Stories about monastery building
4 Buddhist wisdom stories about monastery building from Buddhist teachers, each linked to the original talk.
- Ajahn Ganha patted the mayor's tummyStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Serpentine mayor Clem Kentish, neighbour and council head, came in a tight suit to vet the monks for building approval. Before Ajahn Brahm could stop him, Ajahn Ganha walked up…
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Clem Kentish his name was and he came to check us out. Who are these Buddhist monks? He was also our neighbor down the hill at the time and he was the mayor and he basically he ran the council to check us out and he came if you think I'm fat he was probably fatter than me wearing a suit. You know may have to wear suits and I really fel felt for the suit because the the buttons were almost coming off. It was just only just managed to button it up and it was just stretching and the button could pop at any time. But then what happened next really shocked me. This time monk Ajang Ganha saw him first and I was a bit too far away to stop Ajang Ganha and Ajang Ganha went right up to him and started patting him on the tummy. That's okay to pat me on the tummy maybe, but to pat the mayor, [laughter] this Australian guy who was came [snorts] to check us out to make sure that we were legitimate people. And I thought, "Oh no, that's the end of our buildings. He'll never give us approval anymore." But you know what I saw next was just so wonderful. And again, I'm saying it accurately. This man, this really important person is is he got a smile on his face and he was gurgling like a baby. Loved every minute of it. And Ajang Gunha could do that to a he could do that, I don't know, to to Donald Trump, Clive Palmer, he do anyone like that, you know, especially Clive Palmer. He's a bit tummy fat and if he if a gun Yeah. is so much kindness. People love that and it's so much so that you know no problem with our building licenses after that. But what was for me he became a really good friend in the end
- Paying for the timber: the builder's discountStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Building Bodhinyana in the early days, Ajahn Brahm collected a lot of timber in a rush from a timber yard on Brookton Highway and realised back at the monastery that some of it…
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I'll just mention this um today when the one of the first times when I was building Bodana Monastery that uh we this was um I don't mind I mention it was Collie and Sons they had a a timber yard down Brookton Highway went there one day to get some timber to build a cooty or something and it's a lot of timber I was in a rush when I got back I said oh my goodness we we there's some stuff we hadn't paid for. So I went back on the next day and had the I said look you know we got some timber from you yesterday and just in a rush with no intention we hadn't paid for it you know can we sort of pay the difference and a fellow looked at me as if I was like from Mars or some alien planet somewhere and he said just hold on a moment and he went up to see the big the big manager and then he said okay you can pay for the extra timber But now you're on a builder's discount. And we're not builders. Well, not really professional builders, but you know that he gave us a builder's discount. And just the amount of money, you know, the monastery paid just for that bit of timber, maybe $10 or $15. We made that back 10, 20, 100 times probably by getting the builder's discount from that place. He said, because it's weird. Not many people do that. Not many people are honest and trustworthy.
- The baby washed in wall acidStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Building Bodhinyana's kitchen, Ajahn Brahm spends a morning acid-washing the brickwork. At lunch Ben Anson and his wife Hupa bring food with their newborn; the baby soils her…
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when we built our kitchen after you know I did a lot of the work on that building the dining room kitchen the lower building there and when you do brickwork you have to sort of acid the walls to clean up the marks of the uh of the cement so I was working all morning just brushing all the walls with acid to actually to clean them to make them look good it was time for lunch so we went out for lunch and we had the lunch was given by uh I don't mind saying the name some of you know that Ben Anson and his wife Hupa bought the lunch and with their two daughters oh they only had one daughter just a newborn baby and after giving us the lunch the baby sort of pooped in the uh in their their diapers so she had to take it off was looking for some water to wash her bottom the acid this poor little girl started screaming it didn't really hurt her because it was all watered down it wasn't like concentrated but she certainly went red but it did the job it really cleaned her backside
- The cats and the building sandStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Bodhinyana is covered in gravel, so the monastery's cats treat any pile of sand as a luxury loo, burying their business in it. The day before this talk, mixing mortar, Ajahn…
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I remember the cats in our monastery. We got a couple of cats, and where they like pooing is in sand because if you come to our monastery, the Bodhinyana monastery, down in Serpentine, you know, in there there's gravel. Imagine the cat trying to sort of dig a hole in there, in gravel, to sort of, to do its business. So if it finds any sands somewhere, of course, that's marvellous, that's like a luxury loo for a cat. So it digs under the sand, and does it its stuff and buries afterwards. And the next day when I was mixing cement with that sand, (laughter) you get all the cat poo. You have to take it out. That's happened yesterday. So... but you can't blame the cat. That's just cats being cats. So, yeah, it's suffering having to take out bits of cat poo from the sand before you make mortar. But, you can blame the cat, that just adds mental arrow of suffering, getting angry at somebody.