About This Teaching
This narrated chapter gathers Ajahn Chah's advice to householders. He called the monastery his own large family and taught laypeople as he taught himself. At a village wedding he said the ceremony matters less than how the couple live afterwards, and played on the Thai word for family to show being boxed in and cut open by problems. Family members should listen to each other, solve their own disputes, and not carry fire into or out of the house; mutual respect holds a family together.
On raising children he used the image of a potter shaping pots, warned against cleaning the dishes while dirtying one's heart, and told an anxious mother that young mice dig their own holes. On bereavement, he likened unprepared love to suddenly seeing a snake in the room, and told a grieving mother her son was hers only conventionally. He also advised a wealthy supporter to keep a share of her wealth so as not to end up like a rotten log with no mushrooms.