'Are you the YouTube monk?'

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• Interrupted by the radio

  In brief: A former caretaker of the Perth centre retired to Beverley for a peaceful life but fell into depression. He went into his shed, tied a…

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  he lives over in Beverly he was an old caretaker of our Center here he left to have a nice peaceful time up in Beverly and but you know we all go through difficult times he went through a depression and he got so deped pressed he actually went into his shed and tied a rope to the rafter tied a noose got the chair ready and went into the Caravan where he was saying to write his suicide note he had the he had the uh the radio one at the time just the local radio and as he was writing a suicide note you know just halfway through who would come on the radio aan brah and he said oh no I can't do anything without this m getting in the way so he ripped up his suicide now untied the rope and came and told me about it afterwards he said it's really too difficult to commit suicide you even get on the radio and stop me that's another guy I've got saved his life

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• Two bad bricks in the wall

  In brief: Building the broke new monastery at Serpentine, the ex-physicist monk lays his first brick wall with painstaking perfectionism — then sees…

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  The story of the two bad bricks in the wall, twenty six years ago, twenty seven years ago when we moved to Serpentine to build that monastery down there we had no money, we were broke, and because... we owed money for the land, there were no buildings on that property. So I had to learn how to build. And I was theoretical physicist before, ok, in my head doing sums all day. Now I had to get out there and get my hands dirty and mix concrete and lay bricks and put on a roof and do plumbing. Everything we did. And even to this day, if any of you going into that main hall in our monastery, I am the builder. My name is on the building license for that. And it's still standing so that's pretty good. [LAUGHTER] So in particular, this story I had to learn how to lay bricks. Laying bricks was not a simple thing to do, it may look easy but it's so hard to get everything level. But, as most people would be I was a perfectionist. I had to make sure that brick was perfectly level before I went onto the next one. Sometimes one corner was high, you'd knock it down and another corner would go up. You knock that corner down then it would go out of line. You knock it back into line thinking it was finished, you notice one of the corners was high again. It was just one of those jobs which, where you couldn't get everything in the right place but you kept on trying until you got it. It took a long time but it didn't matter cause I wasn't being paid. So I could take however long I wanted. And when I finished that wall, that first brick wall, like anybody else you were proud, finished, you stood back to look at it and admire it, and it was only then when it was finished I noticed that two bricks were crooked. All the other bricks were straight, two bricks were crooked. So what would you do? What I did was try and scrape the mortar out so I could reset the bricks so they could be perfect. But the mortar was hard, you couldn't scrape it out. And the other monk who was with me at the time, Ajahn Jagaro, I asked him look can we afford, can we please afford some dynamite so I blow it up and start again? Bulldozer would do, push it over. Because...that spoiled the whole wall. Those two bad bricks, they ruined the whole thing. But we couldn't, I was stuck with it, we were too poor to do anything with it. So for three months, every time I went passed that wall I saw my mistakes and I felt so sad. I'd stuffed up. And the worst thing about stuffing up when you're building everybody could see it, you can't hide it. It's a big wall, out there in the open. So, every time there was a visitor, I would actually volunteer to take them around so I could, you know, take them somewhere else so they wouldn't see my mistakes. At night time I'd have nightmares about that wall. I would, I'd dream of it, because I'd really made a big mistake and everybody could see it. And it was three months, roughly, I'm not quite sure it's a long time ago now, about three months somebody else was with me and they saw that wall and they said that's a beautiful wall. And I just couldn't believe what I'd heard because for three months I'd been suffering so much with that wall and they said it's a beautiful wall. My first reaction was to ask them are you visually impaired, are you blind, did you leave your glasses in the car? Can't you see those two bad bricks, the crooked ones. And what they said next just changed much of the way I look at life and stopped a lot of inherent depression in myself. What they said was yes I can see the two bad bricks, but I can also see the nine hundred and ninety eight good bricks as well. And that really hit me, because I realised for three months I was blind. All I ever saw was my two mistakes and I just could not see all the beautiful perfect bricks which I had laid. And when that guy told me what about the nine hundred and ninety eight good bricks that was the first time in three months that I could actually see the bricks above, below, to the left and the right of my two mistakes. And I had to agree with the fellow, it was a beautiful wall, once I could see the whole picture.

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• Volunteering with the kids who taught him to be hugged

  In brief: At Cambridge, when a Christian friend starts volunteering at the local mental hospital, Ajahn Brahm feels he'd better go too. The…

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  Again, just when I was at university, I was the only Buddhist, I knew at that college. So it was very lonely. So, you had your friends and you have great philosophical arguments. There's one guy who was a very close friend, he was Christian. So we had these great discussions. It wasn't sort of antagonistic, but it was animated. And when I heard he was going to the local mental hospital to do voluntary work, I thought I'd better go along as well. I'm a Buddhist, I'm supposed to be compassionate, even though you are very busy and all this other stuff you're supposed to do at university, I went. And I enjoyed it so much that I kept going for 2 years, those Christians, they just actually dropped out. And I went for 2 years, sometimes, "what are you trying to prove?" they asked me. And I think about it, actually it went way beyond doing service, I wasn't there to do service, I was actually getting joy out of this. It gave my week meaning, just to go and hang out with Down's Syndrome kids, and that's really all I was doing. I wasn't an expert, I wasn't trying to do anything much with them, except just be with them. And to this day, I credit that with teaching me what I call like "emotional language". So if I'm a good teacher, 4 years, not just the way you speak, anyone can say words, it's just where they come from. These were kids who can't speak, in the same way, at least these kids, were institutionalised, couldn't speak the same way as I speak to you if you come to ask me a question or we just talk about whatever. They didn't have the vocabulary or the way to articulate their thoughts. But they communicated through their emotions, through their hugs, through their facial language. And my goodness, they were just so clever. I remember many times, just going there and they, they sized me up straight away, if I was in a bad mood, they'd know - what's wrong. They'd give me hug. It was the first time as a man I'd allowed another man to hug me. I was a heterosexual. I was afraid of, sort of homosexuality. That's just the way I was conditioned and they had to allow, as a male, a young male in 1969 or 70, allow another male to hug you. That was tough, you're English, stiff upper lip and all that. But it was so wonderful for me to learn just how to be loved. I got so much from those kids. I really thank them so much. So I thought I was giving when I first went there. No, I got heaps and heaps, I got enormous gratitude, what I learnt when I gave that's where you start to understand what meaning is.

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• The floor the monks finished overnight

  In brief: Building Jhana Grove for an Easter 2008 opening by its patron, former Premier Geoff Gallop, Ajahn Brahm is assured it will be ready well…

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  Notice the floor in the meditation room, it hasn't got a carpet because we thought there's some people want to meditate and they have allergies. So, it's just a bamboo floor. It's very beautiful, but on bamboo floor. You know what happens again, Ajahn Brahm being the builder. I'm not really the builder, but it's my project, so I had to make sure everything was done properly. And it's a huge project, I asked the person in charge of doing the building, "Are you sure it's going to be ready by Easter 2008 or nine or 12? What was it, about 12/13 years ago? 2008. Are you sure it's going to be ready?" He said, "Yes! No trouble at all! Well ahead of schedule." And I should know by now. I'm really stupid. I trust people too much. Because it wasn't. It was a real rush. Especially the last day. We're going to have the opening ceremony, it was on the Easter retreat. And we're going to have it on Friday, the Good Friday. And we invited even the the former Premier, Geoff Gallop. He was gonna, he still is the what do you call it? The patron of Jhana Grove Retreat Centre. And he was gonna come and open it for us. And as soon as the opening was finished, we're gonna have our retreat, the 8/9 day retreat, and we had all this ceremony all arranged. And you know what happened? You know what happened? It wasn't finished. Thursday evening. Half the floor had not been laid. It was just concrete. Half the floor was finished. Half the floor was bare concrete. We tried to get floor makers in to come and finish it off for us. Would they work on Thursday evening, before the long weekend? No way. So what happened? Duh duh duh, in come the monks like the seventh cavalry to save the day again. And it was brilliant. It's beautiful. Ajahn Brahmali and Ajahn Santutthi, they were the main collaborators. They worked till 4am. All night. 4am. And that's a beautiful job they did. If you sit on that, when every time I see that, I feel so much joy and happiness. Just finishing off like that. They had a lot of fun. A lot of joy, not sleeping, working hard. Had an hour or two to sleep before we started the ceremony in the morning, big ceremony all day. Have a look at it. It's gorgeous. That is how we work. Do we get paid? Imagine if we did get paid. There'll be it's Easter. So that's double time. Overnight, that's double time again. So, night time work, oh, they could have made a fortune. If we were paid. But we don't do that. Do it for the fun of it, the joy of it because you don't have fault finding. You have the opposite. Joy finding, beauty finding. And that's one of the reasons why we don't get paid, we get exploited. Please exploit us some more. We don't think like other people. So instead, we just see the joy of doing these things and the wonder of doing these things, which means the fault fighting is not there. So we don't get upset and don't argue. And if you notice carefully, there is a mistake in that floor. Have any of you seen it? It's in the corner, which is closest to the entrance door. Doesn't quite match. But that's beautiful. It doesn't have to match and be perfect.

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