Stories about play
2 Buddhist wisdom stories about play from Buddhist teachers, each linked to the original talk.
- Swings at the bus stopStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Someone sent him a photo of Montreal bus stops fitted with playground swings. Waiting commuters swing back and forth — highly relaxing, so executives arrive as better bosses. It…
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In Montreal they have swings like in the children's playground. So the people waiting for the bus would swing backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. It's very innovative and much more fun you have to do that. But can't we make it more fun? And apparently many people miss their buses because they're having too much fun on the swings
- The Theravada–Mahayana boat raceStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: On a sightseeing trip at a conference in Vietnam, rowing through lakes and tunnels, Ajahn Brahm (representing Singapore) is in a boat of Theravada monks alongside a boat of…
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I went to a conference in Vietnam a couple of years ago, and if you go to conferences, big organised conferences, the organisers want you to see some of the sights. I don't like being a tourist but you had no choice. So I was in the middle of Vietnam somewhere, to these lakes and underground tunnels and stuff, where you go through in a barge, fascinating beautiful place but on the way back... Actually, weird, I was representing Singapore, not Australia, so I was in the Singapore boat and there was another Singapore boat, we had the Theravada monks in our boat, and the Mahayana monks in the other boat, so I looked at them and said "Right, a race, who's better, the Mahayana or the Theravada? [laughter]. Those are the two parts of Buddhist so we had a race between Mahayana and Theravada. I was in the Theravada boat paddling for all I could and the Mahayana monks were paddling really hard as well just to see who would win, and of course it's obvious, the Theravada would win, it's obvious, if you know anything about Buddhism, because the Mahayana, they are Boddhisatvas, they even let other people get to Enlightenment before they do, so they made us get to the finishing line before they did, that's their tradition [laughter].