Also, also — Hakuin and the baby

The story — as told by Ajahn Brahm (verbatim captions)

One of the stories which I always recall from Zen Buddhism of this monk, I think it was Hakuin, one of my favorite stories, that he was a simple monk who lived on top of the mountain just meditating and being kind and caring to his local village. But one day in the village, there was a girl got pregnant by her boyfriend. And they weren't married. And as soon as the father saw his daughter was pregnant, he said, "Who did it? Who was responsible for you becoming pregnant?" And the girl, of course, she was in love with her boyfriend and realized if she told her father it was his boyfriend, he would probably get beaten up or maybe even killed. So she thought, "I can't I can't dob in my boyfriend. Who can I Who can I dob in?" So she thought, "The monk up the hill. He did it." So the father was just irate. "That monk, we've been looking after him. We thought he was such a great monk. He's made my daughter pregnant. That's not on." So he got all the village together and they went right up to the mountain, you know, right there and then, and they said to this monk, "You bad monk, you terrible monk, you've made my daughter pregnant. You can't do that. You thought you was a good monk." And even though he was totally innocent, all he would say is, "Also." "Also." And so he didn't actually react with any anger back or any justification. And so after a while, I mean, if people aren't reacting, you can only shout at them so long. So they all went back down to the village. But now when she gave birth, they went up again. And they said, "Law of karma, you're responsible for this baby." It was a girl. "You look after it." And they tried to dump this baby girl on a monk. And if they tried to do that on me, I wouldn't know the first thing about looking after kids. You know, you some of you have seen even today somebody came to with their little baby and they gave it to me because it's in the Thai tradition if you give like your little baby to the monk, it's like I'm like I'm the godfather. So, and I took hold of the baby hoping they'd take it away quickly enough before I don't know how to hold a baby and what it poos and get my old robe with this poof. So, I gave it back as but but this little hack word he was actually given this girl a baby girl to look after. And instead of protesting, he said, "Don't give it to me. I'm not responsible. I don't know how to look after baby girl." You know what he said? "Ah, so. Ah, so." And it's amazing that I've been taught as a monk and I know it's true. It doesn't matter what happens, you can always make it work. You know, I learned how to lay bricks, I learned how to run a monastery, I give talks to disability services and I say about that talk I gave about shipping. If you don't know that story, that at a transport conference run by when Alannah MacTiernan was the Minister for Planning, she invited me as a member of the public to this plat this uh transport conference and during the lunch break, which was after 12:00, I couldn't eat. So, all the people were having lunch and this journalist came up to me and he said, "I'm a shipping reporter." I said, "Oh, yeah." He said, "Can I do an interview with you?" I don't know anything about shipping. I've been in this ship, but that was just I think just across from uh Southampton to the Isle of Wight, not very far. But you know, I'm up for anything. So, I sort of answered the question and gave my advice on shipping. Why not? Nothing to lose. And do you know this was amazing about this story? This is true. I saw him about 6 months later, and he said, "Ajahn Brahm, you wouldn't believe the success of that article which I wrote. I called it Zen in the Art of Shipping by Ajahn Brahm, and it was syndicated in all the major shipping magazines of the world, and he got all these emails back from all these professors and experts say, 'We don't know who this Ajahn Brahm is, but he certainly knows what he's talking about.'" And that was true. And so, you know, talking about shipping, please don't do this, but if you did give me a baby, you'd figure out somehow how to look after them. But anyway, so he accepted this, but don't get any ideas. He accepted it, and he looked after this baby girl for I don't know how long, but what happened next was that scallywag of a boyfriend, you know, you girls know what some of these boys are like. You know, after a while, once you know, you know, was uh did this, he ran off to the city and found another girl, and this poor girl, you know, she was pining for her child, as you would do, and she realized she'd done a terrible, terrible thing of accusing this monk for something he never did. So, she confessed. She confessed to her father it wasn't the monk. It was this boy she'd fallen in love with. And because, you know, young girl loved him so much, wanted to protect him, that's why she blamed the monk. And this scallywag boy had run away, so she never wanted to protect him anymore. She was so sorry. So, once again, all the villagers, they went up. They went up to the mountain again say, "No, we're so sorry. We did a terrible thing. We shouldn't have done this." You know what the monk said? "Also, also." And he gave the baby back

▶ Watch Ajahn Brahm tell it from 26:56 (to 32:48)