Ajahn Chah … spent… a very brief but significant time with Venerable Ajahn Mun, the most outstanding meditation Master of the ascetic, forest-dwelling tradition. Following his time with Venerable Ajahn Mun, he spent a number of years traveling around Thailand, spending his time in forests and charnel grounds, ideal places for developing meditation practice.
At length he came within the vicinity of the village of his birth, and when word got around that he was in the area, he was invited to set up a monastery at the Pa Pong forest, a place at this time reputed to be the habitat of wild animals and ghosts….
In 1966 the first westerner came to stay at Wat Pa Pong (Wat=temple), Venerable Sumedho Bhikkhu. From that time on, the number of foreign people who came to Ajahn Chah began steadily to increase, until in 1975, the first branch monastery for western and other non-Thai nationals, Wat Pa Nanachat, was set up with Venerable Ajahn Sumedho as abbot.
Web: <ksc15.th.com/petsei/biography.htm>
leaf forms trembling
in the forest pool of marble
where monks at night
once listened for tiger’s breath
we watch a long green snake (a python)
loop itself through the ironwork
then belly-flop – phlat!!
into the dry teak leaves
behind the sun-spattered terra cotta Buddha
impossible for some minutes
to keep eyes closed
to stop listening
for slither
insuperable biases of language
one side talking spirits and devas
the other of superstition
I only know
that when I come back by tuk-tuk three-wheeled taxi
and step through the forest gate
my pace slows
I stop looking
for the purple sunbirds
as I feel breathed into me
something from beyond this
linguistic aporia difficulty, straits (Greek)
around us on all sides
the slow creaking of the tall bamboos
big leaves you can almost hear
when they zigzag down through the butterflies
from the dipterocarpus and strangler figs
in the almost sunless gloom
the darkness of the forest
opening the darkness within us
the wat once walled
inside the forest
as Thailand in Buddhism
and now the forest
or what is left of the forest
walled inside the wat
The Thai student from Cornell
who interviewed elderly monks
about the thudong tradition ascetic practice
wrote in her Ph.D. thesis
Between 1950 and 1975
the US provided Thailand
with $650 billion in support
of economic development Tiyavanich 368
dams golf courses and tourist resorts Tiyavanich 244
In the 1960s, nearly 60%
of the country was forested
and now 17% TIMEasia.com 8/21/02
until in November 1988
rain falling on denuded hillsides
killed hundreds of people Tiyavanich 245
logging since then illegal
meaning another source of graft
along with prostitution and drugs Pasuk 141-42
eucalyptus planted
for export to the Japanese
in the midst of the peasants’ rice Tiyavanich 247
Her dissertation director
who had approved of this high rate of growth
as a very considerable achievement Wyatt 282-83
and justified clearing forests
by the major security crisis Wyatt 290
in the shadow of Vietnam Wyatt 285
wrote a foreword to her book
everything I knew
had to be thrown away and rethought Tiyavanich xi
he had already written
that Sarit after his coup
arrested intellectuals and journalists Wyatt 280
but not how he put Phimontham
the leading meditation monk
into prison for five years
if everyone closed his eyes
how to watch for communists? Carr 10; Tiyavanich 231
the wandering monks chastised thudong monks
some of them maybe killed
every kuti was burnt down monk’s cell
all the fruit trees around the wat
mango longan lime coconut Tiyavanich 234
while Ajahn Chah
gave up the wandering life
created his own wat pa forest monastery
and later Wat Pa Nanachat International forest monastery
Theravadan Buddhism
now in England California
Australia New Zealand Switzerland
insight the power of caring
as we never knew it in America
the power of Luang Por Ophad Venerable Abbot Ophad
to read our minds
in less than fifteen minutes
saying first to Ronna
after spitting his betel nut
into a bronze spittoon
words I had used that very day
about teaching in Thailand
you can’t do one hundred percent
if you can do fifty
do fifty
and then scolding me
You have little bit samadhi concentration
but your mind is sokopok dirty, defiled
and too scattered
as if reading my own fears
so as to change my life
this power of insight
was once as widespread
as the transboreal forest
saints like Alcuin and Wang Wei
drawing on its images
to express the wilderness within Scott 525-30
imprinting their holiness
which aged inevitably
into education and science
social development
at the expense of mental development bhavana
I learned this as a medievalist
all the dhammas are one dharmas
converging
under the glass case
containing the portrait and skeleton
of the young woman who killed herself
when her husband was unfaithful
I sit trying to draw chi
up the ladder of my spine
thinking what have we done to Thailand?
good roads electricity
no beggars here at the gate
like the children carrying babies
crowding around us in Tachilek
across the border in Myanmar
or the two Cambodian girls at the border
searching each other for lice
or those banging their pans in Varanesi
their legs crushed or amputated
for the sake of charity
if you spend a night
at Tha Ton Riverview resort
you can hear shots over the border
or wake to a corpse
floating down the Mae Kok River
as down the Mekong in Laos
arms battened to a frame of bamboo
part of me thinks
no question about it
Thailand has escaped
the bitter colonial legacies
of Britain and France
still leaving their imprint
of poverty and hatred
but Thailand independent
since the eighteenth century
when Ayudhya was larger than London
remained a forested country
until the 1960s
and the American billions
for counterinsurgency and development
with villagers displaced
from the new growth eucalyptus
to become migrant workers
or prostitutes in Bangkok Tiyavanich 245
even after the insurgency
Phra Prachak discovered
when he ordained the oldest trees
by wrapping them in saffron robes River 12
that what was left of the forest in Dong Yai
remained a battleground Tiyavanich 246
illegal loggers
in league with the military
grenades thrown at his monastery
the roof of his hut
splattered with M16 shots Pasanno
officials petitioning to have him defrocked
till he was finally arrested
now nothing left
but a saffron robe in a kuti monk’s cell
books strewn on the floor
small statues of Buddha in disarray Bangkok Post 1/4/98
villagers forced out at gunpoint
some of their crops plowed under
in other places orderly rows
of another crop planted
in the middle of their rice Tiyavanich 247
Ajahn Wan: in today’s society
those who know how to extort
oppress and control others
are regarded as geniuses Tiyavanich 243
and Ajahn Chah: if you try to live simply
practicing the Dhamma
they say you’re obstructing progress Tiyavanich 241
but part of me thinks
it was happening anyway
even some Buddhists
engaged in the crackdown
Ajahn Uan the sangha head
looked down on meditation monks
and tried to force them out
forbidding villagers to give them alms Tiyavanich 173-75
until he became so sick
he had to take food intravenously
and meditation practice
helped him gradually recover Tiyavanich194-95
even then the Sangha Council
in 1987
ordered all ascetics to leave the forests Tiyavanich 249
I try to look on it
as an exercise
in letting go
that gladness or sadness
is not the mind
only a mood
coming to deceive us Chah 1
caring teach us
to care and not to care
great fame in the end
for Luang Por Chah
people came by busloads
they say they’re looking for merit
but they don’t give up vice Tiyavanich 289
Ajahn Chah often said
he felt like a monkey on a string
when I get tired
maybe they throw me a banana Tiyavanich 292
the cuckoo-like bird
sings gaily Moha
Moha the death of the dharma
in the withered sun-loud glade
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Stephen Carr, “An Ambassador of Buddhism to the West,” in Buddhism in Europe, edited by Aad Verboom (Bangkok: Crem. Vol. Somdet Phra Phuttajan, Wat Mahathat, 1990).
Venerable Ajahn Chah, A Taste of Freedom (Bangkok: Liberty Press, 1994).
James Mills, Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace (New York: Dell, 1987).
Ajahn Pasanno, “Saving Forests So There Can Be Forest Monks,” Forest Sangha Newsletter, January 1996, www.abm.ndirect.co.uk/fsn/35/.
Pasuk Phongpaichit, Sungsidh Piriyarangsan, and Nualnoi Treerat, Guns, Girls, Gambling, Ganja: Thailand’s Illegal Economy and Public Policy (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1998).
Jess River, “We must learn to be leaves.” Earth Island Journal (Fall 1993), 12, sino-sv3.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/ FULLTEXT/JR-ADM/river.htm.
P.D. Scott, "Alcuin's Versus de Cuculo: the Vision of Pastoral Friendship," Studies in Philology, LXII, 4 (July 1965), 510-30.
Kamala Tiyavanich, Forest Recollections: Wandering Monks in Twentieth-century Thailand (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1997).
From: Mosaic Orpheus, McGill-Queens University Press, 2009.