Like A Master Musician
อาจารย์ อมโร
Night is falling swiftly. The forest reverberates with the undulating buzz of countless crickets and the eerie rising wail of tropical cicadas. A few stars poke dimly through the treetops. Amid the gathering darkness there is a pool of warm light, thrown from a pair of kerosene lanterns, illuminating the open area below a hut raised up on stilts. Beneath it, in the glow, a couple of dozen people are gathered around a small, solidly-built monk who is seated cross-legged on a wicker bench. The air is filled with a vibrant peace. Venerable Ajahn Chah is teaching.
…Near the back, almost at the edge of the pool of light sits a stern-faced man in his thirties. He is half turned to one side, as if his presence there is uncomfortable, tentative. He is a local hard man – a nak leng. Deeply disdainful of all things supposedly religious he nevertheless has a grudging respect for Luang Por; probably stemming as much from the monk’s reputation for toughness and his powers of endurance as from the recognition that, as far as religious people go, he might be the real thing – “but he’s probably the only one worth bowing to in the whole province.”
He’s angry and upset, sick at heart. A week ago his beloved kid brother – who ran with his gang and with whom he’d been through a 1000 scrapes together – went down with cerebral malaria and was dead within days. Since then he has felt as if his heart had a spear through it and that everything in the world had lost its flavor. “If he had been killed in a knife fight, at least I could take revenge – what am I going to do: track down the mosquito that bit him and kill it?”
“Why not go see Luang Por Chah?” a friend said. So here he is.
Luang Por smiles broadly as he makes a point, holding up a glass to illustrate his analogy. He has noticed the stark young figure in the shadows. Soon he has somehow managed to coax him to the front, as if he was reeling in a tough and wily fish; next thing the hard man has his head in Luang Por’s hands and is weeping like a baby; next he is somehow laughing at his own arrogance and self-obsession – he realizes that he’s not the first or only person ever to have lost a dear one – the tears of rage and grief have turned to tears of relief.
All this happens with twenty total strangers around, yet the atmosphere is one of safety and trust. For although those assembled come from all walks of life and from all around the planet, they are all united at this one moment and place as saha-dhammika, “fellow Dhamma-farers”, or to use another expression from the Buddhist vernacular, they are all “brothers and sisters in old age, sickness and death” and thus belong to a single family.
…This kind of scenario was played out countless times during the thirty years that Ajahn Chah spent teaching. It is significant that, both in longer expositions on formal occasions as well as in such impromptu dialogues, the flow of teaching, and to whom in particular it was directed, was highly spontaneous and unpredictable.
In many ways when Ajahn Chah was teaching, he was like a master musician: both leading the flow of harmonious sound and yet producing it entirely in response to the natures and moods of the people he was with, integrating their words, feelings and questions in the crucible of his heart, and letting the responses flow forth freely.
This reflection by Ajahn Amaro is from the book, Thunder in an Open Sky–The Life & Teaching of Luang Por Chah, (pdf) pp. 3~5.