The Direct Way

Before we begin: one sheet of paper

This text tries to put the whole of the Buddha's teaching on so little paper that you can read it in an evening and apply it the next morning. It invents nothing. Every thought and every image comes from the discourses of the Buddha or from the talks of a forest monk whom I call "the teacher" here: Ajahn Jayapañño of Sakon Nakhon in the north-east of Thailand. Ajahn means teacher; the forest monks are the monks of Thailand who live in the forest and practise the teaching rather than only studying it. I translated his talks from the Thai. He says things so that a child understands them and can apply them at once, and I have tried to follow him in that.

Three rules apply to every sentence. First: it contains something one can do or observe. Second: verb before noun, because "holding on" can be seen in oneself and "attachment" cannot. Third: the Pali, the old Indian language in which the Buddha's discourses have come down to us, stands in brackets beside the sentence. Whoever skips it loses nothing. Two words the text needs all the same: Dhamma is the teaching of the Buddha and at the same time the truth it points to. Buddha means "the awakened one".

The line "Listen" at the end of each chapter names the talk and the minute in the video where the teacher says the thing himself. The videos stand with subtitles at schwoererd.com/talks/.

The Buddha tells of a man struck by a poisoned arrow. He will not let the arrow be drawn before he knows who shot it, what wood the shaft is made of and from which bird the feathers come. He would die, says the Buddha, and all of that would remain unknown to him. This text is an attempt to draw the arrow. It is built the way the way itself is built: first the problem, then its blueprint, then the one place where one can intervene, then the tool, then the practice step by step, then what comes to an end. At the close stand the traps, daily life and the words.

1. The basic rule

The whole teaching stands in two sentences:

When this is here, that comes. When this stops, that stops.

That is called dependent arising (paṭiccasamuppāda). The Buddha himself sums up his teaching in four truths and an eightfold path; the basic rule is what holds both together. Nothing exists out of itself. Everything that is here is here because something else is here, and so everything stops as soon as its condition is withdrawn. That holds for suffering too. One need not fight it. It is enough to cut off its supply.

The rest of this text only shows what "this" and "that" are, and where the supply is cut.

Listen: Evening talk 19.9.2026, minute 01:05 · Morning talk 23.9.2026, 19:04 · schwoererd.com/wheel/

2. The fish does not know the water

The fish lives in the water and does not know the water. Whoever lives in suffering does not know suffering, because he has never paused to look at it.

So first the word. The Buddha calls it dukkha, and the translation "suffering" has earned the teaching its reputation in the West of being pessimistic. Something else is meant. The teacher says it explicitly: not the pain of body and mind, but this: nothing we lean on holds. The body grows old, the mood tips over, possessions go, the person we love changes. What keeps changing cannot carry weight, and hanging on to it produces tension. I therefore translate with three words that together cover the range of the one: tension, stress and suffering.

From this follows a short chain worth knowing by heart, because later it does the work: What is impermanent (anicca) is suffering. What is suffering is not-self (anattā): not me, not mine. For what was mine, I ought to be able to hold. What I cannot hold does not belong to me, and what does not belong to me, I am not. One can test this on any backache.

The teacher says: In the ordinary person, suffering is as big as a mountain. Whoever walks the way even to the first stage (chapter 7 says how to recognise it), is left with as much as a termite mound, as much as a fist. But before one gets out of the water, one first has to know the water.

Listen: 19.9.2026, 04:15 · 07:29 · 21:17 · 24:58

3. The blueprint: the wheel in twelve sentences

The Buddha described the arising of suffering in twelve links. This is no account of the beginning of the world. The old commentarial tradition spreads the twelve links over several lives; the teacher reads them, as Buddhadāsa did, as a process that runs in every person in every second, and that is how they stand here. In the first person it sounds like this:

• I do not see how it really is: that everything changes, that none of it is me (avijjā, not knowing).
• Because I do not see this, the mind creates: it repeats feeling and thinking until what it has created looks like a solid world (saṅkhāra, what the mind creates).
• In this created world something is noticed: seen, heard, thought (viññāṇa, consciousness).
• Where there is noticing, mind and body are there together: a body, and that which feels it, names it and wants something (nāma-rūpa, mind and body).
• Six bridges stand open: eye and sight, ear and sound, nose and smell, tongue and taste, body and touch, mind and thought (saḷāyatana, the six sense bridges).
• Something comes across a bridge. It strikes me (phassa, contact).
• In the same moment a feeling is there: pleasant, unpleasant, or neither (vedanā, feeling).
• Out of the feeling comes wanting: more of this, or away with it (taṇhā, craving).
• Out of the wanting comes holding on. I no longer let it go, and it no longer lets me go (upādāna, clinging).
• Out of the holding on comes someone I now am: the offended one, the one in love, the one who is right (bhava, becoming).
• This someone steps forward, speaks, acts (jāti, birth).
• And what steps forward passes away again, with sorrow, lament and pain (jarā-maraṇa, ageing and death).

The first four sentences describe what runs too fast to be seen. From the fifth on, one can watch. An example: a message appears on the phone. That is contact. It stings or tingles before one has even read it: feeling. Then one wants more of it or refuses to accept it, holds on, becomes the offended one or the winner and carries it for the rest of the day. The message knew nothing of this. Whoever sits at a trading desk knows the same sequence when the price moves. The world is not the suffering. The building is, the one that is put up in a single second around a feeling.

The teacher calls it a wheel that turns. In everyday life one can stop it at one place, and only if one is faster there than the wheel.

Listen: 19.9.2026, 06:22 · 23.9.2026, 30:03 to 32:39 · schwoererd.com/woerter/?lang=en

4. The one place

Twelve links, and in everyday life one point to intervene: between feeling and craving. The root, not knowing, comes later, and one reaches it only through this place. Everything before runs too fast to be seen. That something strikes the eye and is pleasant or unpleasant, nobody ordered. Everything after is too heavy. Whoever is already holding on, has already become the one who is right, no longer lets go, because he does not want to.

But the feeling itself, this first moment in which something pleases or displeases: here nothing has happened yet. Here one can look. The teacher says:

Here we look, here we cut. If one catches the feeling in time, no craving arises. If there is no craving, there is no clinging, no becoming and no birth. So the wheel stops.

Buddhadāsa, a great Thai teacher of the last century, compared it to a vine. Cut it through in the middle, and at its tip it can bear neither flower nor fruit. The middle is the feeling. One does not have to fight the anger once it is there. One cuts once, in the middle, and the tip withers by itself.

That is why the teacher distinguishes two directions. Forward, from cause to effect, is how one studies the wheel in the book. Backward, from effect to cause, is how one practises. Like ripples on water: at first one sees only the swell, the anger when it is already there. Then one moves inward, ring by ring, until one sees the point where something strikes the water. From seeing the swell one comes to seeing the impact.

Listen: 19.9.2026, 21:55 · 23.9.2026, 04:52 · 27:39

5. The tool: presence of mind

What does one cut with? With mindfulness (sati). The word has gone soft in English, so a second one stands beside it: presence of mind. In Thai, the opposite of sati is not absent-mindedness but being beside oneself: blind with rage, losing one's head, not there. Sati means remembering that one is here. The teacher attaches to it two words he attaches to everything: catch in time. Notice it while it is coming up, not an hour later.

Do not forget, he says: mindfulness too is impermanent. It arises and passes. It is not something one has once and then keeps. All we can do is create the cause for it to arise more often, and the cause is practice. That is why one says: develop mindfulness.

It has three stages, and the three stages are at the same time the whole way:

• At the beginning, mindfulness is mindfulness of breathing (ānāpānasati): knowing when breathing in, knowing when breathing out.
• In the middle it is the mindfulness of the four foundations (satipaṭṭhāna). Foundations means: the four places where mindfulness lives. The body, feeling, the mind, and what happens in the mind.
• At the end it is mindfulness as a factor of awakening (bojjhaṅga). The Buddha names seven factors that then grow by themselves: mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, calming down, concentration, equanimity. One then no longer has to fetch mindfulness. It stands ready before anything strikes.

Mindfulness never works alone. As it matures, concentration goes with it, a mind that stays with one thing, and out of the two arises wisdom, the seeing of how it really is. The three must be in balance, the teacher says, like the spices in cooking. One notices it in the taste: too much concentration without mindfulness turns dull, one stares. Too much mindfulness without calm turns restless, one jumps. When it is right, one enjoys the practice.

Listen: 19.9.2026, 15:07 · 23.9.2026, 25:35 · 26:14

6. The way, step by step

The ground

No house without ground. The ground is giving (dāna), virtue (sīla) and guarding one's own mind. The five precepts of the lay person are not commandments but a description of what a mind does that is not beside itself: not killing anything living, not taking what is not given, being faithful to one's partner, not lying, not getting intoxicated. Whoever lives so has nothing to regret, and a mind with nothing to regret easily grows calm.

Guarding the mind begins with an abstention the teacher puts before everything else: do not judge others. As long as we play the judge, we are wrong, whichever way the verdict falls. Whether the other is right or wrong is not our business. First we are responsible for ourselves, only then for others. In his words: "Whoever cannot save himself, whom does he mean to help? Take good care of yourselves. Develop much mindfulness."

Listen: Talk 20.9.2026, 04:50 · 08:28 · 19.9.2026, 23:33

The beginning: the breath

The first step is the hardest. The teacher says it without ceremony: for someone new to practice, watching the breath is hard, the hardest of all, and it is no fun whatsoever. Without enough patience one gives up by oneself.

Why so hard? Because this mind is lost outside. It does not know its home. The teacher compares it to a captured animal: at the beginning one has to lock it up and give it less to eat until it grows tamer. Carried over, that means: fewer stimuli, less entertainment, fewer stories the mind feeds itself on. Only then can it be trained. One presses it, but without letting it die.

The practice is as simple as it sounds. One sits still and notices that one is breathing: short in, know. Short out, know. Long in, know. Long out, know. "Know" here means nothing more than noticing that it is happening right now. One need not want to know anything or achieve anything. One practises remembering and staying with the breath until remembering and breath stay firmly together. Whatever the mind sees or thinks in the meantime: do not take it up, it can deceive. Back to the breath, again and again.

For how long? The teacher prescribes no minutes, so I give only my own advice: a fixed place, a fixed time, ten minutes in the morning to begin with, longer when it becomes longer by itself. During the day, then, what stands in chapter 10. Sitting is the school; the day is the exam.

And with that, a sentence that takes a lot off its pedestal. In the monasteries there is a path for walking meditation on which the monks walk up and down mindfully. The teacher says: the real path is the breath, in and out, there and back. Who built a path for the Buddha, spread gravel, spread sand? In here one walks up and down. And temptation (Māra) cannot see it, for whoever is with the breath offers it nothing to attack.

Listen: 19.9.2026, 24:20 · 33:11 · 34:07 · 23.9.2026, 09:27 · 10:24 · 13:17

Calm, then correct concentration

When the mind stays with the breath and no longer wanders outside, it comes to rest (samatha). Everything further stands on this calm, but it is not yet the goal. Out of calm comes concentration (samādhi), and the teacher defines it thus:

Concentration is a mind that stands firm. It does not waver, it does not flow along with what touches it. It is not dragged off through the eye, through the ear. That does not mean it knows nothing. It knows everything, but it merely knows. It does not go out to know.

"Merely knowing" is the teacher's second key phrase next to "catch in time": something is noticed, and one does not run after it, neither to have it nor to get rid of it. Whether one sits, walks or stands on one's head while doing so is outward form. Concentration is not a state with closed eyes. It has to be there in real life, in every waking moment.

And it is correct (sammā) only when presence of mind is with it. Correct mindfulness leads to correct concentration, and only from that does wisdom arise. How does one tell the difference in oneself? By one simple question: do I still know that I am sitting here and breathing, and do I notice what strikes the eye and the ear? Then presence of mind is with it. If everything except the one point has vanished, it feels calm, but one is staring. That is the concentration that existed before the Buddha. It can do a great deal, but it does not lead out of suffering, because its knowing goes outward, towards the point, instead of inward, to what is happening right now.

Listen: 19.9.2026, 04:15 · 08:14 · 20:07 · 23.9.2026, 11:47 · 14:07

The body

The first of the four foundations is called, in the language of the scriptures, contemplating the body in the body. That sounds cryptic and means something simple. The teacher first clears away a misunderstanding: the body in the body is not the figure of light or the crystal skeleton that some believe they see while sitting. All of that the mind has created. The body in the body is the breath, the inner body that comes and goes in this body.

Whoever knows the breath steadily gets to know the body thoroughly: how it makes itself felt, how it hurts, how it tires, how nothing about it stays on command. And then, little by little, through much practice, the fixed assumption dissolves: that this body is me. In the language of the scriptures, the view of a self (sakkāya-diṭṭhi) is given up. Not that one throws the body away. The body stays and is looked after. Only the view that it is me is used up. That is the not-self of chapter 2, no longer as a sentence but as something one has seen. When one knows the body thoroughly, the teacher says, it has lost its value: it is no longer anything one would have to hold on to. No more doubt.

And because one no longer takes the body for oneself, one sees the mind behind it. So one comes from the first foundation to the second.

Listen: 19.9.2026, 05:00 · 05:47 · 11:55 · 12:26 · 34:32

Feeling

Now one stands at the place from chapter 4. Mindfulness dwells in the body, something strikes, feeling arises, and mindfulness is there in time. It sees: here the mind already likes something, here it already dislikes something.

Why start so early and not only at the anger? Because in anger, the teacher says, there is still a pleasure, a delight in the anger. One bears a grudge, plots revenge, holds it against someone and does not notice that it is oneself who suffers. That is why one cannot give it up once it is there. But before it lies irritation, the first swell, and that can be seen. Something unpleasant strikes, it wells up, and one catches it in time. What does one do then? Nothing further. One returns to the breath and leaves the swell standing where it is, seen and not fed. So it settles right there. It does not turn into rage. The rage never arises in the first place.

The unpleasant side yields first, the teacher says, because one sees its harm. The pleasant side, by contrast, is delicate and fine; one likes to hold it and likes to say: what pleases should stay. So the pleasant side lasts longer, and one need not begin there.

The more often mindfulness sees the feeling, the more clearly it separates two things: that which notices the wave, and the wave itself. The knowing and the known. Feeling is there, one knows the feeling, but one does not get lost in holding on to it. So the feeling gradually loses its importance. It grows lighter and lighter. "There is anger" is a different sentence from "I am furious".

Listen: 19.9.2026, 01:38 · 09:47 · 13:58 · 15:55 · 17:22 · 23.9.2026, 20:48 · 21:17

The mind

Here the way becomes fine, and the teacher becomes blunt. The knowing that was separated from the known in the last section is not a someone. Among meditators, though, people speak of "the knower"; they look for him, they create him. This knower too is still something the mind creates: a subtler self sitting behind the knowing. In reality one need not create anything or look for anything. It merely knows, of itself. There is no knower, there is only the knowing. As soon as there is someone who knows, the knowing is deluded again, because an "I" has been mixed in.

What is seen here the Buddha calls the five aggregates (khandha): form, that is the body, feeling, perception, what the mind creates, and consciousness. That is all that "I" is put together from. None of it lasts, none of it is me. Whoever sees this not from the book but while sitting finds the knower to be just one more aggregate at work.

Hence the formula the teacher repeats again and again: merely know. Just know. It is a knowing that does not pass through thinking. It does not judge. It only does its job, which is to know. In the end the mind lays down even the knowing. It no longer carries it around, not even what it has recognised in practice. The teacher warns against both wrong turns in one sentence: knowing without letting go, or letting go without knowing: there one is still lost. Whoever lays down the knowing is left with this: one knows, and one never reached for it in the first place. Therefore nobody has to let go.

Listen: 19.9.2026, 16:39 · 18:38 · 20:40 · 23.9.2026, 00:42 · 29:03 · 36:35

Backward to the root

When mindfulness has come this far, the chain runs backward by itself, with the same tool one began with: from feeling to contact, from contact to the sense bridges, further back to what the mind creates, and finally to not knowing. Only here, the teacher says, does one begin to destroy what has long been steeping and fermenting in the mind (āsava), the old reactions one takes for one's character. Unless one turns inward in this way, one cannot give them up.

Listen: 19.9.2026, 22:45 · 27:14

7. What comes to an end

What is the fruit of this way? The Buddha described four stages of awakening and said for each what comes to an end. For the first stage it is three things, and all three have already appeared in this text: the view of a self, the view that this body is me (chapter 6, "The body"); doubt about the teaching, which ends once one has tested and seen for oneself (chapter 9); and clinging to rules and rituals, taking the form for the thing (chapter 8). Whoever no longer has these three has reached the first stage. For this the Buddha gave a mirror in which anyone can test himself without asking a teacher: a trust in the Buddha, the teaching and the community that no longer wavers, because one has seen, and a virtue that holds by itself. Anger and sensual desire are still there at this stage. At the second stage they grow weaker, at the third they cease, and at the fourth the rest comes to an end: the craving for becoming, restlessness, conceit, not knowing.

The teacher describes it from the side of practice, the way one can observe it in oneself: anger grows weaker and shorter until it no longer arises. Irritation stays longer, regret, longing, and comes to an end after that. That coarse anger subsides earlier than fine irritation is an observation from practice; in the teaching both belong to ill will, which falls as a whole at the third stage. Anger is the sign, not the test. The measure is the same for all stages: what no longer arises?

That is the measure, not the visions and not the knowledge. In the Buddha's teaching, reaching the Dhamma means that suffering grows less. Whoever knows and understands is not lost, and then there is no suffering: no elation, no aversion, no dread, no chasing after things.

Two things matter here. First: letting go is not an action one performs. One does not resolve to let go; one has no craving for letting go. Mindfulness sees the feeling, more and more often, and its force goes back, back, back. It is wisdom that lets go, and it does so of itself once it has seen. Second: there is nothing one gains in the practice. Only the being lost comes to an end, little by little. Where one used to take oneself seriously, it grows lighter. In the end nothing at all is left.

And the end of the way? The teacher turns the usual translation around. Nibbāna (release) does not primarily mean "extinction", as of a flame. It means: nothing arises. Free of everything the mind creates (visaṅkhāra). When one is not lost, there is nothing left that holds an "I" together, and the teaching calls that emptiness (suññatā). Everything is still there, body, sounds, people, but nobody takes it as significant. Only processes, as nature brings them about. No I, no you, no arising, no dying. Where should suffering come from?

Listen: 19.9.2026, 29:46 · 23.9.2026, 20:03 · 23:20 · 32:39 · 38:45 · 40:00 · The three fetters and the mirror: Long Discourses, discourse 16

8. The traps

The teacher spends almost half of his talks warning against wrong turns. Whoever knows them saves years.

• Visions (nimitta). While sitting, figures of light appear, crystals, heaven, hell, sometimes voices. Where does what is seen come from? From perception, from what the mind already knows and brings out again. It has no significance. You have seen hell, and then what? Can you bring it out and show it to your friends? Whoever sees something returns to the breath.
• Deep concentration as force (jhāna). With it one can press anger down. But it is like a branch one bends down: as soon as it slips from the hand, it springs back, and exactly as far as one pulled it down. That is why a meditator who gets angry is more frightening than one who does not meditate.
• Knowing without letting go. Those who imagine they have reached the Dhamma quarrel with each other without end, because they cannot lay down what they have reached. They suffer from their knowledge.
• Taking the form for the thing (sīlabbata-parāmāsa, clinging to rules and rituals). Blaming others because they do not practise, do not chant, do not walk as we do. Whether someone watches films or listens to music is not the measure. What the mind does meanwhile, nobody knows but himself.
• Impatience. A fruit that is not yet ripe does not ripen when one shakes and squeezes it. It only turns to mush. Everything runs its course by cause and effect (kamma). And the wanting itself, even the wanting to know the Dhamma, is already tension, stress and suffering.
• Imitating the teacher. Students copy the way of speaking, of walking, even the clearing of the throat, and nothing comes of it. Even the one who walked behind the Buddha holding the hem of his robe did not become like the Buddha by doing so.

Listen: 19.9.2026, 30:12 · 32:43 · 36:06 · 23.9.2026, 12:24 · 15:00 · 17:21 · 22:46 · 36:35 · Talk 20.9.2026, 00:29

9. Test, do not believe

The Buddha did not teach belief. The teacher says it in the language of our time: Buddhism is a science by which one proves. It is a theory the Buddha left behind so that we practise it ourselves. Only then does one see the result, even if it already stands in the theory. As long as we have not seen it ourselves, this mind does not believe it, nor should it. No miracles, no secrets. Test until one sees the matter clearly through, and only then decide.

And the touchstone is always the same: is suffering growing less? Do I get angry less often, and if so, for a shorter time? Whoever charges ahead with his head down, never looking back, cannot know. As you step forward, look back. A clear goal, a correct way and an earnest walking: then one reaches the other shore by oneself, as the Buddha calls the end of suffering. The teacher closes his talks with a sentence that holds for this text as well: "I say it for you to hear, not for you to believe. Go and practise, and test yourselves as you go."

Listen: 19.9.2026, 19:19 · 23.9.2026, 02:09 · 24:22 · 25:01 · 40:47

10. Daily life

The whole way on an ordinary day. None of these takes longer than three breaths.

• Three breaths at the traffic light, in the lift, before the call. That is mindfulness of breathing in the middle of the day.
• At the first annoyance of the day: did I notice it before I sent the email, or after? That is the difference between in time and too late.
• When something comes in, a sound, a look, a thought: across which bridge does it come? And right now, pleasant or unpleasant? That is the place.
• What do I want to have right now? What do I want gone right now? That is craving, and one mostly sees it only once one names it.
• Who have I become in this argument: the offended one, the one who is right? That is becoming. As soon as one sees him, he loses weight.
• Which story about this person am I telling myself for the hundredth time? That is what the mind creates.
• When the back hurts: "the back hurts" is merely knowing. "I am wrecked" is the view of a self at work.
• Hearing a sound, noticing the feeling that comes with it, and not running after it. That is merely knowing.
• Whom am I judging right now by his form? That is taking the form for the thing, and it happens more often than one thinks.
• In the evening: what has grown calmer today by itself? Not what I have achieved. What has come to an end.

One need not be good at it, the teacher says. One need not be superior to anyone. To be aware of oneself, that is enough. If mindfulness is once not there in time, one drifts off, and that does not matter. That is quite ordinary. Then one lets it grow more complete, stage by stage.

Listen: 19.9.2026, 35:49 · 36:36 · All questions: schwoererd.com/woerter/?lang=en

11. The words

This text needs a handful of technical words, and it needs them in a form that explains itself. Here are the words of this text, and beside them the common English rendering I do not use, because it turns into a thing what is a happening.

Whoever wants the reasoning: it stands in the essay "The Feathers of the Arrow" and in the word list for the talks.

12. Where all this comes from

The talks of Ajahn Jayapañño (ชยปญฺโญ ภิกขุ), monk of the Thai forest tradition, Sakon Nakhon, stand in three languages with video, subtitles and transcript at schwoererd.com/talks/:

• How Suffering Arises and Where to End It · The fish does not know the water · Evening talk of 19 September 2026. Start here.
• Knowing Without Creating the Knower · The bent branch springs back · Morning talk of 23 September 2026.
• Knowing in order to let go · Evening talk of 29 May 2020.
• The talk of 20 September 2026 (the unripe fruit) is translated but not yet published.

The twelve sentences and the thirty-two word cards with their daily-life questions: schwoererd.com/woerter/?lang=en. The wheel of dependent arising to look at: schwoererd.com/wheel/. The Paṭiccasamuppāda edition in Pali, Thai, German and English and the essay "The Feathers of the Arrow" are in the site's Library and on academia.edu at independent.academia.edu/schwoererd. The simile of the arrow stands in the Middle Length Discourses, discourse 63.

The Ajahn has approved the translation of his talks and allowed further ones to be translated. Questions about the translation to the translator: schwoererd.com.

Draw the arrow. We can talk about the feathers afterwards.