Stories for habits
3 Buddhist wisdom stories for habits from Buddhist teachers, each linked to the original talk.
- Giving up tea for three monthsStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: People told Ajahn Brahm he was addicted to tea. So he decided to give it up for the three-month Rains Retreat. The monks begged him not to: another monk had tried it and was 'a…
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Believe it or not, that one year people kept on telling me: ‘Ajahn Brahm, you’re addicted to tea. You always have your cup of tea. Cup of tea in the morning, cup of tea in the afternoon.’ I said: ‘okay, I'm going to give it up for three months’. And then all the monks came up to me and said: ‘Please don't do that’. I said: ‘why not?’ - ‘Because’, they said, ‘another monk tried that and he was a pain in the butt for three months without his tea - he was such an awful person to live with’. 'Well no', I said: ‘I'm going to try it to see if I'm addicted to it.’ So I gave it up for three months. I was very happy, very peaceful, no problem at all.
- Singing the anthem of his own free willStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: At a Cambridge psychical research society demonstration, a hypnotist puts a student in trance and tells him that when the hypnotist touches his right earlobe he'll stand and sing…
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this was the the time in Cambridge psychic research Society every year we get a hypnotist to come up to teach us a uh a little bit about hypnotism and being students everybody was willing to give it a try I went up there but I was not a good hypnotic subject at the time and there's always a few of the students were really really easy to hypnotize and they do make them do silly things which you know being you know undergraduates 18 19 years of age was great entertainment but what they did to this one poor student put him totally in in hypnotic trance and after he was in trance the hypnotist said when I touch my right earlobe you'll get up and sing the British national anthem in full loud voice and then he said I'm going to take you out of Trance now but you remember that instruction and so he took him out of the trance and he went back to sit in his seat and we were waiting to see what would happen of course eventually the hypnotist uh uh touch his right earlobe and this young man in the middle of a just like you know of 300 students like 300 of you you imagine you just suddenly get up and sing the Australian national anthem in four what an idiotic thing that would be to do but this guy did it he sang the British national anthem beginning to end in a loud voice even all the students were were howling with laughter you know it was the most funniest thing I'd seen and when he finished he sat down and we'd all sort of settled down as well this fellow was not embarrassed at all and so the hypnotist asked him he said why did you decide to sing the British national anthem and this student he gave a logical reason and that was when I realized that that student he had assumed he had sung that Anthem out of his own free will there's no way that he could distinguish between what was hypnotic suggestion what we all seen he was conditioned to do that and what he took to be free will it wasn't free will that was implanted into him by the hypnotist even though it's the most ridiculous thing to do
- The sludge that started to taste niceStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Told that monks should eat plain food, he recalls that in his first year as a monk, as a practice, he stirred everything in his one daily meal — sweets and all — into a single…
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My first year as a monk, for a practice, I put all the food together which was disgusting anyway, and I got the spoon and mixed it all up. I only had one meal a day. It was a sludge, it was a slop and if you saw it, you'd actually pour it out straight away. It wasn't even fit for pigs, let alone for monks. But the trouble was it was an interesting experiment which I did. Every food no matter what it was, the sweets, everything in one bowl and stirred it up so it was absolutely consistent. After a while, it actually started to taste nice.