..续本文上一页ame very impressed and began to follow me in throngs. When the time came to leave, some of them — both men and women — began to cry.

　　While I was at Svay Chek there had been one person who held me in great esteem and who brought his daughter to talk with me every day. 7 His daughter told me that she was unmarried. The tone of their voices told me that they wanted me to settle down there. They”d be willing to help me in every way, they said. Just please stay. As the days passed, we seemed to take more and more of a liking to each other. When I could see that things were beginning to get out of hand, I realized that I”d have to be going, so I said goodbye and headed south for Sisophon.

　　From Sisophon we went on foot to Battambang, where we stayed in the cemetery at Wat Ta-aek, about a kilometer from town. In Battambang I met a lay man who knew Khun Amnaad Amnueykit. He gave me a hearty welcome and introduced me to a lot of people in town. After staying there a good while, we said goodbye and headed for the province of Siem Reap. We camped for a while at a cemetery in the forest, where a number of people came to donate food. From there we left for Angkor Wat, where we stayed and wandered about, looking at all the ancient ruins.

　　We spent two nights there. The first day we had a meal, the second day we decided not to, because there was hardly anyone to place food in our bowls when we went out for alms.

　　Leaving Angkor Wat we headed for Phnom Penh. Along the way we climbed a huge, tall mountain: a nice, quiet secluded place with plenty of drinking water. The mountain was called Phnom Kulen — Wild Lychee Mountain. At the summit were scores of wild lychee trees, bearing bright red fruits. About 20 small villages surrounded the base of the mountain. We stayed there a few days in a Vietnamese temple that had a Buddha image carved into the rock of a large overhanging cliff. While there, I took advantage of the opportunity to explore the nearby caves.

　　Near the temple was a village of about ten households that we were able to depend on for alms. Staying in the temple were two people — a Cambodian monk, about 50 years old and with only one good eye, and a lay follower. Whenever I had nothing else to, I”d sit and discuss Dhamma with the monk. As for the caves, there were two of them: one where I stayed with my following, and the other, about ten meters from the Buddha image, where a large tiger lived. At the time, though, since it was April, the tiger had gone down to live in the lowland forests. When the rains began, it would come back to stay in the cave. One afternoon I left the cave and returned to stay at the Vietnamese temple. Altogether we stayed there for about a week. We then left, going down the west side of the mountain. It took ten hours of climbing to get through the mountains before reaching the flatlands.

　　We then traveled around to the south of the mountain range and stopped in a forest near a village. There a lay person came to tell me a number of strange stories that really took my fancy. This is the gist of what he had to say: About 30 kilometers from the village were three mountains covered with streams and open forests. The strange thing about the mountains was that if anyone went to cut any of the trees, they would either die a violent death, become seriously ill, or suffer misfortune of one sort or another. Sometimes on the lunar sabbath, in the middle of the night, a bright light would come shooting out of the summit of the third mountain. It seemed that a number of times monks had gone to spend the Rains Retreat on top of the third mountain, but had had to leave in the middle of the retreat, either because of strong winds, rains or lightning strikes.

　　This being the case, he wanted me to climb to the top of the mountai…

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