Stories about positive attitude
5 Buddhist wisdom stories about positive attitude from Buddhist teachers, each linked to the original talk.
- A Sunday in Singapore that 'Amnesty would call torture'Story · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Ajahn Brahm recounts a Singapore Sunday from 6:15 a.m. meditation through a 'breakfast banquet', talks, counselling over lunch, a five-hour seminar and an evening launch, ending…
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Again just being in Singapore last Sunday -- there's couple of people here from Singapore, you know this is true -- started off my Sunday morning at 6:15 in the Canning Fort Park teaching meditation. It was only supposed to be a short meditation. But you know what it's like afterwards, people start asking you questions and taking photographs. I had to rush for the morning..so-called breakfast. It was not a breakfast, it was morning banquet. People saying "Please eat this, please eat that, because I made this specially for you Ajahn Brahm." [laughter] And now you may always see I'm a fat monk. It is not my fault. [laughter] I get pressured, forced, cajoled. And if you don't believe me, you just come and follow me for one day and see what happens. So I had to eat this big breakfast and then talk to people. And then as soon as that was finished, had to go off to this morning service at the Buddhist Fellowship, which was only supposed to be a talk for an hour but went on and on and on with questions and stuff. And then we were supposed to have some lunch. But on the lunch, people come up and ask you to sign a book and ask some questions because they have some really big problems in life. So you give them free counseling. You're trying to put a spoon of food in one mouth and counsel them about their marital problems in the other. It is really working. And after that was finished, then I had to sort of rush off to a seminar they'd organized for four hours of giving talks and asking questions. And of course it wasn't four hours, it lasted for five or six, finished about eight o'clock. And after that, I had to go to this golf club where they were having a sort of a launch of an education program which I had to give another talk; didn't get back to bed till about quarter to midnight. And if anyone looked at that schedule, you'd call that torture. Amnesty International will probably take the Buddhist Fellowship in Singapore to court for that.. [laughter] human rights abuse; war crimes. But of course I enjoyed every minute of it.
- Darlington: the church or the gasworks?Story · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: On his first visit to England as a monk (seven or eight years ordained), touring northern groups with the abbot, he visits the run-down town of Darlington. On a morning walk they…
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I remember an experience when I went to visit England for the very first time after I became a monk about seven or eight years as a monk and we had a monastery over there which was just building up up and so the the Abbot over there Su took me off with him to a tour of the north of England in Scotland was visiting some more remote some more remote Buddhist groups and we went to this C mining town of of Darlington we went there on a weekend for a retreat and the first thing which the locals told us it's very rare for someone to visit that that rundown City on a weekend most people get out on the weekend and go somewhere else so we went to that town and then we went for a walk in the morning after breakfast we went to the gardens and we found a beautiful little church to go and have a look inside and when we went back our host said where did you go to a walk for a walk we told him said you went to the most beautiful parts of town that's very indicative of your characters because there was a monkey of a few months before and when he went for a walk he went down to the Gas Works and the rundown old canal in the industrial area and we laugh and said yeah that's his character he a very negative monk
- The cockroach insurance claimStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: At the Serpentine retreat centre the air conditioning fails: a cockroach has crawled into the electrics and been fried, taking the electrics with it. The monks chant for the…
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one was when the air conditioning in fast we didn't know why and we found out a cockroach had crawled into the electrics and got fried and it passed all the electrics of course as soon as we found it we did some chanting for the poor cockroach dying in a retreat center must be really good car if you're going to die anyway as a cockroach next to all these great meditators that was pretty cool for the cockroach bill for about five and so wow how can we pay that so our secretary rang up the insurance agent and so is our air conditioning covered through a cockroach cockroach fryings and the parish he said I didn't lay hard she's here listening said well actually I've never heard that before we never come across that but they looked in there and said it was covered so we've got it all back
- Walking up the hill instead of drivingStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: After nine years of only driving up to Bodhinyana, Ajahn Brahm gets out at the foot of the hill and walks; the familiar hillside becomes unrecognisably detailed and colourful,…
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I noticed the experience of walking up the hill to Bodhinyana Monastery in Serpentine. Now, many of you have been down there, hopefully some of you will come down on Sunday for our Katina Ceremony. We bought that 25 years ago, 26, I think now, and for about nine years, I'd gone up, and down, the road to the monastery, always in a car, in some sort of vehicle. It was like one of those days we had a couple of days ago, just warm spring morning. I remember just coming back from some sort of appointment, and feeling just so positive, so energized, and having plenty of time, I told the driver, "Drop me off at the foot of the hill, I'm going to walk up today." Not for exercise so much, just for enjoying the morning, I had plenty of time. So, I started walking from the southwest highway, up Kingsbury Drive, to the gate of Bodhinyana Monastery. As I started walking I got very surprised. Actually, it was a shock. As I looked around me, I could not recognize where I was. That hillside looked totally different from what I remembered seeing looking through the window of a car. It was totally different. I was seeing things which I never knew were there. What I saw had more detail, had more depth of colour. It was just basically more beautiful. Of course that surprised me, and not being in any rush, not being in a hurry, I just stood still. And as I stood still, the whole hillside changed again. It was like evolving. As a monk you're not on any sort of psychotropic substances, you don't take alcohol, although, during our rains retreat, somebody offered the monks some chocolate cake, and, fortunately, before we ate it, one of the monks looked at the little writing on the cover, saying it had alcohol in it! Fortunately, we stopped in time, because sometimes you're not sure when you get some chocolate cake sometimes they put the alcohol in there just for the taste and then they cook it and all the alcohol goes, it doesn't matter. But we didn't know whether it was put in before or afterwards, and so we decided not to take it. We gave it to one of our visitors who was very happy to be a guinea pig [laughter], Like a food taster. And when he came back the next week he said "That was a lot of alcohol." [laughter] It hadn't evaporated, it was a very good job we were very careful. Otherwise, we may have gone to our monastery just after lunch in a rains retreat and seeing all the monks singing and dancing and goodness knows what else. [laughter] Which would not have done very much for our reputation, so you've got to be very careful. So we don't take such things. We are sort of sober, mindful, alert. So here I was having an experience, like sometimes you have in life, when things become really weird and they start changing in front of your eyes. But what had happened was, what I was seeing, it had more detail, more information. That hillside, you started to see little flowers, started to see rocks, and just the shape of the rocks and the lichen on the rocks. And, just look at the tree barks, and the whole tree bark was just amazing, beautiful. What was also strange was that the colours, the colours of everything you saw, started to grow more intense, more rich, more deep and more beautiful. The whole thing was exquisite. Of course, when a monk has experiences like that, we don't just enjoy, we sort-of contemplate afterwards what the heck was going on. And I decided to analyze it through science, and it became quite clear to me that, when you see things, sight is a chemical reaction on the back of your eye, on the retina. What happens with most people is that when they see something, they move on to another image almost immediately. So, the image on the back of your eye doesn't have time to properly form, and the colors don't come out. They're just maybe 10 percent of what's there, and the detail is all smeared, because the image does not have time. When I walked, I was going slower. The images on the back of my eye, the light had more time, so you could see a much more full picture with more detail, and the colours were deeper because they had more time to manifest. It was just a simple physiology of sight which was occurring. And, of course, when I stood absolutely still, only then did my eyes have all the time they needed to form a full picture. And for the colours, which were out there all the time, to be fully represented in the image on the back of my eye. And for my mind to have time to explore it fully, to appreciate it, and to taste it 100 percent.
- “What if they kill you?” — the monk bound for a rough countryStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: A monk tells the Buddha he wants to take the Dhamma to a faraway country. The Buddha warns that its people are coarse and violent: what if they abuse you? “At least they'd feed…
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There was a monk who went up to the Buddha in that old time and he said, "I want to go to this country a long way away, you know, to spread the dharma, to to build up some Buddhism and to help people in this far away country, just like I was coming to Australia." And the Buddhist said to this monk, "Oh, that particular country, you know, it's very rough. People are very coarse and very violent in that country." And I'm not saying Australia is like that, but people laughed when I made that comparison in Thailand. And the Buddha said, "What would happen, you know, if you went to that country and people talk badly about you and they cursed you?" And he thought, "Well, you know, at least they would feed me." And then the Buddha said, "What if they don't feed you?" He said, "Well, at least they don't hit me, but what if they hit you?" Well, it's only a, you know, a a fist. It's not as if they stab me with daggers. What if there's dagger with daggers and swords? Well, at least they don't kill me. But what if they kill you? Well, it just means I go to heaven quicker. And the Buddha said, "Now that's a real monk. You can go.