พระอาจารย์อธิบายว่าคุณภาพของการปฏิบัติคือความสุขและความบริสุทธิ์ ตามองค์ประกอบ 3 ประการที่หลวงพ่อสอนไว้คือ ความรู้ ความสุข และความบริสุทธิ์ อันเป็นเงาสะท้อนของพระปัญญาธิคุณ พระบริสุทธิคุณ และพระมหากรุณาธิคุณ พร้อมเล่าประสบการณ์การเข้าถึงความบริสุทธิ์แห่งศีลครั้งเป็นนักศึกษาPra Ajarn explains that the quality of practice is happiness and purity, per the three components Luang Phor taught — knowledge, happiness, and purity — reflections of the Buddha's wisdom, purity, and great compassion, sharing his own experience of reaching the purity of morality as a student.
Someone asked: Pra Ajarn often speaks of giving time to system, but on the matter of quality, what principles should we understand?
The Three Components: Knowledge, Happiness, and Purity
Giving time to the wholesome requires the mind to have a place to rest so as to draw merit in. As for quality itself — take being with the breath: breathing in, we know; breathing out, we know; or being with the mantra '' at ease in body and mind with each word. If we desire quality, we come to recognize the quality that arises: the state of knowing, , and . Luang Phor taught that these three components must be present — together with happiness and purity — reflections of the Buddha's wisdom, purity, and great compassion. The far end is the arahant body, or nibbana, furnished with these three; the near end, the human body, must be furnished with these three as well.
Purity Leads to a Peaceful Happiness, One That Tends Toward Nibbana
In each moment we set our focus on purity, purity arises and draws merit in — whether through keeping precepts, meditating, or studying , all tending toward happiness and purity. The purity that arises leads to a happiness that is peace, calm, seclusion, dispassion, liberation, and cleansing — tending toward nibbana. This happiness therefore differs from that of ordinary worldly people. However long a person keeps precepts and meditates, if they don't focus on purity, they cannot come to sense purity — even ordained as a monk, they don't sense it, and have no way to reach it.
Reaching the Purity of Morality as a Student
Pra Ajarn shared a vivid experience from his lay student days. During the university sports break he'd go to practice in forests, hills, and caves, and asked himself what could be his refuge. An inner voice answered: morality. So he kept the eight precepts. After several days he still felt nothing, so he recalled what his mother had told him as a child — that she ate a vegetarian diet to purify the heart — and took up the vegetarian diet too. Once he set his focus on purity, purity arose from a tiny point and expanded; after two or three days he could sense it expanding to fill out to its edges all around.
Once We Kept Morality; Now Morality Keeps Us
Eating a vegetarian diet is a kind of renunciation, drawing one away from the sensual — not delighting in the taste of food. Both precepts and the diet are tools for the essential thing, purity, to appear. When purity expanded to fill all around him, the inner voice exclaimed on its own: 'Once we had to keep morality; now morality keeps us.' Purity surrounded him wherever he went. Even the eight precepts alone can reach purity — because of focusing the attention on purity itself.
Quality Is the Happiness and Purity People Tend to Miss
The problem is that people often keep precepts, cultivate concentration, and study wisdom without focusing on purity. Of the components Luang Phor said must be present — knowledge, happiness, and purity — the purity component is the one most often missing. Quality is precisely this purity and happiness. Happiness lets us keep sitting on and on, because sitting at ease, we don't want to stop. As for knowledge, there are two kinds — knowledge as information, and the state of knowing, which we must set our focus on and sense as being aware of our own body and of what we are knowing. This is very important; without understanding it, practice wastes time and struggles to progress.