About This Teaching
A visiting scientist who had meditated told Ajahn Chah that science was a more effective and verifiable path to truth than Buddhist training. He was unimpressed, comparing the claim to a man with a short arm in a hole concluding the hole ends at his fingertips, or a short-sighted man denying airplanes exist.
At a time when Western-style degrees conferred great status in Thailand, he challenged the belief that book learning is always good. Some people study until they become too smart, attached to views and self-importance, holding others in contempt. He urged bringing things inward: seeing oneself in a farmer, an old person, a confused child. As a Thai proverb says, one hair before the eye can hide a mountain.
Educated people were often hard to teach, he observed, because they studied to accumulate knowledge rather than remove defilement: if they hold a degree, so do their defilements. He likened them to a vulture soaring high that swoops down to gorge on a rotting corpse.