Long before he was a monk — before he had even heard the word — a restless boy in Kampala was learning to be still. His mother kept a saying close: “If you have nothing to say, keep quiet. If you have nothing to do, go to sleep.” But the boy could not sleep. On the long, hot afternoons when she sent him to nap, he lay awake instead, watching her breathe, listening to the silence settle over the room. He did not know it then, but he was already meditating — and that ordinary stillness, learned at his mother’s side, would one day carry him across the world and home again. … In a country that had never seen a Buddhist monk, he became a walking riddle. Children fled, certain he would eat them. … What he did with all that fear is the quiet centre of his story. … “It is always good,” he says, “to return good for the evil that comes with human limitations.” …
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This story originally appeared in DailyGood