Shame & Acceptance
April 13, 2009
Ajaan Fuang would sometimes tell me the story of his childhood. He was born into a poor family and didn’t have many relatives. Many of them had died in a plague years before. He was orphaned at the age of eleven and was sent off to live in a monastery as what they called a dek wat, one of those boys who just hang around the monastery, help fix rice for the monks, and run errands. He had a little bit of an education, not much. And as he got into his teens, he began to realize that his life didn’t look all that promising. He didn’t have any connections, didn’t have much of an education. So he looked to the Dhamma. “This,” he said, “is the only way my life is going to have any meaning, is going to go anywhere at all.” As he said, “I must not have much merit, so I’ve got to make as much as I can.”