About This Teaching
A Western monk who served as Ajahn Chah's attendant remembered him as "unshakable like a mountain." Before dawn he brought water and a towel, watched the teacher sit with his false teeth out like a grandmother, and in the afternoons helped with his bath while listening to him talk with visitors. Thai monks approached him with near terror, while to Westerners he was usually a kindly old man able to stir faith, fear or doubt at will.
Ajahn Chah turned the monk's own episodes into teaching stories. When he moved huts to escape buffalo noise and then moved back, it became a lesson in the mind's restlessness and the need to know one's mind. When the hot season made him dream of donating an ice machine, his realisation that the Buddha lived in the forest without ice became a story about contemplating situations to end unnecessary suffering.