Who Will Feed the Mice?

by Ajahn AmaroAbhayagiri Buddhist Monastery

A reflection on a mother’slove and inspiration.

To the memory of

Pat Horner

1920–2003

Who WillFeed the Mice?

Who WillFeed the Mice?

by Ajahn Amaro

Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery

Who Will Feed the Mice?

©2004, Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery

Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery16201 Tomki RoadRedwood Valley, CA 95470www.abhayagiri.org(707) 485-1630

Edited by Joseph CurranTape transcription by Joyce RadeletDesign and production by Dennis Crean

Copyright is reserved only when reprinting for sale.Permission to reprint for free distribution is herebygiven as long as no changes are made to the original.

This book has been sponsored for free distribution.

Front cover: Figurine sculpted by Pat Horner in 1939, when shewas in her late teens; photo by Ajahn Amaro. Inside front cover: PatHorner with Stardust, 1966; photographer unknown. Inside backcover: Pat Horner with Ajahn Amaro in the garden of her cottagein Kent, mid-1990’s; the shed to which the mice were banished isin the far right-hand corner; photo by Jane Hill. Back cover: PatHorner with Ajahn Amaro at Ocean Beach, San Francisco, March1998; photo by Tony Hill.

This small book is lovingly dedicated tothe memory of my mother, Pat Horner.

May the afterglow of goodness thatshe left in the world continue to shine

for many generations.

“The early teachers” is a term for motherand father. “The early deities” is a termfor mother and father. “Those worthy ofworship” is a term for mother and father.And why? Parents are of great help to theirchildren, they bring them up, feed themand show them the world.

—Anguttara Nikaya 4.63

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The following is based on a talk given onMarch 29, 2003, at Abhayagiri Monastery,Redwood Valley, California.

This is probably the last Saturdaynight talk that I’ll be giving forquite a while. As the resident com-

munity is aware, but visitors probably arenot, I received news from my sister in En-gland that our mother is extremely ill, andthe signs are that she won’t live for morethan a few months. So I plan to be flyingto England in a week.

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The Buddha once said that if you wereto carry your parents around with you fortheir whole lives—your father on oneshoulder and your mother on the other—even to the point where they are losingtheir faculties and their excrement is run-ning down your back, this would not re-pay your debt of gratitude to them. Butyou could repay the debt if your parentswere not virtuous and you establishedthem in virtue; if they weren’t wise andyou established them in wisdom; if theywere stingy and you established them ingenerosity; if they had no faith in the spiri-tual path and you led them to it.(Anguttara Nikaya 2.32)

One day many years ago, I spoke ofthis teaching very matter-of-factly with mymother, assuming that she would be as

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impressed as I was with how highly theBuddha praised the role that parents playin one’s life. And, as she almost invariablydid anytime I tried to spout some spiri-tual statement, she responded, “What ut-ter balls!” She was very good at keepingme level, as I can get somewhat airy-fairyat times. Her point, though, was that it isn’ta one-way process. She said, “Why do youtalk about it in terms of being in debt?What could be more wonderful and satis-fying than bringing children into the worldand watching them grow? It isn’t like a jobthat you need to be paid for.” I was reallyimpressed by that.

For obvious reasons, I’ve been reflect-ing a lot recently on my mother’s influenceon my life, and the thought arose that, un-til I met the Dhamma when I was twenty-

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one, she was the main—if not the only—source of my being able to see that whichwas noble, worthy, and good in the world.I didn’t grow up in a religious household—England is a very nonreligious country—but both my parents were very goodpeople, especially my mother. She reallyembodies unselfishness, kindness, and gen-erosity—and a tremendous harmlessnesstoward all living beings; she is physicallyunable to hurt any creature. When I won-der where I got the inspiring influences orthe inclinations toward that which is goodand wholesome and useful, I realize thatthey came almost entirely from her.

After my mother’s father died, she toldme that she’d received much of her guid-ance and direction from him. She deeplyrespected her inheritance of his gentleness,

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self-effacement, and benevolence towardall things, and she passed on those quali-ties. That was really my main spiritual in-fluence before I went to Thailand: any-thing that kept me operating somewherein the neighborhood of balanced humanbehavior was thanks to her. So I’ve devel-oped a great feeling of gladness and grati-tude toward her that I was fortunateenough to receive this.

Another realization that has becomeclearer as I’ve been meeting people andteaching over the years is that thosewho’ve come from broken homes, or whohave had very unstable family situations,assume that life is unsteady and unpre-dictable; they often have a deep sense ofinsecurity. I remember being struck dur-ing my first few years of meeting and liv-

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ing with such people, and there are a greatmany in this world, that I never wouldhave conceived of the experiences they’dhad, let alone had them myself. Eventhough my parents had plenty of faultsand our lives were not easy, an astonish-ing stability and reliability had beenpresent, particularly on my mother’s part.(My father was often kept busy, first withthe farm and then travelling with hiswork, and besides, I think it was RobertBly who defined the Industrial Age fatheras “that which sits in the living room andrustles the newspaper.”)

I’ve begun to reflect on the sense ofsecurity that arises from this intuition thatlife has a reliable basis. In stable families,parents impart this. If one doesn’t have it,then one has to find it later on in other

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ways. For a child, the parents are a kind ofsubstitute for the Dhamma, that basisupon which everything rests and aroundwhich everything revolves.

I didn’t always get on with my parents.But they never argued in front of us andthey were always there, establishing a con-tinuity of presence and support. Andthinking about that, I’ve seen that theyreflected the qualities of Dhamma that areso crucial: Dhammaniyamata—the order-liness or regularity or patterned-ness of theDhamma; and Dhammatthitata—the sta-bility of the Dhamma.

In a way, that’s the job or role that par-ents have, the archetype they embody: be-ing stable, the rock that things rest upon—and exhibiting that quality of regularity,orderliness, or predictability as the prin-

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ciple that can be relied on and that we canbe guided by.

Incidentally, I was the only son and theyoungest child, so I can also see the down-side of having an ever-present, totally lov-ing mother: you might actually believe thatyou are the center of the universe! I sus-pect I can also attribute, can also “blame,”a certain amount of my narcissistic ten-dencies, an over-inflated view of myself,on my always-caring mother.

My parents tried very hard to look af-ter us, but we lived on a small farm andhad gone bankrupt when I was about six.After we sold the farm my father eked outa living as a small-time reporter for a dogmagazine, and even though my sisters andI were sent to private schools, we were onlyable to attend them thanks to scholarships

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and my mother’s parents shelling outwhatever fees had to be paid.

When I was about twelve, some of mymother’s extraordinary qualities becameapparent to me in a very powerful way. Iwas a growing lad who had a cookedbreakfast every morning before going offto school and would come back in the lateafternoon and then eat cream doughnutsfor tea and an hour later scarf down hugeamounts of food at supper. I was turninginto a burly youth. And every afternoonmy mother waited in her car at the busstop at the end of the lane, a mile awayfrom our home. One day I got off the busand she wasn’t there. I thought, “That’sstrange.” And I walked—I thought maybeshe was a bit late—and walked and walkedbut she didn’t appear. I got all the way back

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to the house and she wasn’t there either.When my sisters returned from school, wefound out that our mother had collapsedand been hospitalized; she was found tobe suffering from malnutrition.

For months she’d been living only ontea and toast. None of us had noticed—because we’d all been so busy gobbling ourmeals—that she’d been trying to make thefood go a bit further by not eating. She’dnever made a fuss, never said anything. Andthe next we knew she was in the hospital. Ithit me like a ton of bricks that she wouldactually starve herself while feeding all ofus and not complain. And when we wentto visit her in the hospital she apologizedas if she were wasting our time! After all,we could have been doing our homeworkor out somewhere enjoying ourselves.

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I think that was the first time I becameaware of the kind of qualities she had andtried to be more alert to the possibilitiesof following her extremely powerful andnoble example.

Just the other day I was reminded ofanother significant story about her. OneChristmas she had been given a beautifulnew vacuum cleaner by one of my sisters.She was very proud of it, as she had nothad a new vacuum since her wedding inthe early ’50s.

By this time (in the ’80s) the familywas not in such dire economic straits, somy mother went on holiday in January, asshe often did, because she liked to get a bitof sunshine; she would become very de-pressed in the damp, gray, endless Englishwinters and would go off on a cheap pack-

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age tour and stay for a week on a Mediter-ranean island. Soon after she came backfrom this holiday she was doing a bit ofhousekeeping—the place was a little dustyand needed a going over—so she wheeledout the vacuum cleaner, picked up thehose, and a cascade of hazelnuts camepouring out. “What!?!” she thought. “Ha-zelnuts? Where on earth did these comefrom?” And then she remembered—be-cause she was a great provider for the lo-cal fauna—the large bird feeder in whichshe put nuts, grains, and seeds for the dif-ferent birds and other creatures. Shelooked at the feeder and saw that it wasempty. The whole half-a-year’s worth ofhazelnuts that she’d put in it was com-pletely gone. But there they were all overher living room floor. Furthermore, a neat

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little hole had been chewed in the hose ofher brand new vacuum cleaner. She real-ized that the mice had found the birdfeeder, removed the nuts from it, andtransported them into the apparent safetyof the long dark tunnel of the hose, fillingthe entire length of it. And now her newvacuum cleaner wouldn’t work properlybecause of the hole in its tube.

I arrived for a visit just after thistrauma had occurred and was given twojobs, one of which was repairing the hose;the other was evicting the mice. Mymother had had just a bit too much. “I’vegot so few nice things,” she said, “and nowmy beautiful new vacuum cleaner is ru-ined. Those mice have got to go!”

As my mother’s eyes are not very good,I began hunting the mice. She figured they

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had to be in the laundry room, where shekept a pile of old clothes and blankets andtowels and such, because, along with look-ing after animals, she also had a gardenthat she was very fond of and, whenever afrost was due, she would go out in the eve-nings to cover all the bushes with blanketsand towels—and occasionally with expen-sive dresses that my sister had bought herin London (and which my sister, to hergreat chagrin, sometimes spotted drapedover the azaleas). My mother was prettysure the mice were nesting under this stackof cloth.

As it happened she was quite rightand, about 16 layers down, I indeed founda little cluster of blinking and startledfield mice. We scooped them up and shesaid, “Take them out to the garden shed.”

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There she had made a nice little rodentbed—naturally she couldn’t bear just todump them on the concrete. So now shewas feeling relieved and her spleen wasfully vented.

That night, however, she couldn’t sleepbecause of thinking about those poor littlemice who were now so cold out in the shed.She had a very restless night and, early thenext day, she began taking food out tothem. My mother then would set out smalldishes of hazelnuts and oatmeal every dayso that the little creatures would make itthrough till early spring, when they couldgather food for themselves. She has a verycompassionate nature, even if she occa-sionally goes a bit overboard.

The one creature that my motherdoesn’t like very much is the cat—largely

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because of how cats hunt and kill birds andother small creatures. The way cats teasetheir prey really breaks her heart. On oneoccasion, however, when all us childrenhad grown up and gone away, and my fa-ther was traveling a lot and she was by her-self, a very ragged tomcat came aroundand started following her. It looked so for-lorn, so messed up, that she started feed-ing it. And the news spread pretty fast:“There’s a soft touch down at FarthingGreen Farm.” Within eighteen months shehad twenty-three cats. Some were visitors.But once this tom got a bit of bulk backon and was in full breeding form, he pro-duced offspring with any of the female catsthat came around. So here was this bigtom—my mother named him FatherFlynn, although I’m not quite sure where

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the name came from—and his partnersand a vast array of offspring.

Finally my mother realized she had todo something or the cats would go on re-producing ad infinitum. So she gatheredthem all up and took them to the animalrefuge, where she knew they would befound good homes. On a farm if a cat haskittens, the farmer usually just puts themin a bag and takes them to the pond anddrowns them. There was absolutely no waymy mother could do that.

So having a vast compassionate natureis a very beautiful thing, but it can cause acertain amount of distress, as most of ushave experienced ourselves.

� � �

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And now my mother is 82 years old andher body seems to be reaching its

limit. How does one hold that? How doesone use the practice to relate to the situa-tion—to bring balance to the heart and tobe of benefit to her and to others?

The wonderful Thai forest masterLuang Por Duhn teaches us that the citta,the heart, is the Buddha. “Don’t look forthe Buddha anywhere else,” he says, “theaware quality of the heart is the Buddha.”This is an extraordinarily forthright, clear,completely nondualistic teaching.

The problem that arises when we loveor hate someone is that there is a polarity,a duality, that the heart easily can be drawninto: there’s me here and there’s the otherout there. And the more intense the emo-tion, the greater the feeling of duality.

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Although we can be very focused ongenerating loving-kindness toward an-other being, there’s always the matter ofalso sustaining the liberating insight thatrecognizes selflessness, anatta, that seesthat all dhammas are not-self and thatthe impression of a self-existent, separateentity is merely an impression basedupon ignorance and the activity of thesenses. This conundrum can be a focusof practice.

In this light it’s interesting to reflecton the great masters and the relationshipsbetween their spiritual practices and theirfamilies. Ajahn Chah was recognized as ahighly accomplished being, and one of hisfirst disciples when he started at Wat PahPong was his mother. She moved out ofher village, was ordained as a nun, and

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went to live in the forest with him and hiscluster of monks. When she died, AjahnChah made a great ceremony of her fu-neral—it was a huge affair—and he or-dained eighty or ninety people during theevent to make merit for her. Moreover, themain temple, the ordination hall, at WatPah Pong was built on the exact spot wherehis mother was cremated.

Sri Ramana Maharshi was also said tobe a supremely detached being; he wasfamed for being so equanimous that ratssometimes nibbled on his legs when he satin samadhi and he allowed doctors to treathim because it made them feel better. Simi-larly to the life of Ajahn Chah, his motherbecame his disciple and went to live at thebottom of Arunachala Mountain while hewas in a cave at the top. After she died, he

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too built his ashram on the place whereshe was cremated.

So here are these two highly accom-plished, extraordinarily detached beingswho both built their temples on theirmothers’ ashes. Of course this may haveno significance whatsoever, but to me itindicates that they’re not saying that “Allsankharas are impermanent, my motheris just a formation in nature like any other,and it’s no big deal.” There’s a mysterioustwining here of both the realization of ul-timate truth and the recognition of theunique quality of that personal connec-tion on the material plane. It’s almost as ifthe mother is the primordial symbol of thesource of reality, as she is the source of lifeon the physical plane. After all, in the Westwe freely use the term “Mother Nature,”

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and “nature” is another word for“Dhamma.” So perhaps it is natural andperfectly appropriate to accord this beingwith whom we have a unique relationshipa unique position among all the dimen-sions of life that we experience.

At this time, I have found myself prac-ticing, first of all, to establish in the mindas clear an insight of the nondual as pos-sible—or you might say to establish theheart in pure knowing—and then I’vebeen bringing up a phrase or question, aninvestigational statement, such as, “Whereis my mother?” or “What is my mother?”The purpose of this process is to let go ofany habitual identification, to break downthat notion of myself here and the otherover there, and to open the heart to thepresent moment.

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Then, within that basic space of aware-ness, I consciously bring forth the inten-tions and emotions of metta, karuna, mu-dita, and upekkha—loving-kindness, com-passion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.

There needs, however, to be a balanc-ing within that, because as soon as thoseintentions or qualities are aroused, one canslip back into the idea of me over heresending it to you over there, which is adualism. But there’s a way that Dhammapractice can guide us toward both seeingthings as completely empty (the ultimatetruth of things) and respecting the con-vention that there’s a being here and a be-ing there (the relative truth of things). Onone level that convention pertains. But it’sonly a partial truth, a half-truth, and itexists within the context of Dhamma.

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One of the ways that the Buddha spokeabout stream entry—the irreversiblebreakthrough to realization of theDhamma—was as a “change of lineage.”The phrase relates to the idea that “I am apersonality; this is me, this is mine, this iswhat I am.” This belief is calledsakkayaditthi, or “personality view.” And aslong as “I am the body,” then of course PatHorner and Tom Horner are my parents.But if the body is not-self, and perceptionsare not-self, feelings are not-self, the per-sonality is not-self, what does that sayabout Mr. and Mrs. Horner? What doesthat mean? If this body is not-self, then thelineage of the body can’t be the whole story.

This is a subtle point of Dhamma andit’s easy to grasp it in the wrong way, as Imost painfully did when I was a young

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novice in Thailand. I can’t believe I reallydid this, but I recall that, in a letter I sentto my mother from Thailand in ’78, I ac-tually wrote, “You know, in truth, you’renot really my mother.” Something in medoesn’t want to remember having donethat, but I have a sinking feeling that I did.

Anyway, we exchanged a number ofrather tense letters in those days, when Iwas “full of the light” in Thailand, but thisone certainly represented the nadir. In ret-rospect it was pretty awful and very em-barrassing. When my mother received thisparticular inspired declaration, shepointed out that she definitely was mymother since certainly nobody else was.She wrote, “I care about you because youare my son, not because you are a Bud-dhist monk—compris? ”

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Even at that time I realized that thiswas a totally appropriate response fromher. I wasn’t taking hold of the principlecorrectly. However, when that insight ispresent and we don’t pick it up wrongly,we can genuinely see this change of lin-eage, without getting the relative and theultimate planes confused.

There is that relationship with ourparents in this flow of karmic formations,but the lineage of our true reality is seento be fundamentally rooted in theDhamma. That’s the source, the origin, thebasis. Rather than thinking of one’s physi-cal parents as the origin, we can have theclear realization that that’s just part of thesituation. It’s the Uncreated, the Un-formed, the Unborn, the Unconditioned

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that’s the genuine source, the genuine ori-gin, the basis, the ground of reality.

We can fully respect the conventionand we can base our practice on the in-sight that all sankharas arise and cease, thatall dhammas are not-self. There’s nothingto get heated about, nothing to get carriedaway by; it’s just life doing its dance. Theheart can remain serene, stable, clear, andbright. Which, of course, is what makes itpossible for us to be of benefit to others,whether they be our parents, our children,our teachers, our students, . . . or the mice.

� � �

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Pat Horner passed away peacefully onJuly 16, 2003. She had pancreatic can-

cer but was largely able to remain active andindependent until she died. During her lastswim at her local pool, at the end of June,she was chagrined that she could manageonly twenty lengths in half an hour (ratherthan her usual twenty-four), and ten daysbefore the end she was out in her underwearand a raincoat at midnight, rescuing afavourite plant from a snail attack broughton by a sudden rain shower. She was alsostill solving tricky crossword clues up to thetime that she slipped into unconsciousness,three days before she died.

She passed away at home in her ownbed, with myself and her two daughters, Kateand Jane, as well as her son-in-law, Tony,whom she loved as a second son, at her side.

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She is buried close to a favorite ancient cop-per beech in Sherborne, Dorset, with a smallbut bright flower garden on her grave.

if there are any heavens, my motherwill (all by herself) have

one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor afragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley butit will be a heaven of blackred roses

—e. e. cummings

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About the Author

Ajahn Amaro was born J. C. J. Horner inTenterden, Kent, England, in 1956, theyoungest of three children. At the time hisparents owned a small farm with severalhorses and dogs, growing apples and a fewcrops, and raising pigs and chickens. He be-gan his monastic training in the forest mon-asteries of northeast Thailand with AjahnChah in 1978. He continued his trainingunder Ajahn Sumedho, first at ChithurstMonastery in West Sussex, England, and laterat Amaravati Buddhist Centre outside ofLondon, where he lived for ten years. In Juneof 1996, Ajahn Amaro moved to Californiato establish Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery,where he currently serves as co-abbot.

To the memory of

Pat Horner

1920–2003

Who Will Feed the Mice?

by Ajahn AmaroAbhayagiri Buddhist Monastery

A reflection on a mother’slove and inspiration.