Winter Camping:  the Art of Dissolving Problems
Ajahn Sona, October 28, 2008
1. Transcriber's Preface
2. Dhamma talk
3. Glossary

Preface
In December of 2008, I was newly integrated into the monastic community and still becoming familiar with the rich tradition and teachings of the Theravada forest tradition.  Ajahn Sona arrived at Abhayagiri Monastery with a small group of novices and lay supporters for what would be a grand event - the ordaining of three novices from his small monastery in British Columbia, Canada.  He arrived just before the Uposatha observance and in typical fashion for a teacher of this lineage, obliged a request to give a spontaneous talk to the gathered community that evening.
After the talk and ordinations Ajahn Sona went on his way, and the discourse with its many contemplative themes faded from memory.  It wasn't until six years later, when I was preparing for my first venture on tudong, or pilgrimage, and became absorbed with the task of packing that a fellow monk recommended I give the talk a listen.  When I did I was surprised to hear not only many of the themes of simplicity and tranquility that had become quietly integral to my practice, but my own voice, as the most junior monastic present, leading the call of appreciation at the end of the recording.
Since then I've listened to the talk many times, and I always find that Ajahn Sona's spontaneous and eloquent explanation of tranquility practice, given around the framework of his explorations in winter camping, goes right to the heart of expressing the peace and clarity with which and for which a pilgrim sets out on a trail of self-discovery.  And his themes of "dissolving problems" and "the natural simplicity of human life" have become well-known in the circles in which I travel.
For everyone who isn't a monastic or wanderer, the talk is nevertheless a presentation of timeless themes of practice and a look into the colorful tapestry which is the Theravada forest tradition, from the perspective of one of its venerable teachers.
Tahn Pamutto, Oct. 2016

Dhamma Talk
"Namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma sambuddhassa
Namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma sambuddhassa
Namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma sambuddhassa
Buddam Dhammam Sangham namasami.

I was asked to give a dhamma talk tonight, and for those who don't know me - I'm Ajahn Sona from Canada.  We’re coming from “Sitavana”, or Birken Monastery.  We have two names now: a secondary name in Pali, “Sitavana”, meaning “Cool Forest” monastery - very appropriate for Canada.  I’ve been here recently and I recognize many of you.  Glad to be here.
We're here for the ordination of the three novices from Birken Monastery, and auspiciously we arrived on the Uposatha so we were able to participate in the observance.  It's been a little while since I sat in with so many monks and had the full patimokkha recited - it's a very nice feeling.  When we return we will have three new bhikkhus and a full quorum, so we'll be reciting the patimokkha in full.  It's all part of the great tradition, and by having a full entourage of monks through the rainy season we will be able to have a kathina at the end of it.
It's been a nice opportunity to commune sangha members, and also it was a particularly pleasant surprise for me to kneel down tonight and recite the “Dhammacakkha-pavatana Sutta”.  We do it too - it's an evergreen, and it goes through various cycles of popularity at the monastery.  We haven't done it in quite some time.  It was nice to hear this many voices chanting it, all with the correct rhythym and pronunciation.  And… it was good to hand me something to talk about [laughs].

These are a type of talk, as you travel around and so forth, where you just get invited to talk.  I've given up preparing anything because I just hope by now that there's enough contents rattling around in my head.  I like to not plan it too much because if you do you sometimes ignore what's relevant and spontaneous and meaningful to this moment.  It's nice to leave it unplanned - also I don't get so bored because I get to listen to what I have to say, and it's all new.  I haven't done a lot of rehearsal.
This Dhammacakkha Sutta is the monumental sutta, the first.  It was given formally to the Buddha's comrades from his misspent youth, the misspent seven years in the wrong direction.  Misspent, but probably necessary.  I don't know ... there's something perhaps more than that this just happened to the Buddha - this idea of extremes, of finding the middle path.  It happens in microcosm in various peoples' lives.  Certainly in my life I have gone to extremes, and it's been a helpful learning experience to find out where the middle is.
I have passed my 20th rains this year, and part of that was giving some talks on twenty years in the robes.  Just before I came down, in Vancouver, I gave a talk at the library.  I had planned once again to talk about the last twenty years, but I actually never made it to the first year.  I ended up talking ... I started at 15 [laughs] and the talk was over before I got to the first year of my ordination.  
One thing that came up was my exploration as I moved into a Buddhist view of things, and my interest in simplicity and finding out what I didn't need etc.  I ended up, I suppose intuitively, moving towards dhamma.
Of course, I had some explicit ideas about monks and so forth, but I ended up doing a lot of Winter Camping, and exploring the extremes of both indulgence and minimalism or perhaps hyper-minimalism.  Only in retrospect, as I came across the teaching of the Buddha, I realized I had repeated a paradigm or a pattern in nature.  I think it was at first an aspiration to get away, to get out of the confusing claustrophobic nature of urban cultural life, and just to get out into the woods to clear the mind.
You can just see the Buddha, or the bodhisattva at the time he went forth, going over the wall of the palace into the forest.  Not with a sense of destiny necessarily.  Some schools perhaps reinterpret that he was only going through the motions, that he was already so deeply enlightened that he had to do this as a demonstration to the world.  I've never been very impressed by that idea.  I really think he didn't know where he was going, but he knew what he was going away from.
That's not the best way to travel through life - I often give the advice to people don't just go away from things, go towards things.  But the Bodhisattva … how could he be, in a sense or perhaps unconsciously, going towards something?  But certainly, consciously, just knowing what he was going away from.  Obviously because of this pursuit of extreme asceticism the following six years, he didn't have a clear vision at the beginning.
It reminds me of these endeavors that I went through as well, of starting off trying to drag all the comforts of life along on an expedition into the Ontario winter at forty below zero — which makes a lot of weight.  So much weight that we couldn't put it on our backs, it had to be dragged on toboggans.  Neither of us had been camping for a long time,  so it was an interesting thing … we took everything plus the kitchen sink.  Looking back, the weight of it, and the dragging of this weight, was part of the problem.  The attempt to provide for everything, every possibility, ultimately led to some failures.
I think we made it about three miles on snowshoes dragging the toboggans.  After managing to struggle with all this weight we were soaking wet with sweat — not a good idea at forty below zero.  We were equipped with triple backup for eating and so forth - highly concerned with the theory that you need a lot to eat at this kind of temperature.  We made our little camp and the first thing was the fire.  We brought an axe and a saw and the whole business, and so we took the axe and went for some firewood.
We were floundering around in the snow trying to chop a tree down.  One swing, the axe head comes off, disappears into the snow forever.  Because of the cold.  Everything shrinks - the axe handle shrinks, everything shrinks, and it just flew off.  We spent, oh, half an hour of the precious remains of daylight searching up to our shoulders for the axe head and not finding it, getting progressively colder and colder.
But we had triple backup.  We had a coleman stove with a propane canister.  And, if your a physicist you'll know already, that propane at forty below zero - the canisters have no pressure in them.  My friend happened to have a Masters Degree in physics and engineering.  He could explain the whole thing to me, but he hadn't thought about it beforehand.  Why our stove didn't work ... he knew exactly why.
Now we're down to a can of sterno.  We had brought along some food, of course - filet mignon ... raw, filet mignon.  If you've ever seen a hockey puck with bacon wrapped around it, that's what it was.  Of course completely inedible, and the sterno didn't even melt snow.  Of all of the things ... we had nothing left but to eat snow and go to bed.
We had a huge tent with us, very bulky.  We managed to set it up, and heeding all these books we had read about winter camping, my friend decided he must get rid of his wet clothing and get dry clothing on.  In order to do this he has to strip down at forty below zero in this tent with a gas lantern hanging in the middle of it -- the only thing that worked, a pump-up gas lantern.  In his frantic efforts he knocked that down and broke it and set the place on fire.  He was stark naked … shards of glass, and jet fuel, and flames … However, we managed to put it out.  Now we're in the pitch black, broken glass, frigid snow … 
We did survive till dawn, and you could see two lonely figures trudging back the three miles the next day, toboggans loaded ... wiser, but sadder men.
It was the beginning of an evolution.  We analyzed what went wrong.  The attempt to make it all safe and cozy was the cause of the incredible discomfort.  We began to gravitate down from the overindulgence, and the burdens that one carries from this kind of thinking.  The thinking was all wrong.  It seems so reasonable in a warm house in Toronto.  That's also part of something we discovered as we went along, and slowly we made vast improvements: the next trip, the next trip, the next trip.
We began to think there was a magic key ... how light can we go?   Not that long afterwards we're down to no sleeping bags, no tent, and just bread in the pockets of a plastic raincoat.
November in Ontario.  We got out there, and it started to snow.  We laid down to sleep in the open with the snow coming down, wrapped in plastic raincoats.  We woke up in the morning, both of us with frozen feet, covered in six inches of snow.  We had to walk about 20 kilometers just to get our feet warm and get feeling in our feet.
Although, you know, it was not as bad as the first trip and all the overindulgence, but we came to the realization we had gone too far in the direction of trying to be light. What we were really trying to do was get rid of all weight so we wouldn't have anything to carry or to burden us.  We realized, though, that this was an extreme and that it didn't work.  So we made our way back.
We started to realize the pattern — we even started to talk about the Buddha, saying “This is weird... this must be what that middle path is like … this extreme we went to.  We just went too far.”  So we moved back to find that right amount, and tried to find that with wisdom.
Another thing that we discovered was that our thinking could not be trusted when we were trying to make plans for any of these things in a warm house.  We weren’t realistic about things ... we didn't prearrange anything.  We thought - “Well, I'll do this out there, this tying knots and things like this.”  But when you get out there at thirty or forty below zero, you can't tie knots.  Somehow this doesn't seem real when you're in a pleasant environment.  It only seems real out there.
What we decided was we would take a little notebook along, and we would write down our thoughts in the middle of the camping trips.  We would consider this to be a sutta, or a bible:  it must be followed literally and completely and in detail, and it cannot be questioned, especially in a warm living room.
We’d take it home, and it just seemed ... it was very interesting opening the thing and reading it in prep for the next trip.  We'd think, “Uh, well, do we really have to?”  But remember the override clause - you must follow this.  These are the rules, because they were made in reality.  They were made in the midst of the situation, when the truth is apparent.
We did this, and we found that when we went out, taking the advice of the book, that everything went just fine out there.  We kept learning:  this is the nature of delusion.  You just cannot trust your mind in certain situations.  It's only in a particular situation, when you're in contact with reality, that you can see.  This I discovered again and again - the maze of the mind.  When you can trust what it says, and when you can not trust what it says.
I’ve come to use that a lot with people who come to me with all these problems all the time, asking for advice.  Again and again, I am telling them that this problem is not really one that you need to solve.  This problem is one you dissolve.  That the nature of most problems are simply the strange nature of the mind, the, I don't know, the evolutionary disfunction that the mind is the source of problems.  It creates the problems and many of them are not necessary to solve.  They are the problem; the mind itself generating problems is the problem, and you cannot be the one who solves the problem.  You’ve got to find yourself in the right place when can you trust what the mind says.
When can you trust the mind?  The only time you really can trust it is when there is some quality of samatha, some condition of serenity.  It doesn't have to be profound, but it has to be noticeably serene, so that one evaluates ones capacity to solve or dissolve problems not by the quality of thought, but by the texture of feeling.  The direct experience of equanimity and serenity.  And if you don't know whether you are serene or not, you're not.
So if it's not there, almost everything you think is useless.  Not to be trusted.  If it is there then that voice really can be trusted, and usually what it tells you is that your life is really simple, that it's not complicated.  That's something as well to learn — when you talk to yourself about your life, you're not really just recounting the facts.  You're actually giving yourself a lot of suggestions.  If you talk to yourself that you have a lot of things to do, a lot of burdens and duties, and that your in-laws take up a lot of your life, etc., you are not just giving an accurate portrait of your life.  You're suggesting things to yourself, and it becomes real.
If you're going to talk to yourself at all about life, you should always talk to yourself — even if you feel it's somewhat false, because you are profoundly suggesting something — talk to yourself about how simple your life is.  How really it's not that bad.  It's quite easy.  You don't have that many complex things to do, in fact most of them are really simple.  Most of them involve walking across rooms, sitting on chairs, lifting cups of tea or coffee, writing things down perhaps.  When you look through a silent camera at the activities of the human, it turns out it's fairly simple, fairly straightforward.  And when you're talking to yourself about that, you are not only probably closer to an accurate description of reality, but also you're suggesting.
Because we can make complexities out of anything.  Even if you go off to a monastery you will find, much to your surprise perhaps, that even though you have maybe a half hour task in a whole day it can become quite a monument along the way.  The nature of the mind — it can fill up and complicate and create things.  So know the mind, and know what it's up to, and know some tactics for its return to the middle path.
So before this Dhammacakkha Sutta, the Buddha is talking to his mud-caked buddies [laughs] who've just been on a long camping trip, about this, about how he's gone off and clarified his mind, and how.
One thing he does along the way is the famous recollection of a moment of peace as a child.  He becomes as a little child once more, and that mind that that child had sitting under the rose apple tree was kinda the right version of the camping trip.  Sitting pleasantly in the shade.  Not complex, not overburdened, etc.  Freeing the mind enough to just be enjoying the breeze.  In beginning with that moment of serenity and clarity he solves a lot of his problems by dissolving a lot of his problems.  Notice that the beginning of the end of his suffering, the end of the long series of mistakes, is that moment when he decides to dissolve problems.  It is then that he can trust his mind.  He also sees it as blameless.  He understands that there's no reason to fear this serenity, even though it's extremely pleasant to free the mind from burdens, worries, fears, and the extremes that it goes to.  It’s nothing to be feared.  He’s very clear about that.
Then he recounts a time as a bodhisattva where he decided to think only wholesome, skillful thoughts, and not think unwholesome, unskillful thoughts.  He made two piles of these thoughts, and he only selected from the pile of wholesome thoughts that he will not regret.  He gave it a really great whirl, and he came to the conclusion that this is really good.
However he's still thinking.  He's started to divide up the nature of thought, pre-choosing where to go with these thoughts.  Same thing as the notebook idea.  He’s just discovered that there's certain processes of the mind that are really to be avoided.  They've not profitable; they just do not go anywhere.  They never give an accurate description of reality, and they are all suggestive as well.  They tend to suggest a direction in which you should go.  They don't just describe - they prescribe.  You gotta be careful with the mind.  When you think you're describing, you're also prescribing.
He does this and further realization comes to him that, yes, this is good, the wholesome thoughts are good.  But even this is a bit wearisome, endlessly thinking.  Then he proceeds to ask himself, “What if I let go of thinking, but remain conscious and indulged in the peace and ease of that.  How would that be?  So he does that and he discovers that, yes, indeed, that's even better than the endless production of thoughts even though they are wholesome.  Again he's going towards.  This is degrees of samatha.  He is not a Buddha at that time, he's a bodhisattva, but he's finding out how to thread his way between these extremes and find his way.  He's laying down these preliminaries.  This is how he finally gets through it.
This is universal.  We, every single one of us, whoever, if we're ever going to solve our problems, finally we have to take this path.  We have to understand that we cannot just think, and that we cannot go to extremes, and that even being involved just with wholesome thoughts is not adequate itself.
There's a marvelous quality in this dissolving of problems.  It sets the stage for a kind of evaporation.  I would think enlightenment would be more or less something like the complete evaporation of a puddle of water, where there is no need to dissolve any more.  Because there is nothing left, no pool of problems which return.  That would be an ultimate solution, an end to the cycle of having to dissolve again and again.

This Dhammacakkha Sutta is all about this extraordinary presentation of the four noble truths and it's presented in the form of a simile of a wheel.  The wheel is set rolling.  And the Buddha is foremost in similes.  Of all the religious literature in the world, all full of marvelous parables and similes, some of them just so astute, so perfect, none of them compare in number and precision to what we find in the Pali Canon, in volume.  None of them are off-hand, none of them are distorted, and whenever anything like this wheel comes up one should say that the Buddha never did anything casually without meaning.
It's always amazing what unfolds when you meditate on dhamma.  Think of it as this wheel.  What did a wheel mean; what does a wheel mean to you?  What did it mean at the time?  The wheel was an astonishing breakthrough in terms of human civilization.  It's a marvel.  It has properties unlike anything else.  There's a number of places in the suttas where the Buddha talks about wheels, of how perfectly one can make a wagon wheel with the spokes, and of the perfection of this rolling motion.
That rolling motion is very much part of our faith.  The processes of the mind, of consciousness, have inertia behind them.  That's very radical.  The Buddha’s saying there's a causal inertia in the structures of the mind.  It is like a wheel.  It rolls.  If you set it in motion, given the right context - that is the four noble truths - a wheel begins to roll.  That wheel he assures us is unstoppable ultimately, we just need to get enough momentum behind it and inevitably it rolls to its liberating conclusion.
It happens at a number of levels. It happens at the personal level. It describes the personal consciousness of each individual human being, but also on a grander scale it's talking about the impossibility that this wheel will be stopped or prevented by any Mara or Brahma, any human, or any force on the earth, in the heavens or below.  Nothing can stop this wheel when it's set in motion.  This is on the grand scale, and of course that was quite a claim to be making 2500 years ago.  But now, from the perspective of how it still is rolling, very palpably, clearly rolling, 2500 years later, you say, "You know ... it's quite amazing. He was accurate with that."  The rolling through the fall of empires, rolling through the rising and passing away of huge migrations of people, whole episodes in human history...  Still rolling.  It gives one confidence to contemplate that, so far, it has proved true.
The first level, though, is to take it in personally and to meditate, and just to internalize that feeling of rolling.  There's something beautiful and effortless about the idea of a wheel rolling once it's set in motion.
I suspect that because vehicles at the time were pulled rather than self-powered, that many of the similes would be different if it were given in modern terms.  I think if it was at this time the Buddha might have used the idea of the vehicle with wheels. All-wheel drive and four-wheel drive might have been part of his bag of similes, because of this process of right effort. The 'four right efforts' lends itself to the idea of the wheel, of powering by all four wheels -- and you do need all four.
Two of the right efforts are connected with negative unwholesome aspects and two of them with positive.  The removal and prevention of unwholesome states are the two negative, and the sustaining and creating of wholesome states are the two positive.  All these have to function at certain times.  I suppose that once one has attained a certain degree of enlightenment, the lower two - that is prevention and elimination - don't need to be exercised.  It's just the two positive need to be brought more into it.
Before that stage we need all four, and sometimes even in the beginning we're mostly dealing with prevention and removal.  There can be a little bit of a dry spell before maintenance is possible.  Sometimes in the beginning of our practice there's not many wholesome mental states to maintain. They haven't arisen, so that is one of the efforts to make sure they come into being, for the creation of these things.
Now, the simile for crossing the river to the far side, to nibbana, is the idea of the raft.  A man gathers some sticks together, binds them together, rests his chest on them, and then kicks with both hands and feet to get himself across this river.  Often when we hear the raft simile, we think of something like what Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn rode down the Mississippi river, the kind of thing with logs with a nice cabin on it.  But when you actually read the simile it's very much poorer than that, it's simply enough to keep your chest and head above water while you get across the river.  What that also represents is the four right efforts. The Buddha's very explicit to paddle with both feet and both hands.  And the raft itself is the eightfold path.  It's a poor man's version of it.  It's just enough to keep you afloat.  You don't have to have memorized the entire Pali Canon and understand all the 37 requisites of the Abhidhamma, etc, you just need enough to keep you afloat while you paddle.  Just enough to get to the other side.  In fact, the Buddha is saying, "Don't spend too much time making it a glorious raft -- it just needs to get you across."
People at the time seemed to get across on very simple teachings.  Of course, some people are of great intellect and great memory and so forth, so they seem to have absorbed the whole canon.  But it's not necessary to be that way and one should not be intimidated.  You need just enough to give you flotation while you apply effort.
You can think of getting across as this idea of paddling and kicking, or you can think of it as the flow.  I believe that once one gets far enough into the river it doesn't matter whether you kick and paddle, that there's some current that catches you.  This would be sotapanna.  There's a current that whether you kick and paddle or not you are destined to arrive on the far shore.  All you really need to do, and that's nice, is just to get to that first part of the current, the one that demands that within some few lives it's inevitable you'll be washed onto the far shore.
Of course, if you keep up the effort you get to the far shore quicker, but it's inevitable if you just make it into that current.  That stream also ties in with the idea of the inertia of the wheel.  The unstoppable turning of the wheel.  The wheel has spokes.  The eightfold path is represented in these spokes, and the twelve factors of dependent origination is represented as spokes.  It's all contained -- the idea of the path, the wheel, the spokes -- all of these things, contained in these similes and wrapped up in this wheel idea.
The Dhammacakkha-pavatana Sutta is primarily just about this - the four noble truths, the eightfold path, and the arising of light, wisdom, knowledge, and freedom or liberation.  For the next forty-five years that wheel keeps rolling and right to the last sermon, in all of those talks, the essence of it is always summarized in that first sermon.  That's remarkable.  It's remarkable to look at it, that over those years the initial theme that he sets, like a great symphony, is just variation upon variation upon variation.  And it always fits back into that simple theme of the four noble truths and eightfold path, rolling inevitably towards light, and wisdom, and liberation.
I will leave you with those images tonight and let you roll on.

Glossary
Pali - the language of the Buddha's teachings, preserved by the Theravada tradition.  Words in pali occur throughout the talk.  The standard opening homage translates: "Homage to the Blessed One, the Noble One, the Fully Self-Awakened One.  To the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, I pay respects."
Uposatha - an observance day falling on the Full and New Moons.  On this day the monks recite their patimokkha, and at many monasteries lay people can visit to hear a talk on dhamma.
patimokkha - the code of discipline for Buddhist monks.  When four or more monks gather, they recite this code verbatim every fortnight on the Full or New Moon.
kathina - a robe-giving festival at the end of the monsoon, initiated by the lay community to show appreciation for a community of monks who have been in residence during that season.
Dhammacakkha-pavatana Sutta - 'The Discourse on Turning the Wheel of Dhamma', the Buddha's first official sermon, given to five ascetics who had been his companions while striving for enlightenment.
bodhisattva - before attaining enlightenment, the Buddha was known as a bodhisattva or seeker.  Raised in luxury as a prince, he went forth from that life to practice diligently in the forest.
Pali Canon - the central texts of the orthodox Buddhist tradition, most dating back to the time of the Buddha.  The 40 volumes include short and long teachings and dialogues, the entire code of discipline for monks and nuns, and the Abhidhamma, an analytical approach to mental phenomena.
Mara or Brahma - Mara's and Brahma's are powerful demons and gods (respectively) in ancient Indian cosmology.
four noble truths - the essential framework laid out in the Buddha's first sermon, in brief - (1) there is suffering, (2) the cause of suffering is desire, (3) the abandoning of desire causes the cessation of suffering, (4) there is a path of practice to abandon desire - the eightfold path.
Eightfold path - the fourth noble truth and path of practice, namely: Right View, Right Volition, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Concentration, and Right Mindfulness.
nibbana - in sanskrit, "nirvana", literally means 'cooling', and refers to the complete settling of the mind free from all disturbances.
sotapanna - the first of four tiers of enlightenment, where by abandoning wrong views and undertaking right effort one begins walking the path which inevitably leads to nibbana.