The Snobbish Monk , an article I wrote in 2013, I talked about seeing deeply the root of all my efforts to feel good about myself: a defective sense of self, the idea that I wasn’t good enough. I was trying to feel good about myself because I didn’t feel good about myself. Seeing that was crucial to being free from that stressful pattern, but not enough for me to actually be free from it. I also needed to consciously change the behaviour that was part of the pattern. In other words, I had to choose to stop trying to feel good about myself. Easier said than done. The urge to repeat the pattern came up again and again, but this time I was clear about what’s better for me. A major behaviour I needed to stop was looking for people to help. I recall times when the mind was actively looking for people to ‘save’. Why? So that I could be ‘the hero’ and  feel good  about myself. I needed to catch that urge, and remind myself not to do it. Volunteering to be the hero had gotten...