ing to the monastery, he would receive another dose of ‘strong
medicine’, in the form of another scolding, to apply to his sore. A
great many monks and novices lived with Ãcariya Mun and most
of them had such festering sores. If one monk didn’t get a dose
of his medicine then another did. They went to the village and
were confronted by attractive sights and sounds until they were
unable to stay out of trouble. Consequently, upon their return to
the monastery, when the opportunity arose, Ãcariya Mun would
have another go at them. It’s natural for someone with kilesas to
have a mixture of good and bad thoughts. Ãcariya Mun did not
give a lecture for every bad thought. What he criticized was the
tendency to think in harmful ways. He wanted them to think in
terms of Dhamma, using mindfulness and wisdom, so that they
could free themselves from dukkha. He found that, instead of
easing their teacher’s burden with rightful thinking, monks pre-
ferred to think in ways that troubled him. Since many such monks
lived with him, there were scoldings nearly every evening.
All of this serves to illustrate that Ãcariya Mun’s subtle abil-
ity to know the thoughts of others was very real.^33 As for those
reprehensible thoughts, they did not arise intentionally but acci-
dentally, due to occasional lapses in mindfulness. Nevertheless, as
a teacher imparting knowledge and skill to his students, Ãcariya
Mun quickly sounded a warning when he noticed something
inappropriate, so that the perpetrator could become conscious of
his lapse and learn to be more self-controlled in the future. He
did not want his students to get trapped into such thinking again,
for it promotes habitual thought patterns that lead directly to mis-
fortune.
Ãcariya Mun’s teaching for the monks was thoroughly metic-
jacob rumans
(Jacob Rumans)
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