Story 1.
The story about ChimDada

Chimdada is a Vietnamese with Cambodian roots with very poor parents. At the age of 7 he became a monk at a Cambodian monastery at Soc Trang province (Soc Trang is located in the Mekong River Plains and is surrounded by Bac Lieu, Can Tho, and Tra Vinh provinces. The main ethnic communities living in Soc Trang are Kinh, Khmer (28%), and Hoa (8%).
At about the age of 13-14, on one occasion he and a fellow monk sneaked out of the monastery to the village where his fellow monk came from. His colleague knew the people who lived in the village very well and so helped to plot a plan whereby he would act as a fortune-teller in order to gain money deceitfully. Of course he was so accurate with his fortune-telling that he was so admired by the people in the village.
Unfortunately for him, at this time there was a family in the village who had just lost a buffalo who came asking him to tell them how to find it back. He embarrassingly postponed the fortune-telling saying that he would do it the following day.
That evening the two mischievous monks racked their brains to find a solution but to no avail. They both were continuously worried that they would be found out and that the whole village would curse them.
That night Chimdada could not sleep a wink but tossed and turned all night. He prayed to Buddha and to all the many gods he knew from custom folklore such as: the village chief spirit, the local earth god, and to all the genies and evil spirit to come to his rescue.
So tired he could not remember when he drifted off to sleep. Suddenly he saw himself floating just above the ground across many uncultivated fields and finally arrived in front of a rotten tree stump. He heard a voice from the tree stump telling him where the stolen buffalo was.
He awoke and before he could check the information he just received, the family who had lost the buffalo arrived and hurried him to tell them where the missing buffalo was. He told them the location that the voice in his dream revealed to him.
Unexpectedly, the owner found the buffalo at that location. So he was rewarded someh money which helped the two young monks to buy tickets for the journey back to the monastery.
From then on he was renowned for fortune-telling, with very accurate predictions (even now he is still fortune-telling to earn money.

Old_Guru would like to our readers to guess who the spirit in the dream with the voice was? How could that spirit openly compete with Buddha Sakyamuni for one of his disciples and also help him in his fortune tellings, as well as using the money he earned to learn magic with over 90 famous Cambodian gurus ( which I will talk about in future articles) and help him to become a Head monk (Abbot) of a large Cambodian pagoda. So, is the spirit a good or evil one?

Until next time
Old_guru 08-12-08

(Post for Ngoc xuan)