your bridge home
Saints and Poets
He picks up an ordinary drinking glass and tells you it is already broken.
Ajahn Chah held up a glass, and said: this glass is already broken.
That is the thing everybody quotes. And I will tell you what he meant by it at the end.
Ajahn Chah was born in 1918 in a farming village near Ubon Ratchathani, in the poor north-east of Thailand. His parents grew rice. He became a novice at nine, and was fully ordained at twenty-one, in 1939.
And then he studied the books for some years, and was not satisfied.
And in 1946, when his father died, he did the thing that decided his life.
He walked out.
Ajahn Chah became a tudong monk, a wandering forest monk of the Thai tradition. Which meant no monastery. One robe. One bowl.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.