Ven. Ajahn Brahmavamso Maha Thera popularly known as Ajahn Brahm is the Abbot of the Bodhinyana Monastery, Western Australia and the Spiritual Director of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia.
Recently, Ajahn Brahm visited Sri Lanka on a Dhamma tour from May 17 to 25 at the invitation of the Ajahn Brahm Society of Sri Lanka. During his brief but enlightening visit, the renowned meditation guru and Dhamma teacher delivered a public sermon at the BMICH. He also addressed members of both the business and scientific communities. The centerpiece of his tour was a meditation retreat designed for experienced bhikkhus, bhikkhunis, and selected lay practitioners.
Here is part 3 of the interview the Sunday Observer conducted with Ven. Ajahn Brahmavamso during his recent Dhamma tour of Sri Lanka. Part 2 of this interview appeared on June 8,2025.
Q: How can Buddhist mindfulness be integrated into a high-pressure corporate environment to support ethical leadership?
A: It’s quite easy. Think about why corporate environments are high-pressure in the first place. You have many problems to solve and countless decisions to make, often with tight deadlines. That means you have to make those decisions quickly.
How do you make such decisions? Do you approach them mindfully? Do you even know what will turn out to be true or false?
Let me share an example from when I was giving a lecture at the University of Oslo, Norway. A young woman was listening intently, and during the question period, she said, “I have to make an important decision in my life, but I don’t know which way to go. How do I make important decisions?”
This is one of the main reasons people experience high stress. They don’t know how to make decisions effectively. They keep making them, remaking them, and then worrying about them. They lose sleep at night. That’s what causes stress.
So how do you make a decision? I told her, “First, let’s look at a good example.” I like bringing things down to earth, so I said, “Let’s give this question more grounding in reality.” I asked her, “Suppose your question was whether you should accept a marriage proposal from the young man sitting next to you?”
I shouldn’t have said that because she went quite red, and put her hands in her face – because that was exactly the question that was worrying her!
Then I said, “It’s easy to make a decision like that. After all, you’re choosing who you’re going to commit to in marriage for the next 70 years, right?”
If you’re going to marry someone, it’s a huge decision. How do you make that decision? I advised, “Take out a coin and toss it. Heads, I marry him; Tails, I don’t.”
Now, don’t second-guess me here, because there’s much deeper meaning than you might expect. You toss it up—Heads you marry him, Tails you don’t. See which way the coin comes down. When it comes down Heads, how do you react? If you say, “I’m not sure about this, let’s try two out of three,” it reveals that you’re not ready to marry him. If it comes down to Tails, meaning you don’t marry him, and you feel disappointed or want to toss again, that shows you actually do want to marry him!
So tossing the coin is not to make a decision for you. It’s really about uncovering what you truly want to do — it reveals your intuition or inner understanding.
People waste too much time making decisions, and by the time the decision is made, they have no energy left to make it work. Instead, it’s better to make the decision quickly, even toss a coin if necessary, and then save your energy to make it work!
Often, the decisions they make have caused many couples to separate. And they’re really good people. So why can’t they get on together?
They usually get into the habit of thinking only about the faults of their partner. They never know how to change that. But instead of looking for the bad ‘bricks,’ look for the good bricks, the good qualities of your partner. And after a while, you can put forth energy and effort to make them an amazing person. You never think, “Okay, I got married and that’s it, I don’t have to do it anymore.” Keep the fire hot. If you keep the fire too hot, sometimes it burns out. If it’s just too cold, you think the relationship is over.
The same principle applies to corporate decision-making. Make decisions mindfully, but quickly. Then invest your energy in making them work rather than second-guessing yourself. Focus on the positive aspects.
Q: Would you recommend Kasina meditation for students preparing for exams? A student once mentioned that his sister practised Kasina meditation focusing on Candlelight and experienced improved memory. Is such an effect possible?
A: Yes. But that’s only doing the basics of Kasina meditation. If she really gets into it, she wouldn’t want to take any exams, because there are many more interesting things to do!
Q: What the student told me was that when his sister got into kasina meditation, she started having these weird premonitions – like she’d know beforehand when something bad was going to happen. It would come to her in dreams or just hit her out of nowhere. Do you think that’s possible?
A: It could be true, but it’s unreliable.
Let me share an example from one of my fellow bhikkhus. This happened many years ago. When he was young, his parents were quite wealthy and lived in Los Angeles. He once had a dream that his sister drowned in the family swimming pool. Later the same dream began to replay again and again. So he knew what was going to happen next. He acted quickly, and he saved his sister’s life.
And he had a similar dream later on, as a young man when he was in New Zealand. In that dream, he saw himself using marijuana and being arrested by the police. He said the quality of that dream felt exactly the same as the one about his sister. But in this case, because he actually was using marijuana, he didn’t take any precautions.
The dream came true and he was arrested and deported back to the United States.
He said he had a third dream too after he became a monk. In this, he saw the Viet Cong invading Thailand which was a real possibility at the time. He was so convinced by the dream that he told me many times he believed he would die as a bhikkhu, running across the paddy fields in Thailand, trying to escape an invasion. But that never happened.
He later disrobed. One year after he disrobed, he got married. Two years after he disrobed, he got killed in a head-on car crash.
So be careful.
Q: You often say that Buddhism is more scientific than science. Could you please explain on what basis you say so, especially in this AI-driven world?
A: Yes. The reason I say that is because in modern science, when proving a theory what is followed is “the law of finding fault with a theory.” It goes as “Please suggest your theory,” and then all the scientists should look at that theory and try to find fault with it. And if they cannot find fault with it, that’s called the truth. So nothing is ever proven 100 percent forever because you haven’t found a fault in it yet. One can only disprove with absolute certainty. It is impossible to prove anything with absolute certainty. In other words when a flaw appears in the theory, only then does science advance.
Take the theory of the Law of Gravity.Is it true now? “What goes up comes down?” Of course, it’s not. The Law of Gravity is that massive bodies attract each other with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, multiplied by the universal gravitational constant, Big G.
Later, Einstein came along and said that gravity isn’t a force at all, but it’s the curvature of space-time caused by mass. But even Einstein’s theory is not so true, because further research has suggested that even the gravitational constant, G, might not be constant, but rather, may vary over time and space. This wasn’t discovered through ‘mainstream physics’ but has been proposed by people like Rupert Sheldrake, a controversial scientist. But on this point, he may well be correct.
So, in other words, science is just proving what it wants to believe. They’re not challenging enough. But what Buddhism is really focused on, is actually finding out the truth, no matter what the cost is. Buddhism is a ‘science’ founded on objective observation. Buddhism teaches that one must check experience against theories to determine whether something is true or not.
