by Ajahn Brahm
Early on in my sojourn at Wat Pah Pong, Ajahn Chah sent me on a mission that really helped me with my meditation practice. Bung Wai village wanted to found a monastery, and Ajahn Chah sent six of us Western monks to assist them. There was no building in Bung Wai for us to stay in, and Ajahn Chah directed us to encamp on the village’s cremation grounds.
When we slept we were allowed to use our mosquito nets, which we rigged with our umbrellas. Snakes slithered by. After a while as a Thai Forest monk you get so that you have no fear of snakes. I quite honestly felt love and empathy for them! Even the ever-present, deadly cobras. We monks joked that there were one hundred species of snakes in Thailand: ninety-nine of them are venomous, and the other strangles you.
I once saw a king cobra cross a jungle path. With my scientist’s eye, I measured the snake as it slithered along the path in front of me. I counted each of its lengths and calculated it was roughly fifteen meters. Was it supernatural? I can’t say for sure.
Ajahn Chah would come every evening to the cremation ground to do a two-hour meditation and give a talk. It showed his support and interest in the place.
We began the meditation at six o’clock. This was exactly the time when the mosquitoes became active. We had to remain perfectly still during meditation, and we have a precept against killing, so there was no swatting them away. We had no coils, and we were not allowed to use our nets.
Those mosquitoes ate us alive. There is no other way to say it. Can you imagine? I would count sixty or seventy on my body at once, their little bodies slowly puffing up with my blood.
We Westerners watched awestruck as the Thai monks were able to sit perfectly still and remain comfortable during this excruciatingly itchy feeding frenzy. How did they do it?
I learned how — by necessity. After my body was paved with bites, I began to be able to focus deep inside myself, so I couldn’t feel my body anymore. During those two-hour sits, the mosquitoes taught me how to keep my mind from wandering. Once I was deep inside, it was as though they were not there. And, in fact, this is not just an illusion. In deep meditation, your respiration slows. There is barely any carbon dioxide coming out of your pores. And it is the carbon dioxide exuded by your body that attracts mosquitoes!
Sitting in the cremation grounds of Bung Wai, we Western monks learned how to become invisible. I think Ajahn Chah, although he never indicated it in any way, mightily enjoyed that process.
You never had a clue what Ajahn Chah was up to. The way he reacted was often completely unexpected. I’ve met a couple of Nobel laureates in my day, and compared to Ajahn Chah they were dullards. An abbot only has the power his disciples give him. Ajahn Chah’s disciples included the king and queen of Thailand and the poorest of illiterate villagers. He could relate to them all.
One instance of his unpredictability that has stayed with me involved an exorcism. A woman was brought to him in a deranged state, swearing, frothing from the mouth, making wild, contorted movements. Ajahn Chah took a look at her. “She’s possessed by a very dangerous spirit. Dig a hole. Boil water. We need to pour boiling water over her and bury her!”
The woman instantly came out of it. A minute later, she was sitting quietly in front of Ajahn Chah, no longer possessed but spitting mad, infuriated because she thought he was really going to boil her alive!
I never knew what he would do next, and he often acted as though I weren’t there. I had very little one-on-one teaching from Ajahn Chah.
An exception to this was, perhaps, seven or eight years after I had become a monk. One of Ajahn Chah’s Western affiliate monasteries had bought a sauna for Ajahn Chah in the hope of luring him there to give a talk. Two-thirds of Ajahn Chah’s talks were absolute rubbish, but every once in a while he’d spit forth a real rip-snorter.
As he was coming out of the sauna, I was walking in the opposite direction. We were going to pass. I was proud that my mind was so peaceful and pure, and I silently invited him to take a look inside my head with what I knew were his remarkable powers of telepathy and admire the pristine nature of my gray matter.
I had a keen intuition that this was going to be a special meeting. It was destined that we should so meet — a meeting of remarkable men. Ajahn Chah had singled me out. He held me to be important and special. A monk among monks. He knew that I had worked hard and done all the right things. Now it was time for transmission. I was sure that this was going to be momentous.
He stopped and looked at me. “Brahmavamso,” he said. “Why?”
I was dumbfounded. “I don’t know,” I stammered.
He laughed. When you’re absolutely stupid, they don’t scold you. They think it’s funny! He was deeply amused.
“If anyone asks you that question again, the answer is: ‘There is nothing.’ That is the answer to that question. Do you understand?”
“Yes, yes! I understand.”
He smiled at me and shook his head in the way you would to a three-year-old. “No, you don’t,” he said.
I felt so incredibly stupid. I shall always remember it: exactly the place, precisely what was going through my head. It was the most personal instruction he gave me. There is nothing. Nothing to understand? No answer to the question why? Why what, for goodness’ sake?
I turned his words over and over. If he could read my mind, which is what I had deliberately been inviting, was he responding to what was in there? The encounter haunted me. It took me many, many years to discover its meaning. So I leave it to you to ponder . . . as I did.
Free-Range Frog: Living Simply and Gratefully
THE COLLECTION of alms is one of the fundamentals of the Theravada Thai Forest tradition of Buddhism and goes back to the Buddha’s time.
The point of the alms bowl is that we eat what we’re given. We don’t get to choose. We give up control and give thanks in response. Our gratitude is very real. We are not allowed to cook or prepare our own food. Without alms we would literally starve. We owe our lives to the alms givers. By subsisting off alms, we choose to live a way that is both humbling and liberating. But it can also be disgusting! How many meals did I have in Northeast Thailand of frog soup? The villagers were so poor that this was literally all they had to give us.
The recipe for frog soup is simple. Gather small frogs from the puddles in the rainy season. Each frog should be just big enough to fit in a Chinese spoon. Boil the frogs in water. No salt. No soy. No chili. No seasoning of any kind. To eat frog soup, place one frog on your spoon with a little of its broth. Close your eyes, put the frog in your mouth, and bite down. Crunch! Chew well. You eat them bones, guts, eyeballs, and all.
This was our one meal of the day, and it was so wretched that many times I did not want another. And yet living this way was profoundly satisfying. Each dawn we headed into the village for our alms round. The villagers had grown up with this ritual, as had their parents and grandparents. The sun rose and barefoot monks in their orange robes filed out of the forest, cradling their bowls.
We were not allowed to ask for anything. The alms round was accomplished in silence. We walked past the simple huts and the villagers emerged with their offerings. Every morning they began their day with the ritual of monks walking quietly past their homes.
Some rice. Frog soup.
The Buddha said that just like a bird goes from country to country with only the weight of his wings, so a monk goes with only the weight of his robes and bowl. Have you ever seen a bird in the sky carrying suitcases?
The villagers were subsistence farmers. All they farmed was rice. We never had vegetables. There was no fruit. No mangoes. No bananas. We ate rice and whatever crawled or hopped around on the ground. In the wet season there were small, bony fish. Boiled. No salt. No soy.
Through this kind of austerity we learned in our guts what it was to make peace with life. Boiled frog? Good enough. Ant soup? Why not? We took what was given to us and learned to be satisfied. We learned to stop asking for more. We learned to stop asking.
We made ourse
lves easy to look after. The villagers took care of our corporeal needs. And we took care of them spiritually. We chanted for their children when they were still in the womb, gave their kids lessons in being respectful to their parents while encouraging their studies, blessed their marriages and counseled them when they argued, encouraged them to be moral and taught them meditation, looked after them when they became ill, gave them a monastery in which to hang out when they were old, and performed their funeral rites and even chanted in their houses in case they became attached as ghosts. It was literally a service that deserved to be called “before the cradle to beyond the grave.”
We were bound together in an ancient dance of giving and receiving. It felt effortless and elemental. The sun came up each morning, and we walked into the village with our bowls in our hands.
It never seemed morally acceptable to me to live at a higher standard than the poorest of our supporters. I was a mendicant, inspired by Saint Francis and his order. I particularly loved the story of Francis’s visit to the Vatican to feast with the pope. A couple of hours before he was due to arrive, he went begging in the streets. At the banquet, he shared his scraps with the fat-cat cardinals.
In another inspiring story, a Franciscan monk on his alms round came across a beggar who had absolutely nothing. Not even clothes! The monk gave his robe to the beggar and returned to the monastery naked. When his fellow monks heard what had happened, they thought he was an admirable monk, and he was given another robe from the storeroom.
The next day the monk went out again on his rounds. The local beggars had gotten wind of his generosity. One quickly appeared — naked of course. Presto, the monk’s robe was gone and back he went to monastery, where robe number two was replaced.
The third day the same thing happened. This time the monk did not get off so lightly. The abbot summoned him, scolding him at length. “They’re taking advantage of you,” the abbot shouted. “They think that you’re soft in the head!”
The monk didn’t try to defend himself, and the abbot finally dismissed him.
Soon there was a gentle knock on the abbot’s door. The monk had returned with a cup of hot soup.
“Why have you brought me soup?” said the abbot.
“I thought all that shouting and scolding might have made you hoarse. Take some soup to soothe your throat,” the monk replied.
After that the monk could give away as many robes as he wanted. He was beyond teaching as far as the abbot was concerned. The monk’s generosity was so selfless that he never even considered his own appearance or comfort, and his compassion for his abbot when being scolded — unfairly scolded, some might say — was singularly awesome. His was obviously so advanced that trying to teach a monk like that would be as pointless as teaching physics to Albert Einstein.
In the time-honored manner, we eat everything out of our alms bowl. There is no course number one and course number two. In goes the curry and in go the sweets. Strawberry ice cream on top of spaghetti Bolognese. I am a master at inventing my own types of fusion cuisine. Quite frankly, I cannot recommend it. I tell myself that it all gets mixed up in the stomach anyway. But going down, it can taste truly grotesque.
I heard about an abbot in England who kept all the leftovers from the day’s alms gathering in a large bowl in the freezer. Each morning he had this bowl heated up, adding whatever offerings had come in that day. With a big spoon, he mashed everything together, creating a pungent mush. He’d take whatever was needed for the day and pass it down the line to his monks. He did this for three months, and all his monks disrobed or fled. They couldn’t take it anymore!
Alms bowls were traditionally clay, but those disappeared long before my time. My alms bowl, which I received upon my ordination from a sponsor, was iron. I seasoned it in a big bonfire to create a coating of ferric oxide on the outside so it wouldn’t rust. There is a special type of leaf in Thailand that when crushed exudes a kind of natural detergent. We used this leaf to clean our bowls.
That wasn’t the only plant we used from the forest. Tarzan would have been proud of us! We cared for our teeth with a special type of wood. We cut toothbrush-sized lengths and then smashed the ends with a wooden mallet until they spread out like mushrooms and split the lengths into slivers. The wood tasted slightly bitter and was supposed to have a therapeutic value. We called these slivers “tooth woods.” They were a popular offering to our teacher or a senior monk.
We were all malnourished. Many of us became sick because of the bugs. But we survived. The roughness of the life and its hardships did not in any way dilute our happiness. In fact, it enhanced our sense of well-being. We lived so simply, with so little. We always had just barely enough and not a smidgen more. We left what today would be called a “small footprint.” We felt almost invisible. Light, airy, and timeless.
It is so very difficult to live simply these days. Our modern age doesn’t understand simplicity. The frogs came in season. They lived in the muddy puddles. They weren’t factory frogs. They were free-range frogs, organically grown.
Giving
EACH DAY AT BODHINYANA, laypeople come and feed us lunch, bringing sumptuous dishes — a grand buffet! They line up before the meal and offer each monk a small spoonful of rice in his alms bowl. This Theravada tradition goes back 2,500 years to the time of the Buddha.
According to our precepts, we can’t eat after noon, so the ritual begins around ten thirty in the morning. Forty or fifty people typically show up. Some get up early to cook their finest dishes. Some pick up pizza on the way. Whole families come. It’s an outing! Let’s go feed those nice monks up in the hills! It is completely uncoordinated, unplanned, and spontaneous. Yet every day the same thing happens — people bring food.
When we first opened our gates long ago, perhaps one or two people would come. Now each day we feast. Why? Why do they come? How is it possible that it happens without any effort, as though it is a natural process, like photosynthesis, the cycle of night and day, the way the rain falls?
There is great joy in giving. Not because someone is rattling a can in front of you. But for the fun of it!
Traveling through the Singapore airport, I saw a woman tossing and turning on a bench. She was obviously trying to get some sleep. A busy stream of passengers rolled by.
I tapped her shoulder. “How about one of these?” I held out my eyeshade.
She smiled, took the shade, gave thanks.
I was high for days on the sweet energy of that exchange.
I learned how much energy we get from giving long ago.
Young men preparing to become novice monks in Wat Pah Pong had to make and dye their own robes. I’d been through that process myself. It was a kind of initiation: a test of your commitment to the path.
You sewed your own robes from white cloth and then the arduous process of dyeing them began. This happened in the dyeing shed. An open-air shack, perhaps six meters square, the dye shed had a corrugated metal roof and wooden benches to either side of an earthen stove, which looked like an Indian tandoori oven that had been made from the dirt shoveled off anthills and compacted and smoothed. A big iron pan sat on top; its bottom was lined with ash so the metal didn’t overheat and corrode.
Dyeing involved gathering wood from the forest for your fire and hauling water from the well. You heated the water and added shavings made from branches of the jackfruit tree. You boiled the hell out of those shavings to release the jackfruit sap to make the dye. You had to keep the fire going, concentrate the dye, and infuse the robes with it four or five times to get the proper depth and evenness of color. The dyeing process took days of work, and you had to do it nonstop or the robes would streak, the water would steam off, and the sap would cake. You had to constantly add more water from the well and swish and turn the cloth.
The dye shed also functioned as a laundry. There was no soap in those days. You washed your robes in a weak form of the jackfruit dye.
Our well was fairly shallow, perhaps six meters deep wi
th four meters of water at the bottom. Everyone drank from it. You took your chances with the quality of the water.
We Westerners always seemed to lose the bucket used for drawing water. It was lowered into the well on a long bamboo pole with a hook on the end. After a few buckets had disappeared to the bottom of the well, the main offender (often me) had to fetch a strong rope and be lowered into the well by another monk. I went down into that well many times, an embarrassment more than compensated for by the well’s delicious coolness and the opportunity to circumvent the precept against swimming!
During the dyeing of robes, there was no sleep for several brutally hot days and miserably muggy nights.
One evening after meditation and chanting I went to the dye shed. A group of three young monks were in the middle of this grueling process. I remembered my own travails in the dye shed.
“I’ll look after the dye pot tonight,” I offered. “You go take a rest.”
They were off like a flash.
They returned soon after the bell rang at three o’clock. I went to “the morning meeting” where we chanted and meditated. I was surprised: after being up all night I was suffused with energy. The elation lasted through my alms round. I felt so extraordinary that I confessed to my supervising monk that I had broken the rule against helping novices during the dyeing process. “How is it I have so much energy? I haven’t slept for thirty-six hours!”
“That’s what happens when you help people!” he said.
Isn’t it wonderful that what should exhaust and deplete us instead fills us with vitality and joy? When it involves helping people. When it is about giving.
When you do something to help somebody, you feel worthy. It generates a feeling of satisfaction and contentment. You savor life rather than fighting it. Life feels replete, overflowing rather than wanting, pinched, and thin.