About This Teaching
With a senior friend, Ajahn Dtun went to the Chonburi mountains, where water was so scarce that only one of them could stay on the summit. Practising alone at a nearby hill, he contemplated the unattractiveness of the body through to the four elements and its emptiness, and felt another portion let go: greed and dissatisfaction seemed almost gone.
When a monk came from Wat Pah Pong to fetch his friend for secretarial duties, Ajahn Dtun found he was not himself required, and he accepted a fellow monk's invitation to a quiet forest monastery in Kanthararom, where the only drinking water came milky from a well beside a swamp, which he jokingly called coconut milk. One morning on alms round a mother buffalo charged him while he was spreading loving-kindness. His only thought was that if there was old kamma between them, so be it; his mind stayed still, and the buffalo stopped close enough to touch, then walked away. Another day he was startled by hundreds of footprints on the road, which turned out to be chickens, since he normally saw animals only as skeletons. Eventually he was summoned back to Wat Pah Pong.