Introduction

Ajaan Lee composed the following three short essays when he was hospitalized in late 1959, shortly over a year before his death. The style of presentation -- outlines that are just barely fleshed out -- is typical of his later writings. He seems to have intended that the essays be given to hospital patients, as food for thought for them to ponder while undergoing treatment. Although the presentation is ecumenical, the basic points are straight Buddhism. The explanation of the two types of disease in the first essay follows one of the central insights of the Buddhas Awakening: the realization that events in the present are conditioned both by past kamma (intentional actions) and by present kamma. The four principles of human values presented in the second essay correspond to the four agatis, or types of prejudice that the Buddha warned against: prejudice based on (1) likes and desires, (2) dislikes and anger, (3) delusion, and (4) fear.

The third essay, "The Buddhist Way," is a brief outline of the Buddhas teachings based on the synopsis of the Ovada Patimokkha, a discourse the Buddha gave at the beginning of his career to 1,250 arahant disciples before sending them out to spread the teaching; and on an analysis of one of the basic Buddhist concepts, that of sankhara, which means force, fashioning, or compounded thing. In its form, the analysis of two types of sankharas -- those on the level of the world and those on the level of the Dhamma -- is original with Ajaan Lee and is based on a Thai reading of two Pali compounds: sankhara loka and sankhara Dhamma. From the point of view of Pali grammar, sankhara- functions as the adjective in each of these compounds: the first compound refers to the world of compounded things, the second refers to compounded things as phenomena in and of themselves. The two compounds were taken over straight into Thai, but because Thai places its adjectives after the nouns they modify, Ajaan Lee has interpreted loka (world) and Dhamma (phenomena) as adjectives modifying sankhara, and thus he arrives at his own novel interpretation of the terms. His understanding of the aggregate of consciousness, the fifth aggregate, is also interesting in that it differs from most scholarly interpretations. Otherwise, the content of his analysis is standard, and the points he makes form a convenient synopsis of Pali Buddhist teachings.