Stories about development
2 Buddhist wisdom stories about development from Buddhist teachers, each linked to the original talk.
- The bucket with so many holesStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Coming from Cambridge to subsistence villages in northeast Thailand, Ajahn Brahm is shocked at how happy people are eating frogs and snails. Years later a villager tells him that…
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And I remember seeing an example of that living in this poor part of Thailand, you know, which had no roads, no electricity. But you know, there's this great sense of happiness in those villages. That's one of the great shocks to me coming from a rich country and having spent 3 years in this elite university where people would actually call you young gentleman. And if you looked at me at the time, that would be a stretch of everybody's imagination to call me a young gentleman the way I behaved in those days. But that we had to be called that. And it is awkward in Cambridge. It's really a weird place. But you come from that place where you could have dinner, you know, with a Nobel laureate or just to play soccer with an earl and all that sort of stuff. And they were actually hopeless at soccer, by the way. But and you went from there to the villages of northeast Thailand of subsistence farming, you know, as I had mentioned before, eating frogs and snails and all this other stuff. Whatever crawled on the floor went into your curry. And seeing that people were so happy. That was one of the weirdest surprises to see that people in these villages had far more happiness than anyone I'd ever seen in those great colleges or this, you know, developed society like UK. It made me challenge, I mean, why are all these aid organizations pouring millions into northeast Thailand making them suffer just like us? And actually that is actually what happened. And I saw it in my own eyes. They saw that I remember cuz I cuz fluent in sort of Thai and now and you would speak to people and I remember this one guy I saw after maybe 20 years I'd been there. And he said, "You know, when we you first came here, yeah, we didn't have very much, but you know, we had enough to get by. We had enough food. No, not the best food, but enough." He said, "Now it's just like having a bucket with so many holes. You know, I get money for all these things. But the more water I put in my bucket, the more holes there are. They just keeps on dripping out and I can never fill my bucket anymore." He said, "That's just all these things I now have to pay for electricity, for television, for medical insurance and blah blah blah." And he says, "In the old days, life was so simple and so happy." And I remember this other guy. He was one of Ajahn Chah's chief disciples.
- When we had no hospital, people were so healthyStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: One of Ajahn Chah's chief disciples (interviewed in a BBC documentary; Brahm briefly confuses him with another monk who first went to see Chah) says honestly: when he was young…
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And I remember this other guy. He was one of Ajahn Chah's chief disciples. And he said something which really shocked me, but you know, he was very honest. And he was actually one of the people interviewed in the BBC documentary about Ajahn Chah many years ago. He said, "When I was young, we didn't have any hospital and people were so healthy. Now we have a hospital, there's so many sick people." Now that was fascinating comment because I trusted this fellow. He was very honest. And he was putting a window sort of into the past and into the the present. He's very, very old man, but very trustworthy. He was one of these guys he first went to see Ajahn Chah. No, so that's another guy. I'm getting him mixed up. But this was a very, very honest fellow, a very good man, one of the chief disciples. So I really trust, you know, what he said there because I was there in the very early days. But it was saying that sometimes development, what we think they need, that is one of the problems with with aid, with compassion.