Don't Worry, Be Grumpy

How to Catch a Mango

In my first few months at Wat Pah Pong monastery with my teacher, Ajahn Chah, he would repeat the following story again and again. It was such nonsense that I dismissed it as some cultural anomaly. Yet somehow I remembered it. Later in my life as a monk, I recognized the metaphor as the perfect description of how enlightenment happens, offered by the most brilliant master I ever met.

Wat Pah Pong is a mango orchard, whose trees were planted by the Buddha. The trees are now mature, with thousands of ripe mangoes ready to be eaten. Because of the great wisdom and compassion of the Buddha, monks and nuns today, and lay followers too, don’t need to climb the tree to get a mango. Nor do they need to throw sticks up, or shake the tree, to get a mango to fall.

All one needs to do is to sit perfectly still under the mango tree, open a hand, and a mango will fall into it.

Such is the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha.

I knew mango trees. If you just sat underneath a mango tree, you would have to wait many days for a mango to fall. The birds would probably eat them all first. Moreover, if one did actually fall, it would more likely drop on my bald head, knowing my luck, than into my hand. This was a stupid simile!

Now I realize that it was I who was stupid. Nothing is gained in the spiritual life when you go “shaking the tree” or “throwing up sticks” or “climbing the tree” to make things happen. When you learn to be perfectly still, without a desire in the world, and open up your heart with unconditional love, only then do the mangoes of enlightenment fall softly into your hand.