About This Answer
A questioner has heard that the only way to repay parents is to help them establish sīla (virtue), but her mother has no interest in Buddhism or the precepts and contact is difficult. Ajahn Dtun answers that sometimes one simply cannot help a person in that way; people go according to their kamma, and views are very hard to change. She may instead help her mother in whatever worldly ways she can.
Asked why he could repay his own father so fully, he explains that it was easy: before he ordained, his father was already firm in the five precepts. He tells a story of his father's honesty. Sent overseas by a Thai cement company to study, his father lived so frugally that he returned with much of his allowance unspent and handed it back. The Western manager was puzzled, saying no one had ever returned money before, and the company used it to buy him shares.
After Ajahn Dtun had been a monk for ten years he encouraged his father to ordain, and his father lived as a monk for sixteen years before dying at eighty.