There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil
platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion,
which suddenly set his entire oil platform on fire. In mere moments, he
was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his
way out of the chaos to the platform's edge. When he looked down over
the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic
waters.
As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could
stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames.
Or, he could plunge 30 meters in to the freezing waters. The man was
standing upon a "burning platform," and he needed to make a choice.
He decided to jump. It was unexpected. In ordinary circumstances, the
man would never consider plunging into icy waters. But these were not
ordinary times - his platform was on fire. The man survived the fall and
the waters. After he was rescued, he noted that a "burning platform"
caused a radical change in his behaviour.
We too, are standing on a "burning platform," and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour.
Our world is burning too! Burning with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. (The Fire Sermon) The fire is sustained by our clinging. (Clinging)
"If, on examination of one's own mind, a monk knows, 'I usually remain covetous, with
thoughts of ill will, overcome by sloth&drowsiness, restless,
uncertain, angry, with soiled thoughts, with my body aroused, lazy, or
unconcentrated,' then he should put forth extra desire, effort,
diligence, endeavor, relentlessness, mindfulness,&alertness for
the abandoning of those very same evil, unskillful qualities. Just as when a person whose turban or head was on fire would put forth extra
desire, effort, diligence, endeavor, relentlessness, mindfulness,&
alertness to put out the fire on his turban or head; in the same way,
the monk should put forth extra desire, effort, diligence, endeavor,
relentlessness, mindfulness, & alertness for the abandoning of those
very same evil, unskillful qualities.
"But if, on examination, a monk knows, 'I usually remain uncovetous,
without thoughts of ill will, free of sloth & drowsiness, not
restless, gone beyond uncertainty, not angry, with unsoiled thoughts,
with my body unaroused, with persistence aroused, & concentrated,'
then his duty is to make an effort in maintaining those very same
skillful qualities to a higher degree for the ending of the effluents."
Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would
wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions
-- motion, speech, self-awareness -- shut down one by one. An
astonishing story.
From The Buddha In The Jungle by Kamala Tiyavanich.
The Green Buddha of The Grotto
Western Explorers and thudong monks who traveled through the forests of Siam and Laos often saw Buddha images, large and small, in sacred caves. Between 1881 and 1893, when James McCarthy was conducting surveys for Siam's government that took him all over the north, he investigated many caves. When he was in Nan, a principality in northern Siam ringed by high mountains, McCarthy wrote, "We visited the cave opposite the mouth of the Nam U, the ascent to which was made easy by a flight of steps. It was not very large but contained from one to two hundred images, varying from 3 inches to as many feet. A beautiful little pagoda built within looked charming in the glorious sunlight." Local people generally believed that many of the Buddha images in the caves had been there since ancient times. Upon entering a cave or a wat they usually paid homage to the Buddha images there. Villagers did not keep Buddha images in their homes. In the days when village life was not yet ruled by money, it was unthinkable that anyone should wish to remove images from caves or monasteries.
Unlike devout villagers, Westerners who came upon Buddha images in caves had no fear of guardian spirits. Those who wished to take a few images home with them did so without scruple. A Dutchman identified only by his last name, Klaasen, came to Northern Siam during the first decade of the twentieth century when the mountains and jungles were still formidable places. Klaasen, who lived and worked in Siam for thirty-five years, was not an antique hunter and knew the law forbidding the removal of religious statuary, but when he saw a green jade Buddha image in a jungle cave somewhere beyond Chiang Mai, he could not resist the temptation to take it.
Many years later, in the 1950s, Klaasen met Ludwig Koch-Isenburg, a German zoologist, at a hotel in northern Thailand. The Dutchman proposed a trek to the cave. Klaasen, who knew his way around, persuaded a government official in Chiang Mai to give them permission to stay at a solitary forest rangers' station high up in the mountains. Koch-Isenburg, who wrote about their trek, described the scene .. ..
"We had come to the bottom of a wide ravine whose floor was completely covered by a shallow, crystalline stream. Holding our shoes in our hands, we leaped from stone to stone in the bed of the river. ... The ravine narrowed." Suddenly, he cried out in amazement. "A gigantic recumbent Buddha had been carved out of the rock. One arm was outstretched along the body, the other was propping up the head; the eyes gazed, mysterious and unfathomable, into the timeless green and golden virgin jungle. .. I realize that we had entered a mighty grotto in the rock. In front of the Buddha's face stood a vessel containing rods of incense, and I saw with some surprise that my Dutch friend was lighting them. .. "
Klaasen led Koch-Isenburg to a little niche in the rock at the feet of the Buddha. "Carefully he picked up a carving that stood there and handed it to me. I stared spellbound at the ancient image. .. .. A tremendous feeling of happiness surged through me. I felt a deep sense of gratitude, though I could not have said for what." The Dutchman then told the German scientist that the statue had this effect "upon everyone who sees it". Klaasen next confessed that he had once been so "overwhelmed" by it that he "became a thief".
In the 1920s, Klaasen told his young friend, " ... ... I had to fight a terrible battle with myself," he told his companion, "before I reached out my hands and plucked the statue from the spot where it had probably stood for centuries. ... And in fact, the very moment I put the sculpture into my pack, I thought I heard a burst of insane laughter. ..."
After reasoning that he would soon be returning to Holland, where avenging spirits could not follow him, he found no peace. He bought a small statuette of Buddha made of solid gold. Its money value, Klaasen said, "must be approximately the same as the value of the stolen jade Buddha ... We materialistic Westerns think we can balance everything by arithmetic and pay for anything on earth. I travelled back all that enormous distance and set the gold Buddha in the empty place on the altar. But this act of restitution did not buy me inner peace. Nevertheless, a few months later, I was ready to start for Holland, and by that time I had at least regained enough peace of mind so that I could sleep at night."
Klaasen succeeded in smuggling the statue out of the country, but "back in misty Holland, whenever I looked at my Buddha," he said, "I felt a stabbing pain in my chest. What an earthly paradise I had given up! I would sit lost in thought for hours, and all the magic beauty of that ravine in the jungle would pour through my heart."
After working out a new contract with his firm, Klaasen returned to Siam. As soon as he could get away from his job, he traveled back to the north. He had decided to return the green Buddha to its home. "By now it had become completely clear that I must return my stolen Buddha to the sanctuary if I were ever to be a free man again."
The closer he got to the cave temple the better the Dutchman began to feel. But when he entered the grotto, he said, he "sprang back in horror. Before the altar an ancient monk in yellow robe was kneeling. The pedestal of the jade Buddha, on which I had placed the golden image, was empty. The monk rose as if he had sensed my presence and came toward me. His eyes held a look of infinite kindness as he bowed his head and raised his clasped hands to his forehead in greeting. Like a sinner caught in the act, I stood before the man. The stolen Buddha burned like fire in my hands, and, acting under a mysterious compulsion, I held it out to him. A repressed smile played around his lips - or so it seemed to me - and quietly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, he turned and replaced the statue on its pedestal."
The monk said quietly, "I have waited for you, Brother."
Klaasen learned that the monk, a hermit, had watched the theft from his cave in the rocks above the grotto. He could have stopped Klaasen, "But true to the rules of his religion, with its respect for others," the Dutchman told the German, "he had let me commit the robbery. He could have called out to me, but had he done so the farang [Westerner] would have lost face, would have been shamed."
Taking a deep breath, Klaasen revealed to his German companion that he then became a Buddhist and for a long while "wore the yellow robe and trudged about the country with the begging bowl," returning to the gorge from time to time. "All our European haste and disquiet has fallen away from me. I have come to realize that quiet equanimity is the highest good that we can achieve in this life," the Dutchman concluded.
From The Buddha In The Jungle by Kamala Tiyavanich.
Throughout his years of wandering Ajan Butda was often invited to villagers' houses to perform Buddhist ceremonies and give sermons. One day, as he was approaching a village, a man ran up to him and asked the monk, "Which is your wat?" (wat = temple-monastery) Ajan Butda replied, "Wat Song Kha [= Two Legs Monastery]. Wherever my two legs stand, that is my wat." In the context of the Dhamma, the two legs symbolize wisdom and compassion.
Like his village teachers, who studied local religious literature, including the Jataka stories, Ajan Butda believed that Gotama Buddha practiced paramis over many successive lives as a bodhisat before he was able to attain enlightenment. By the turn of the twentieth century the Bangkok elite of his day no longer believed that the Jataka stories had been narrated by the Buddha. Ajan Butda, however, was convinced that the Buddha had been a bodhisat in his former lives.
.. ..
On another occasion Ajan Butda was invited to give a sermon at a wedding in rural Thailand. Unlike Protestant ministers, Catholic priests, and Jewish rabbis, Buddhist monks do not normally perform wedding ceremonies. Customarily a marriage was performed by a layman versed in traditional rituals or by a respected elder. On their wedding day the bride and groom made merit by offering food to monks and inviting the most senior monk to give a sermon and offer blessings for the couple's happiness. Sometimes nine monks were invited, as nine was considered an auspicious number. These nine, together with the Buddha image, made ten, an even number considered auspicious for a wedding. On this day four couples were getting married at the same time, and Ajan Butda was invited to give a sermon.
Instead of the usual sermon about how a husband should minister to his wife and how she should reciprocate, Ajan Butda talked about supramundane happiness, the pure happiness of liberation from greed, delusion, and aversion. As Ajan Butda went on describing the joys of renunciation, the brides and the bridegrooms began to have doubts about embarking upon the married life. By the time he finished his sermon the couples-to-be had made up their minds not to enter the householder's life.
Instead of offering blessings at the wedding ceremony, the monk was asked to perform ordinations for the grooms and brides who now wished to become bhikkhus and mae chi (white-robed renunciants). Some of the grandfathers and grandmothers of the brides and grooms were so moved by Ajan Butda's teaching that they also wished to ordain along with their grandchildren. Unfortunately, since Bangkok authorities did not recognize Ajan Butda as a preceptor, he could not ordain them. (also see Forest Recollections Wandering Monks in Twentieth-Century Thailand by Kamala Tiyavanich)
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