Stories about slowing-down
3 Buddhist wisdom stories about slowing-down from Buddhist teachers, each linked to the original talk.
- First walk up Kingsbury DriveStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Building Bodhinyana, Brahm sends the car ahead and walks Kingsbury Drive alone for the first time after years living at the top — so slowly, turning to valley and hillside, that…
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I'm going to walk up the hill today alone." So, I send the car with a driver up ahead. I'm going to walk. And that kind of really shocked me. What I didn't get much exercise, I must admit, because I did walk so slowly. And every now and again, I turn to the left to see the valley, turn to the right and see the hillside. And my goodness, often I had to ask myself, "Where am I?" I could not recognize my location. And I've been living up that uh the top of that hill for about 5 or 6 years by that time. The first time I actually walked up that hill. It looked totally different
- The barium meal that wouldn't moveStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: A monk in Thailand given an afternoon barium X-ray finds the meal won't move because his stomach is 'asleep' in the afternoon; a nurse tells him to think of his favourite food,…
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I remember learning this when one of my fellow monks, a long time ago, he had some digestive problems and so he went to the local doctor. This was in Thailand. And they decided to give him a barium meal. I don't know if they still do that. They probably do ultrasound or MRIs these days but I'm not quite sure. But what a barium meal was, he had to drink this radioactive guk. And it lay in his stomach and they had some x-ray machine that can actually see how this barium meal actually went through his system. That way they could actually test if there was any blockages anywhere or any difficulties in his digestive tracts. But the stupid doctors, they scheduled his appointment for about two or three o'clock in the afternoon. And you know monks, we'd only eat in the morning time. In the afternoon we don't eat. And he'd been a monk for about four or five years. So when he was lying down there, that barium meal was just sitting there, wasn't going anywhere because the stomach wasn't used to doing anything in the afternoon. It was half asleep, it was resting. That's what happens in monks. And so he'd actually had this meal, all the nurses or doctors or technicians were around him, and they couldn't proceed because the barium meal was just sitting there. And so one of the nurses, a very smart girl, said "monk, think of your favorite food." And he was lying on his back. As soon as he started thinking of his favorite food, then the barium meal started moving here and all over the place. Just the thought was enough to actually get the whole system going.
- 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.