Stories about plans
3 Buddhist wisdom stories about plans from Buddhist teachers, each linked to the original talk.
- “Please don't die during our retreat”Story · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: At the start of the rains retreat Ajahn Brahm jokingly asks everyone not to die until October or November, since funerals break his meditation. On Monday an email arrives: one of…
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I made an announcement last week please don't die during our retreat because if you do I have to come out of the retreat and do your funeral service for you and that breaks my meditation so just out of respect and out of kindness can you please delay your death and to the least know October or or even better November so of course there's a there's always karmic consequences when I say city jokes like that because on Monday I got an email one of my disciples died then he left it for one day and so all my plans of what I was supposed to do on Tuesday and Wednesday were thrown into turmoil as I had to go to Singapore for their funeral so on Tuesday morning at one o'clock in the morning I had to take the flight and I came back on Wednesday afternoon just you know 20 less than 24 hours in Singapore to help with the funeral service
- The corpse in the elevatorStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Funeral directors collecting a body from a top-floor old apartment find the gurney will not fit the stairs or elevator, so they hold the corpse upright between them. Murphy's…
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there's no way you can get sort of like the the little it was not coffin yet a little um trolley they put the dead person on so strap him in there and just you know to try and take him take him down the stairs but even in the elevator the elevator was too small and he was on the top story so what to do that is it'd be it'd be like some comedy show but this was real life you know real life is much more funny than anything they can invent on the TV so what they did you know they decided well the only thing to do is actually just carry him down ourselves so that they forgot about the trolley that just his two Funeral Directors you know in Black they look pretty sort of weird already and with the dead person in between just holding on to him standing and of course it's one of these though one of these old apartment blocks where everybody knew one another so they knew this guy has died so top story about six stories or something down to the ground floor where the horse was waiting they were praying please nobody pressed the button halfway down but of course there is some law which is even the most powerful law in the whole universe which you can rely upon it's called Murphy's Law it's something can go wrong it does go wrong so the elevator stopped on the third floor halfway down they couldn't do anything about it and when it does open there's this little old lady who'd also lived in the apartment block for a long time and you can imagine what she saw this guy who she knew was dead standing between these two guys in Black and my friend the funeral director he said we don't know how this happened but we lost control of him and he started Falling Towards the old woman she just dropped out what should we do next so they thought they had to say we can do they they grabbed on the guy again and pressed the button and they just hope they didn't have another customer they ran up the stairs afterwards and she was okay she was a bit shocked but you know when it can happen it does happen
- The number-two monk who had to become abbotStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Ajahn Brahm planned to stay number two behind Ajahn Jagaro — 'the car at the front of the convoy gets all the bugs on the windscreen' — until the head monk fell in love and left,…
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I never wanted to be an abbot. I never wanted to be a boss monk. I had it all worked out when I was a young because there was another monk here, Ajahn Jagaro before and I was number two. It was perfect. I always say it's a car in front of the convoy that gets all the bugs on the windscreen. The one going behind is free of the bugs. So I always had the idea of being number two, tailgating another person. Who wants to be a leader anyway? Anyone who's a leader is just a dummy. Anyone who wants to be prime minister? That's why if you want to be a prime minister or a president, you must want your head examined. It's much better being number two or number three or four, whatever, because that way you don't have to be out front taking all the flak and making all the hard decisions and stuff. But anyway, it didn't work out that way. Because I was number two, tailgating, and then the head monk fell in love and left. I ended up being, basically that's what happened. So it ended up me having to take over.