About This Teaching
Ajahn Chah was born in 1918 into a respected rice-farming family in an Isan village, the fifth of eleven children. The account describes the customs around his birth and a village life of shared houses on stilts, generosity and no notion of privacy.
As a boy he was a natural, good-humoured leader who settled his friends' quarrels rather than fighting. He loved to play at being a monk, sitting on an old bamboo bed with a cloth draped like a robe while friends offered him fruit and water and he gave them the five precepts.
The reading pictures him herding water buffalo, chasing frogs and catching cicadas with jackfruit sap. In later years Ajahn Chah believed many of his illnesses were the kammic results of such casual cruelty to animals in childhood.