..续本文上一页aken aback by the amount of space Ajaan Lee gives to signs, portents and other supranatural events. Things of this sort tend to be downplayed in the laundered versions of Theravada Buddhism usually presented in the West — in which the Buddha often comes off as a Bertrand Russell or Fritz Perls in robes — and admittedly they are not the essence of what the Buddha had to teach. Still, they are an area that many people encounter when they explore the mind and where they often go astray for lack of reliable guidance. Ajaan Lee had a great deal of experience in this area, and has many useful lessons to teach. He shows by example which sorts of experiences to treat simply as curiosities, which to take seriously, and how to test the experiences that seem to have important messages.

　　In my many conversations with his students, I have learned that Ajaan Lee limited his narrative to only the milder events of this sort, and often deals so much in understatement that it is possible to read through some of the incidents and not realize that anything out of the ordinary is going on at all. When the book was first printed after his death, many of his followers were disappointed in it for just this reason, and a number of them got together to write an expanded version of Ajaan Lee”s life that included many of the more amazing events they had experienced in his presence. Fortunately — from Ajaan Lee”s perspective at least — this manuscript has since disappeared.

　　To be frank, one of the things that first drew me to Ajaan Lee, aside from the clarity and subtlety of his teachings, were the tales I had heard of his powers and personality. My teacher, Ajaan Fuang Jotiko, was a close disciple of his, and much of my early education as a monk consisted of listening to his stories of his adventures with Ajaan Lee. For me, if the Autobiography had lacked the drama of the event in Wat Supat, or the panache of his encounter with Mae Fyyn (having her light him a cigarette as one of her first acts after he had cured her paralysis), it wouldn”t have been Ajaan Lee.

　　However, I should say something here about the miracles surrounding the relics that play a large role in the latter part of the book. There is an old tradition in Buddhism that many of the bodily relics of the Buddha and his arahant disciples transformed into small pellet-like objects that come and go of their own accord. The Theravadin version of this tradition dates back at least to medieval Sri Lanka, and may go much further back than that. There are old books that classify the various types of relics by shape and color, identifying which ones come from which parts of the Buddha”s body and which ones from which disciple. The tradition is still very much alive in Thailand, especially now that the bones of many of the dead masters of the forest ascetic tradition have turned into relics. As for relics of the Buddha, I have talked to many people who have seen them come and go, and I have had such experiences myself, although nothing as dramatic as Ajaan Lee”s.

　　I mention all this not to make a case for the existence and provenance of the relics, but simply to point out that Ajaan Lee was not alone in having such experiences, and that the rational approach of Theravada Buddhism has its uncanny side as well.

　　At any rate, my feeling is that Ajaan Lee mentioned the issue of the relics for two reasons:

　　1) He was compelled to because it was a part of the controversy that surrounded his name during his lifetime, and his students would have felt that something was amiss if he didn”t provide some explanation of the topic. The incident he mentions at Wat Supat was not the only time that relics appeared while he was teaching meditation to groups of people, and in fact he once mentioned to Ajaan Fuang that the…

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