All stories, A–Z

T

• The silence of Westminster Abbey — As a young man in London, whenever Ajahn Brahm was confused he would go into the great cathedrals…
• The silent German monk who finally gave a talk — In Sri Lanka with Bhikkhu Bodhi: a German monk who never gives talks is visited; an hour later…
• The Singapore spirits helped the Ang Mo — An English ex-army dental technician with a Singaporean wife visits the in-laws, gets bored, and…
• The Singaporean monk, the snake book, and the witch doctor — Singaporean monk in NE Thailand asks for the snake book — to identify the snake that just bit him.…
• The slingshot and the gong — Sitting with Ajahn Chah, with no clock and his legs aching after what must have been over an hour,…
• The sludge that started to taste nice — Told that monks should eat plain food, he recalls that in his first year as a monk, as a practice,…
• The smell of his baby pram — Asking in deep meditation 'what's my earliest memory?', Ajahn Brahm (soon after leaving Thailand…
• The snake and the monk eyeball each other — During chanting at a new jungle monastery in Thailand, a snake climbs up a monk's back; its head…
• The sniffer dog at Perth Airport — Back from an early trip to Sri Lanka, his robe smelling of spices and curries, Ajahn Brahm queues…
• The social worker's solutions that popped up — A senior social worker with heavy responsibilities arrives at a nine-day retreat in North Perth at…
• The soldier who refused at My Lai — A documentary on an anniversary of the My Lai massacre traces the American soldiers ordered to…
• The Spitfire engine in the old bomb — A monk's mate in England fits a Spitfire aircraft engine into an old car. On the motorway he…
• The squirrel on the psychiatrist's couch — A cartoon sent to the monastery: a squirrel on a psychiatrist's couch explains why it came — when…
• The stolen Harley on the wrong level — An early member owns almost nothing except his prized Harley-Davidson. In a Sydney shopping centre…
• The storm and the green leaves — A forest monk in northern Thailand survives a night of falling trees in his flimsy hut; next…
• The storm that waited for the ceremony — For the Buddhist Society of Western Australia's 30th anniversary Vesak ceremony in Perth's Supreme…
• The suggestion box at Barre — A well-funded meditation centre in Barre, Massachusetts — one of the first places for meditation…
• The suicidal spider — eight webs smashed — Mindful spider builds a perfect first web; broom smashes it. Second, third… eight houses…
• The supermodel was annoyed they photographed the monk — On a Kuala Lumpur retreat a famous Malaysian supermodel grew fed up that at the end nobody wanted…
• The tadpole who studied water — Analogy: intelligent tadpole goes to school and university and even becomes a nun studying the…
• The Taiwanese school quieter than a cemetery — Visiting a large traditional school in Taiwan, Ajahn Brahm thinks it must be a holiday because…
• The talk he couldn't remember — Years after Ajahn Chah's stroke left him unable to speak, Ajahn Brahm dreams — lucidly — that…
• The tangled brain cleared before the second operation — A Malaysian man in Penang had a rare disease he described as things in the brain physically…
• The taxi that made him miss the plane — A man who later visits Ajahn Brahm tells him what changed his life. In Bombay, his taxi to the…
• The teacher who woke in a drowned boy's body — A now-famous meditation teacher (unnamed, still alive) was, it seems, reborn into the body of a…
• The temporal bell that woke her from coma — Angie Marksfield's auntie describes deep coma as blackness; what brought her out was sound — like…
• The tennis shoe on the window ledge — A patient who floated out of her body during an operation later reports a tennis shoe on a high…
• The texture of a bean after a month's retreat — Just after a month self-retreat at Bodhinyana he eats a bean slowly and notices texture he had…
• The Thai dancers and the sprinklers — At a big Jhana Grove ceremony, Thai dancers in full costume were performing on the grass when the…
• The thank-you letter to the plumbing shop — Building Bodhinyana's first toilet block, Ajahn Brahm can't afford a plumber, so a salesman called…
• The Theravada–Mahayana boat race — On a sightseeing trip at a conference in Vietnam, rowing through lakes and tunnels, Ajahn Brahm…
• The three rings of marriage — Wedding joke: the three rings of marriage are the engagement ring, the wedding ring — and the…
• The three-metre dugite in the shade of his hut — On retreat at Serpentine, Ajahn Brahm hears kangaroos fleeing as a huge, highly venomous dugite…
• The Tibetan doctor's pulse diagnosis — As Ajahn Brahm recalls from a Buddhist magazine, a newly arrived Tibetan refugee doctor with no…
• The Tibetan monk who never got to speak — A former caretaker became a Buddhist because of a talk in a Melbourne public library that never…
• The tiger that was a mouse — Meditating alone at night deep in the Thai jungle, Ajahn Brahm hears rustling. As a…
• The tight bud before it blossoms — First year in Perth someone tells him: watch a flower bud — petals press tight inside the…
• The tired schoolteacher on alms round — An old friend who became a schoolteacher visits Ajahn Brahm in northeast Thailand. Exhausted and…
• The toilet frame with no hole — For Western visitors, the monastery made a sitting frame to place over squat toilets. An…
• The tomboy who was a boy before — A girl of five or six is a stereotypical tomboy — hangs out with boys, beats them up — and says it…
• The torn-up degrees his mother taped back together — On his first visit home as a monk, Ajahn Brahm finds his BA and MA certificates at his mother's…
• The tourist whose car Bill Gates fixed — Remote northern California: a tourist's car fails with no mobile coverage; a farmer stops and…
• The trail of blood into Mum's council flat — Staying at his mother's London council tower block (a supposed 'hotbed of crime'), Ajahn Brahm is…
• The tree and the child — A tree gives a boy twigs for a treehouse, fruit for university and a wedding, branches for a…
• The Triads offered to sort out any trouble — After a Friday talk a Chinese man says he is with the Perth Triads; Brahm is scared — then the man…
• The tribe that praises the wrongdoer — Ajahn Brahm recounts an email about a tribe untouched by other cultures: when someone does wrong —…
• The truckload of dung — You come home to find a truckload of manure dumped in front of your door. You didn't order it and…
• The tsunami ghost who gave a phone number — Three days after the 2004 tsunami, a Thai woman in Krabi dreams of a battered English girl from…
• The TV star he didn't recognise — Teaching a small meditation class in Double Bay, Sydney, Ajahn Brahm notices a woman at the back…
• The twin who forgave at Auschwitz — Ajahn Brahm recalls an article about a woman who, as an identical twin at Auschwitz, was subjected…
• The two arrows — The Buddha's simile: when you suffer, it is as if two arrows strike you — the physical arrow and…
• The two chicken farmers: eggs or dung? — One chicken farmer fills his basket with chicken dung, leaves the eggs to rot and stinks out his…
• The two mangoes — Simile for rebirth: you eat a mango, plant its seed, tend the sapling, and years later the tree…
• The two sisters: one with a husband, one without — Two Thai sisters come for counselling. The elder can't stand her Australian husband and is…
• The tycoon's mansion that felt like a prison — Visiting a Kuala Lumpur tycoon's mansion to give a blessing, Ajahn Brahm passes machine-gun…
• The ugly dead trees were condominiums — New to Serpentine forest he wants to chainsaw 'ugly' dead trees; learns they house possums, birds,…
• The unidentified flying monk — A famous monk in the north of Thailand became famous because a Thai Air Force fighter pilot,…
• The vet who wept when his dog was hit — Victorian vet driving to a weekend party is overcome with unexplained grief, pulls over and weeps;…
• The Vietnam monk who blessed both armies — During the Vietnam War a monk receives government and communist soldiers alike for meditation and…
• The villages without grief — Living nine years at a Thai cremation-ground monastery, Ajahn Brahm saw villagers bring their dead…
• The walking stick that always missed — First year at Magnolia Street: a man in a psychotic episode waves a walking stick violently at…
• The wall that disappeared — As a young theoretical physicist, Ajahn Brahm sits at a Zen monastery in the north of England, in…
• The ward that focused on the good hours — After a talk at Singapore's mental-health institute, a Christian ward head quietly tells Ajahn…
• The wedding without rings — At a Yanchep wedding, celebrant Dennis is about to pronounce the couple husband and wife when…
• The wet-road skid — crash or swerve — Wet road; car ahead stops for a pedestrian; Brahm skids and must choose rear-end crash or swerve…
• The whitewashed wall that vanished — Young seeker ~21–22 at a north-England Zen monastery: sit in a line, open eyes on a whitewashed…
• The whole household had the same dream — The daughter of the monastery treasurer, in her twenties, dies of cancer. Some time later he…
• The widow who hugged her husband's killer — At South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where those who truthfully confessed their…
• The wife who came back for the will — A Thai woman who never trusted her Chinese husband asks Ajahn Brahm to do her funeral and pay for…
• The wild horse that kissed the coffin — Gerald in Hong Kong sent a photo-story: a man tamed a wild horse with only kindness and patience —…
• The wine gums — One Christmas when Ajahn Brahm was a young monk, four (now famous, unnamed) Canadian monks receive…
• The wobbly VIP chairs and the fist under his nose — For the opening of the Nollamara centre the Governor of WA, Sir Gordon Reid, accepts the…
• The woman who fell asleep in the meditation hall — During Friday meditation a woman lies down, points her feet at the Buddha, falls asleep and snores…
• The woman who refused to go back — A woman who dies on the operating table meets a spirit telling her it isn't her time; she refuses…
• The woman who swapped seats to talk — Exhausted on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Perth, Ajahn Brahm sits by the window. A woman asks if…
• The woman who wasn't her mother — After deep meditation on retreat, a woman tries recalling her earliest memory and sees herself…
• The worm in the pile of dung — A good monk reborn in heaven searches every realm for his misbehaving friend and finds him reborn…
• The worm that wanted its chocolate bar — A man with intestinal worms chooses the 'natural' treatment: every day for a week, at exactly…
• The worst procedure in the ward — In a Rockingham Hospital ward with three other men, they compare medical procedures to decide…
• The worst thing she'd ever done — A woman dying of cancer meets Ajahn Brahm most Friday evenings. Wanting her to die free of her…
• The young doctor who wanted to quit — A first-year intern loses his first patient, a young mother, and must tell her husband that his…
• The young people's biggest problem: tiredness — At an afternoon youth seminar in Malaysia for about 200 people aged 15 to 25, the participants…
• The zookeeper who freed the orangutans — At the annual John Curtin Medal presentation, Ajahn Brahm (a past recipient) hears about that…
• Then cancel my husband's life insurance — A woman's house burns down; the insurer will only replace, not cut a cheque. She says she should…
• There are a thousand Ajahn Chahs — At Ajahn Chah's funeral the Western monks argued about what he had really taught — pure mind or…
• There are zombies in your retreat centre — At Jhana Grove a visiting child tells him there are zombies — retreatants doing very slow walking…
• “There is no problem in the Middle East” — Asked during the Six-Day War about 'the problem in the Middle East', a British Prime Minister…
• There's a nasty bug going around — A man is punched, headbutted and stabbed on three successive days by a six-foot cockroach at his…
• They auctioned his robe in Melbourne — At a Melbourne fundraiser for a new monastery, Ven. Mudita (captioned Moodau), whom he had…
• They can steal the donations, not our happiness — During the rains retreat thieves break into the monastery's donation box; nobody knows how much…
• They drew a circle that shut me out — Poem/analogy: heretic shut out by a circle; love and wisdom draw a bigger circle that includes…
• They emptied the donation box on New Year's Day — During the BSWA New Year's Day ceremony someone emptied the donation box. When people got upset…
• They gave him a wrapped box of nothing — When people ask what gift he wants for his birthday, a few who got the message wrap an empty box;…
• They had all watched a hanging — Answering a teacher in Q&A: over a hundred years ago, when hangings in England were public,…
• They lost the plot (Guildford Cemetery) — After the joke about funeral directors who 'lost the plot', Ajahn Brahm recalls it really…
• They preferred the taller Islamic teacher — Multi-faith school visit: feedback says girls preferred the blond Western Islamic speaker — taller…
• They watched the sunset on TV — the real one was at the window — A favourite Leunig cartoon: left half, a family watches a sunset on a nature channel; right half,…
• “They're all Buddhists” — the expensive clinic — A very wealthy Kuala Lumpur businessman tells Ajahn Brahm he paid a fortune for therapy at a…
• “This is my son, the monk” — On his first visit home after seven years as a monk, when monks in London were seen as weirdos,…
• This is not what I signed up for — Years earlier, midway through a two-hour Indonesian book-signing and photo queue, Ajahn Brahm…