| Ajahn Sumedho |
Q: Did you notice that he had any experiences with psychic powers? A: He’d kind of laugh at all of that. He was very clear on what the Buddha taught so he didn’t encourage any kind of attempt to get powers but to just develop awareness in daily life. Not even a lot of samadhi or sitting. It was a more active life style that pointed toward the present - ‘paccuppanna-dhamma’ - here and now. This is what I was recognizing and how I picked up the teaching. When asked about powers, he just said, “if they come don’t make anything of them. If you don’t have them, fine. If you do, don’t hold on to them. Don’t think you are special because you have powers.” Q: Did you experience times of being happy and also not so happy with him as a teacher?
A: Yes, he could be very charming and make you feel very good but he could also be very critical and very fierce. But with Luang Por Chah, I always trusted him, so I felt even when he was being critical of me, I could use that. I could see my feelings of anger towards him. One had to conform to everything at Wat Pah Pong and he would give very long desanas (Dhamma talks) in the evening, sometimes four or five hours. And of course, I couldn’t understand them. So when he would start to give a talk in Lao, I asked him if I could get up and go back to practice at my kuti. He said, “No, no, you have to stay and develop patience.” And so I thought I had to do what he said, so I did that. And of course, when you are feeling bored with a lot of pain from sitting so long, you feel anger. And he’s the one with all the power; he’s the one sitting up in the Dhamma seat and he can decide to stop when he wants to. I’d start feeling all this rage, real anger and I’d start thinking, “I’m going to leave this monastery, I don’t want to be here.” But then it would drop very quickly. It didn’t hold, for some reason. I didn’t carry it. One time, I remember I was really angry, he’d been talking for a long time and I was so fed up and tired with the whole thing and then at the end of his talk he looked at me and smiled and asked me how I was doing. I said I felt fine, because all that anger and rage had just dropped away. Basically I had so much faith in him that I could allow him to do things that would push me to the edge, to make me see what I was doing. Basically I trusted him, so I never felt like I was used or abused or exploited because I trusted that he was helping me even when I didn’t like what he was doing.
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