Ok, for those here who don't know the Book of Ones; the scriptures of Buddhism are divided into five basic what they call Nikayas or sections. In general, most of the teachings that are very easy to understand come from the Majjhima Nikaya, which has about 150 Suttas, they are not too long, they are not too short, a lot of them are fairly understandable. The 20 Suttas that I edited, I think 17 of them came from the Majjhima Nikaya. It has a lot of easy to understand stuff, sometimes too idealistic, whatever, but a lot of the teachings come from there. There is another section called the Digha Nikaya which has a lot of long Suttas, they are much longer than the Majjhima Nikaya. In general, there are also little more abstract at times, very much enlightenment, enlightenment, and they are a secondary place to look at the teachings compared to the Majjhima Nikaya. There is another section in which they talk about groupings of the Dhamma in numbers. Anguttara Nikaya, where you have teachings according to whether there is one thing involved, two, three, etc. The Four Noble Truths would be in the sections on fours, the Ten Paramis would be under the section of 10's, etc. You can see how it works in that way.
The Book of Ones talks about wise reflection as a factor that can be by itself, very important. It talks about a wise spiritual friend as something that can be very important. It talks about heedfulness, which is carefulness, a very strong compassion with action involved in it as a one, act of one. There is a Thai teacher, Phra Payutto, a very famous Thai teacher, he is probably the number one Thai scholar in Thailand. He is also a very nice man, we have met him, he seems to understand the practice pretty well. He made a bit of a dictionary of these ones, twos, threes and things for the Thai people, which had the Thai words, the Pali words and also the English words in it. And he condensed it down, he didn't have all of the ones, the twos, the threes and so on, but he would have as many as he thought would be important and in his book he only had these three, in his group of ones, that was all he put. The importance of these three can never be underestimated. They are super important, each one of them.
Wise reflection, you have to think wisely, you have to train your mind to think wisely. How are you going to do this? You need advice from good, wise spiritual friends, people who show you how to train you mind, and then you have to do it. The relationship here between wise reflection and good wise friends is so strong that you can't get that wise reflection unless somebody leads you to it. It is like - you want to play the piano? You go to a piano teacher, as much as the teacher can teach you and then you use it, you might be able to expand on it but you need stuff from that teacher to learn to play the piano. So the wise reflection that you are starting with is stuff that we feed into you and then you have to go with it and move with it. So the relationship of those two is very clear.
Now, the word heedfulness is not actually a common word in English, so we are going to look at the word compassion along with mindfulness and with wisdom altogether - these three go together. To be careful. As a little kid, maybe you were playing with something and your Mummy or Daddy came by and said to us, "oh, oh, be careful". What did they mean? Be careful? As a little kid we don't fully understand these words. But being careful means don't do certain things which will cause you harm. That opens it up a little bigger. Don't do certain things which will cause you harm. Why? Because we don't want harm. There is the compassion, we don't want harm. So we are careful because we don't want harm, we have compassion, which is why we are careful. Now, how do we not do things that cause harm? We have to be aware of what we are doing. If you are hammering some wood together, if you are not aware, yes, you hit your thumb with your hammer, so you are not careful, are not heedful. Mindfulness has to be there, together with the compassion that doesn't want harm. And you can see how this works together, heedfulness is a combination of our mindfulness, our compassion and our wisdom, understanding the situation.
Now, who leads us into this? Of course, the Kalyanamitta is the one who tells us to be careful. A good Kalyanamitta will show you why you need to be careful, a good Kalyanamitta will show you how to open your compassion so that becomes how you want to live your life all the time, you want to be careful, you want to be heedful. The heedfulness also has a kind of energy to it. It has an act or force, when the kid wants to be careful out of heedfulness, they are really aware, because they are really conscious, they don't want to make a mistake.
Take somebody who wants to light a fire. You can light a fire, yes, it is easy and whatever, but a person who is freezing is going to like that fire in a whole different way to a normal person. The person who is freezing may only have one match. How careful are they going to be? They will be so aware, so mindful, this match is so important, they are freezing - you can see there is a little bit of extra element of energy involved and heedfulness also often implies a sort of energy. The Pali word is Appamada.
Appamada is very seldom used by teachers. I don't know of any whom I have been with who have ever used it. During the 20-day retreat, we teach the word, Appamada. Appamada is such an important word, this heedfulness is so important, that the Buddha used it in his last words before he died. You have to think to yourself, there is the greatest human being on the planet, he is dying, and he is going to choose what he wants to say at the very end of his life. To me personally I have a feeling these words are super, super important. So when the Buddha died and he said these important words. He used the word Appamada, and in English, he basically said something like "strive on with heedfulness". Continue on, work hard, with heedfulness, with compassion, mindfulness and wisdom. That is how valuable this word actually is, how important it is, even though it is not taught that much. In general, everything that we teach is pushing you to be heedful, we just don't use that word because it is not as common as the word compassion,. But it is a significant word and Appamada in particular is a nice Pali word to know about.