Khanti - Wat Pah Nanachat

the end of the rainy season he didn’t want to disrobe, and his
mother was absolutely outraged: ‘Come on, enough is enough.
The Middle way! Three months is sufficient. Don’t go over the
top. You’ve got a bright future ahead of you’ – that kind of
attitude. But he wouldn’t listen. So she ended up standing
outside the abbot’s hut, shouting and abusing him, screaming –
I suspect as a deliberate ploy – knowing that it would create a
major embarrassment for everyone involved. And her son,
mortified, disrobed. After he disrobed, I don’t think he ever
talked with his mother again. He applied for a position
overseas, moved to America, and I don’t believe that she’s seen
him ever since. So anyway this woman had had a lot of pain in
her life, much of which was self-inflicted. One of the first
times she came here, after listening to a Dhamma talk, she was
filled with a lot of piti 8 , and she bowed to me in a very slow,
mannered self-conscious way, and she said, ‘It’s just so
wonderful to be able to find a monk that I can bow to
wholeheartedly.’
I had heard that kind of phrase before, and didn’t much
care for it. I said to her, ‘Your bow must be very valuable, that
you can only give it to some special monks. My bow is very
cheap. I bow to anybody who has got more rainy seasons than
me, anybody who was ordained even a day before me. I don’t
care who they are, I really like bowing.’
She wasn’t used to being spoken to in that way, but she
took it well and became a regular supporter of the monastery
after that.
But the attitude that the woman showed when she came
to bow, can be found amongst monks as well, ‘I’ll bow only to
8 piti: rapture and abundant joy
10