About This Teaching
Illness and pain accompanied Ajahn Chah throughout his life. The account opens with his image of a wild horse: hold the reins while it strains, but if it bolts, let go or your hand will be torn off. The body is the same. Care for it with medicine, but when it runs to its end, let it go and simply be the one who knows. With right view, he said, one can be at ease right where the pain is.
The narrative follows his health from his forest years: fevers, malaria and above all his teeth. He would tie a tooth to a rock with string and hurl the rock into the forest. In 1967 he had all sixteen remaining teeth pulled at once. When the injection barely worked, he calmed his mind until the pain gathered into one place and almost vanished. Later he laughed at himself for polishing those teeth with ash as a boy, "in love with my own bones."
When an eye infection made a companion cry, he told him to laugh. He traced the pain to boyhood kamma of piercing geckos' eyes.