Stories for injury
3 Buddhist wisdom stories for injury from Buddhist teachers, each linked to the original talk.
- The fall from the ladderStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Building the ablution block at Serpentine, he falls a long way when a fully extended ladder loses its footing and he gets caught in it. No bones broken, but his hands are too…
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I remember just years ago falling off a ladder in the corner of of ablution block when we were building it over in uh Serpentine. It was really a long fall. This is one of those very long ladders fully extended because uh it was um it was actually stupid thing to do. But nevertheless, he fell off the ladder, or rather the ladder just lost its footing and went all over the place and he got caught in the ladder. And you know, I was just amazed. I didn't break any bones at all. That night, I couldn't sleep very well because my hands were just I couldn't sleep at all because the hands were very, very painful. So, I went to the doctors the following morning to have an X-ray and say, "Nothing wrong there." I kind of knew there would be nothing wrong because sometimes just the way you meditate, you could look at a part of your body and heal it pretty quickly.
- The nail that didn't hurt until someone said soStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: On alms round in Thailand Ajahn Brahm steps on a nail that goes a couple of inches into his foot. It doesn't hurt — until the monk with him says, “Oh, that's terrible.” Then it…
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stepping on a nail - it went about two inches into my foot! It's a long way, a big 4 inch nail, it went right inside my foot! It didn't hurt at all! until somebody said "Wow that's terrible!!" and as soon as they said that it started to hurt
- Why did I get shot?Story · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: A man drafted into the Thai army, wounded in a border skirmish, comes to Ajahn Chah asking what bad karma caused it — did he kill someone in a past life, mistreat his parents?…
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To understand that part I'm going to digress now onto the story of the soldier. This is a powerful story which happened when I was a young monk in Thailand where I got a lot of my stories and understanding from. A young man was drafted into the Thai Army and he was wounded in a battle on the border. Even though there was not supposed to be any battles going on, there were still struggles in the border, both the Burmese border, the Laotian border, the Cambodian border which wasn't being reported for diplomatic reasons, but there was still firefights went on. He was wounded and so he had to leave the army and he came to see his teacher Ajahn Chah, with his arm bandaged and he said “oh I just had really really bad kamma because I got wounded in the battle, why did it happen to me?”, and Ajahn Chah looked at him and said, “what do you mean, why did it happen to you? You're a soldier! That's what happens to soldiers - you shoot bullets at other people, you can expect other people to shoot bullets at you, and some of those bullets would hit