Rude Awakenings - Forest Sangha Publications

^0 T H I R D M O O N 06feeling too well of late but was looking forward to coming out to visitme in the monastery. The telegram was from my brother saying thatdad had died that morning.That was hard to take. Dad had wished me well in my life as abhikkhu. He had worked hard all his life, built his own business up fromscratch, and began to realise, in his sixties, with all the stress and anxietyand long hours, that he was caught in it, and that maybe his dropout sonhad a point. After twenty-five years of some friendship but little communicationas adults, we would have met. So there was the regret.Then, when I went back to England to visit my recently widowedmother, my teacher died in Thailand. That was Ajahn Alan—so bright,calm, and gentle in the vihara in Chiang Mai when I first met him. It wasevening and the oil lamp was lit by the seat where he was sitting; the windows,having no glass, allowed hordes of flying ants to flurry in towardthe light and crawl over his face and arms as he sat. But he displayed noirritation, carefully picking an ant away from his eye or mouth when itslife seemed to be endangered by his lecturing. That presentation, andthe strange relocation of attention through focusing on the breath, wasall that was needed to set my Dhamma wheel rolling. If I could watchmy thoughts and feelings and not react to them ... if I could watch mymind ... then whose was this mind and who am I?So I went to stay in Ajahn Alan’s monastery in Nakhon Sawan andbecame his disciple. So did a few other Westerners. That stimulatedplans in our teacher’s mind. Ajahn Alan had always felt frustrated by thecultural overlays that eight hundred years of Thai culture had depositedon the Buddha’s words. Some of the archaic rules seemed to him to beanachronisms; nowadays he felt it was more suitable to be able to handlemoney in order to purchase books and other requisites for teaching,as well as to be able to travel to bring the Dhamma to those who mightbe interested to hear. This all made sense to me, but I did feel uneasyabout his proposal to set up his own vihara in northern Thailand, andeven more uneasy about his expectation that I be one of the teachers2 1 4