Introduction

Venerable Ajahn Chah was a master at using the apt and unusual simile to explain points of Dhamma in a memorable way, sometimes to answer questions, sometimes to provoke them. He was especially talented at exploiting the open-ended nature of the simile—in which some similarities are relevant and others are not—using a particular image to make one point in one context, and a very different point in another.

This book is a companion to In Simple Terms, an earlier collection of similes drawn from Ajahn Chah’s transcribed talks. Here, the majority of the passages come from a compilation made by Ajahn Jandee Kantasaro, one of Ajahn Chah’s students, entitled Khwaam Phid Nai Khwaam Thuuk (What’s Wrong in What’s Right). The title of this compilation is taken from a phrase that Ajahn Chah often used to describe the misuse of correct knowledge. Ajahn Jandee, in his introduction, illustrates the principle by telling of a man he once encountered who used the teaching on inconstancy to justify the fact that he never cleaned his truck.

Khwaam Phid Nai Khwaam Thuuk contains 186 short passages transcribed directly from recordings of Ajahn Chah’s talks and conversations. From these passages, I first selected those containing similes and then eliminated any that were totally redundant with the same or better expressions of the same simile either in this collection or in In Simple Terms. This left 94 passages. To provide a full complement of 108—11 x 22 x 33, a number that, in the Buddhist tradition, signifies completeness—I chose an extra 14 similes from a range of Ajahn Chah’s other recorded talks and conversations, and then arranged the resulting collection so that the passages would comment and build on one another.