My Mind Is A Water Buffalo

At one time in Thailand, a man was taking his water buffalo out to the fields to graze. The water buffalo became very excited and ran off. The man tried to stop him.

Just try stopping a water buffalo. Think how big a water buffalo is. It’s huge, and this was just a small Thai farmer. He held onto the rope. The rope became twisted around his finger and pulled his finger off!

He came into the monastery missing half a finger. Obviously, there was blood everywhere, and quite a lot of pain. The abbot took him to the local hospital and got him patched up. The farmer was okay afterwards.

But that was a great metaphor which he gave us. The metaphor was that you are foolish to try to stop a water buffalo; it will just pull your fingers off.

Your husband, your wife, your children, and sometimes your mind are like a water buffalo. If you try and stop them, what happens is that something is ‘pulled off’, and you get a lot of pain and suffering.

What happens if you do let the water buffalo go? The water buffalo only runs about half a kilometre or so down the road. It doesn’t go that far. It stops and settles itself down, and then you can walk gently up to it and pull it back again. It’s stopped, and it’s easy to control.

Sometimes that’s what you need to do with husbands, and wives, and kids. They run off, and then they stop and you can pull them in.

Often, the mind is like that in meditation; it’s running off into thoughts and fantasies. Let it go. Don’t let it pull your finger off. Once it’s gone a little way down the road, when it’s stopped and it’s had its little bit of fun, okay now bring it back to the silence.


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The best thing that you can do for the whole world, the best gift you can give to others, is to become Enlightened, so that you can have huge compassion and huge resources of wisdom to share with others.

You become Enlightened for your own sake, and for the sake of others. There is no difference between these two ways. People make all these differences.

So go out there into the world, and for your own sake become Enlightened, and become Enlightened for the sake of others.


Extract from: Practising in the World, by Venerable Ajahn Brahmavamso