About Ajahn Sombat
A champion worrier, made to sit still.
Ajahn Sombat is ninety years old. For sixty-five years he has been a Buddhist monk of the Thai Forest Tradition, and since 1971 he has lived on the same forested hill in northeast Thailand.
Every morning, after the almsround, he sits on a wooden platform outside his hut and listens to whatever people bring him. For each worry, he has a story.
- 90
- years old
- 65
- years as a monk
- 1971
- on the hill since
His story
He did not want to be a monk.
He was born in 1936 in a rice farming village near the Mekong, the fourth of seven children, and worked the paddies barefoot from the age of six. His mother named him Sombat, which means “treasure,” because he was born the year the rains came back after two failed harvests. He likes to say he has never lived up to it.
At eighteen he left for Bangkok, loaded boats on the Chao Phraya and drove for a rice merchant, and spent those years lying awake at night, worrying about money, about being cheated, about the future.
At twenty-five he went home, and his mother asked him to ordain for three months, as Thai men do. He never took the robes off. For the next ten years he walked barefoot through the forests of the northeast with a bowl and a cloth umbrella. That is where most of his stories come from.
A morning on the hill
First, a cup of tea.
No visitor may tell him their problem until they have sat with him for the length of one cup of tea. Most of them, he says, have solved it by then.
He keeps a small notebook of every worry people have brought him. Worry about children has been winning for fifty years. He talks to the mango tree he planted in 1972, and considers “Que Sera, Sera,” taught to him by a Peace Corps volunteer in 1968, a complete summary of the Dhamma.
“People climb my hill with every worry. For each one, I have a story.”
The book
Lessons from the Monk
If you want to worry less, rest more easily and find more peace in ordinary days, this book is for you. It holds 50 stories from his sixty-five years as a monk, each one chosen to carry a piece of Buddhist wisdom, and after every story he shows what you can learn from it for your own life.
Normally $20.00 Price $12.50