Ajahn Khemanando | |
Question: What single thing most impressed you about Luang Por Chah? With examples according to your experiences. Answer: Most of my own personal experience of Ajahn Chah comes from the period, beginning in January 1979, when I came to stay at Wat Pah Pong as a layman, followed by many months as an anagarika or pa-khao. I was a new-comer to Thailand and monastic life and spoke or understood very little Thai, being quite dependent on the more senior Western monks for translations and explanations of what was happening. So my impressions from that time were not so much of profound dialogues or specific instructions on meditation, etc., but more revelations of Ajahn Chah’s character which would often over-turn my own pre-conceptions about the nature of an enlightened being whilst also, sometimes simultaneously, providing evidence that he did indeed function on quite a different level to the people by whom he was surrounded. Apparently small incidents in which Ajahn Chah would do things that didn’t need explaining, which I was able to observe and gain some food for thought. Once, myself and a fellow pa-khao, a New Zealander, were whiling away a hot, steamy afternoon in idle conversation on the balcony of my kuti. At Wat Pah Pong in those days, much of the formal practice was done as a group activity in the main hall morning and evening, while your individual kuti was kind of sacrosanct, where you could expect to be left to your own devices most of the time. We had adjacent kutis in a far corner of the monastery and had become friends offering each other companionship and support in this way, basically relaxing and goofing off. So you can imagine how surprised and guilty we felt when Ajahn Chah himself suddenly appeared on the path to the kuti, calling out and beckoning with his hand! We thought we were in for a scolding for not meditating diligently, but Ajahn Chah didn’t seem bothered at all, he wasn’t telling us to stop talking, but calling to us, “Come here, come here!”. It transpired that Ajahn Chah was taking time off from being the resident sage of Wat Pah Pong, receiving a constant stream of visitors at his kuti and had decided to go hunting for monitor lizards instead! Having just spotted one in the vicinity, he had come to enlist our help, patiently miming an explanation of how to fix a string snare to the end of a bamboo pole. Ajahn Chah was very fond of the forest chickens, which he would feed with rice in the area around his own kuti, and wanted to protect them from their natural enemy, the large monitor lizards, which liked to eat their eggs. So there followed what turned out to be an hilarious scene of two rather clumsy, inexperienced Westerners being goaded on by an enthusiastic Ajahn Chah, their adopted spiritual guide, thrashing around in the forest trying to catch a big lizard - hardly the sort of thing that I had imagined writing home about! We were quite hopeless, of course, and eventually gave up without catching anything but not before having a good laugh at ourselves. | |