92. Stranger still

I’m sure you can imagine how thrilled the large surrounding crowd of lay people was to be present at this coincidental meeting of three great ajaans. This sort of opportunity isn’t easy to find. So two photographers from Surin starting taking as many pictures as they could.

When we were back on the bus for the trip home, the photographers saw that everyone was hungry for the pictures, so they announced that they would blow them up to 12” prints and sell them, with the proceeds going to help Jawm Phra Forest Monastery. I thought to myself that it wasn’t a very pretty thing to see a price put on an ajaan’s pictures with the purpose of selling them, but almost everyone on the bus placed an order.

When the photographers developed their film, they discovered that, of the more than twenty pictures they had gone to all that effort to take, all were totally blank, like a cloudless sky. That put an end to everyone’s hopes for the pictures and, as it turned out, that was the last meeting among those three great ajaans.