About This Teaching
A comfortable young man in Bangkok, Ajahn Dtun says, he was turned by past kamma toward impermanence and the wish to go beyond birth, aging, sickness and death. He wanted to ordain in a remote forest monastery, having been put off by city temples where monks watched television and played football.
An elderly neighbour who kept the precepts suggested two teachers, and he chose Ajahn Chah at Wat Pah Pong, partly so his father, then working in Ubon, could visit. At their first meeting Ajahn Chah called him crazy, but crazy "on top", and said all the world's wealth could not equal the value of ordaining. He feared his father would refuse, even thinking he might run away, but his father, a man who always honoured his word, gave permission.
Arriving as an eight-precept layman, he spat out a dessert he normally liked and resolved never to eat while desire for food was present. That same day Ajahn Chah told him to uproot everything and leave nothing. Entering the monastery felt like entering another dimension, with happiness filling his heart. His father, himself once a monk, often rested on the veranda of his hut.