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1999 Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Throughout its history,
Buddhism has worked as a civilizing force. Its
teachings on karma, for instance -- the principle that all
intentional actions have consequences -- have
taught morality and compassion to many
societies. But on a deeper level, Buddhism has always straddled the line
between civilization and wilderness. The Buddha himself gained Awakening in a
forest, gave his first sermon in a
forest, and passed away in a forest. The
qualities of mind he needed in order to survive physically and mentally as he
went, unarmed, into the wilds, were key to his discovery of the Dhamma. They
included resilience, resolve, and alertness; self-honesty and circumspection; steadfastness in the
face of loneliness; courage and ingenuity in the
face of external dangers; compassion and respect
for the other inhabitants of the forest. These
qualities formed the "home culture" of the Dhamma.
Periodically, as Buddhism spread and adapted
to different societies, some practitioners felt that the original message of
the Dhamma had become diluted. So they returned to the wilderness in order to revive
its home culture. Many wilderness traditions are still alive
today, especially in the Theravada countries of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. There,
mendicant ascetic monks continue to wander through
the remaining rainforests, in search of Awakening in the same environment where
the Buddha found Awakening himself. Among these wilderness traditions, the one
that has attracted the largest number of Western students, and is beginning to
take root in the West, is the Kammatthana (Meditation)
Forest tradition of Thailand.
The Kammatthana tradition was founded by Ajaan
Mun Bhuridatto in the early decades of this century. Ajaan Mun's mode of
practice was solitary and strict. He
followed theVinaya (monastic discipline) faithfully, and also observed many of
what are known as the thirteen classic
dhutanga (ascetic) practices, such as living off almsfood, wearing
robes made of cast-off rags, dwelling in the forest, eating
only one meal a day. Searching out secluded places in
the wilds of Thailand and Laos, he avoided the
responsibilities of settled monastic life and spent long
hours of the day and night in meditation. In spite
of his reclusive nature, he attracted a large
following of students willing to put up with the
hardships of forest life in order to study with him.
He also had his detractors, who accused him of
not following traditional Thai Buddhist customs. He usually responded by saying
that he wasn't interested in bending to the customs of any
particular society -- as they were, by
definition, the customs of people with greed, anger, and
delusion in their minds. He was more interested in
finding and following the Dhamma's home culture, or what he called the customs
of the noble ones: the practices that had enabled the Buddha and his disciples
to achieve Awakening in the first place. This phrase -- the
customs of the noble ones -- comes from an
incident in the Buddha's life: not long after his Awakening, he returned to his
home town in order to teach the Dhamma to the family he had left six years
earlier. After spending the night in a forest, he went for alms in town at
daybreak. His father the king learned of this and immediately went to upbraid
him. "This is shameful," the king said. "No one in the lineage
of our family has ever gone begging. It's against our family customs."
"Your majesty," the Buddha replied,
"I now belong, not to the lineage of my family,
but to the lineage of the noble ones. Theirs are
the customs I follow."
Ajaan Mun devoted many years of his life to
tracking those customs down. Born in 1870, the son of rice farmers in the
northeastern province of Ubon, he was ordained as a monk in the provincial capital
in 1892. At the time of his ordination, there were two broad types of Buddhism
available in Thailand. The first can be called Customary
Buddhism -- the mores and rites handed down over the centuries from
teacher to teacher with little, if any, reference to the Pali Canon. For the
most part, these customs taught monks to live a sedentary life in the village
monastery, serving the local villagers as doctors or fortune tellers. Monastic
discipline tended to be loose. Occasionally, monks would go on a pilgrimage
they called "dhutanga" which bore little resemblance to the classic
dhutanga practices. Instead, it was more an undisciplined escape valve for the
pressures of sedentary life. Moreover, monks and lay people practiced forms of
meditation that deviated from the path of tranquillity and insight outlined in
the Pali canon. Their practices, called vichaa
aakhom, or incantation knowledge, involved
initiations and invocations used for shamanistic purposes, such as protective
charms and magical powers. They
rarely mentioned nirvana except as an entity to be invoked for shamanic rites.
The second type of Buddhism available at the
time was Reform Buddhism, based on the Pali canon and
begun in the 1820's by Prince Mongkut, who later became King Rama IV (and still
later was portrayed in the musical The King and I). Prince
Mongkut was ordained as a monk for twenty-seven years before ascending the
throne. After studying the canon during his early years as a monk, he grew
discouraged by the level of practice he saw around him in Thai monasteries. So
he reordained among the Mons -- an ethnic group that straddled the Thai-Burmese
border and occupied a few villages across the river from Bangkok -- and studied
Vinaya and the classic dhutanga practices under the guidance of a Mon teacher.
Later, his brother, King Rama III, complained that it was disgraceful for
member of the royal family to join an ethnic minority, and so built a monastery
for the Prince-Monk on the Bangkok side of the river. There, Mongkut attracted a
small but strong following of like-minded monks and lay supporters, and in this
way the Dhammayut (lit., In Accordance with the Dhamma) movement
was born.
In its early years, the Dhammayut movement was
an informal grouping devoted to Pali studies, focusing on Vinaya, the classic
dhutanga practices, a rationalist interpretation of the Dhamma, and the revival
of meditation techniques taught in the Pali canon, such as recollection of the
Buddha and mindfulness of the body. None of
the movement's members, however, could prove that the teachings of the Pali
canon actually led to enlightenment. Mongkut
himself was convinced that the path to nirvana was no longer open, but he felt
that a great deal of merit could be made by reviving at least the outward forms
of the earliest Buddhist traditions. Formally
taking a bodhisattva vow, he dedicated the merit of his efforts to future
Buddhahood. Many of his students also took vows, hoping to become disciples of
that future Buddha.
Upon disrobing and ascending the throne after
his brother's death in 1851, Rama IV was in a position to impose his reforms on
the rest of the Thai Sangha, but chose not to. Instead, he quietly sponsored
the building of new Dhammayut centers in the capital and the provinces, which
was how -- by the time of Ajaan Mun -- there came to be a handful of Dhammayut
monasteries in Ubon.
Ajaan Mun felt that Customary Buddhism had
little to offer and so he joined the Dhammayut order, taking a student of
Prince Mongkut as his preceptor. Unlike many who joined the order at the time,
he wasn't interested in the social advancement that would come with academic
study and ecclesiastical appointments. Instead, his life on the farm had
impressed on him the sufferings inherent in the cycle of life and death, and his
single aim was to find a way out of the cycle. As a result, he soon left the
scholarly environment of his preceptor's temple and went to live with a teacher
named Ajaan Sao Kantasilo (1861-1941) in a
small meditation monastery on the outskirts of town.
Ajaan Sao was unusual in the Dhammayut order
in that he had no scholarly interests but was devoted to the practice of
meditation. He trained Ajaan Mun in strict discipline and
canonical meditation practices, set in the context of the dangers and solitude
of the wilderness. He could not
guarantee that this practice would lead to the noble attainments, but he
believed that it headed in the right
direction.
After wandering for several years with Ajaan
Sao, Ajaan Mun set off on his own in search of a teacher who could show him for
sure the way to the noble attainments. His search took nealy two decades and
involved countless hardships as he trekked through the jungles of
In the long course of his wilderness training,
Ajaan Mun learned that -- contrary to Reform and Customary
beliefs -- the path to nirvana was not
closed. The true Dhamma was to be found not in
old customs or texts but in the well-trained heart and
mind. The texts were pointers for training, nothing
more or less. The rules of
the Vinaya, instead of simply being external customs, played an
important role in physical and mental survival. As for
the Dhamma texts, practice was not just a matter of
confirming what they said.
This attitude toward the Dhamma parallels what
ancient cultures called "warrior knowledge" -- the
knowledge that comes from developing skills in difficult situations -- as
opposed to the "scribe knowledge" that
people sitting in relative security and ease can write down in words. Of course,
warriors need to use words in their training, but they view
a text as authoritative only if its teachings are borne out in practice. The Canon
itself encourages this attitude when it quotes the Buddha as teaching his aunt,
"As for the teachings of which you may know, 'These
teachings lead to dispassion, not to passion; to being unfettered, not to being
fettered; to divesting, not to accumulating; to modesty, not to
self-aggrandizement; to contentment, not to discontent; to seclusion, not to
entanglement; to aroused persistence, not to laziness; to being unburdensome,
not to being burdensome': You may definitely hold, 'This is the Dhamma, this is
the Vinaya, this is the Teacher's instruction.'"
Thus the
ultimate authority in judging a teaching is not whether the teaching can be
found in a text. It lies in each person's relentless honesty in putting the
Dhamma to the test and carefully monitoring the results.
When Ajaan Mun had reached the point where he
could guarantee that the path to the noble attainments was still open, he
returned to the northeast to inform Ajaan Sao and then to continue wandering.
Gradually he began to attract a grassroots following. People who
met him were impressed by his demeanor and teachings, which were unlike those
of any other monks they had known. They believed that he embodied the Dhamma
and Vinaya in everything he did and said. As a
teacher, he took a warrior's approach to training his students. Instead of
simply imparting verbal knowledge, he put them into situations where they would
have to develop the qualities of mind and character needed in surviving the
battle with their own defilements. Instead of teaching a single meditation
technique, he taught them a full panoply of skills -- as one student said, "Everything
from washing spittoons on up" -- and then sent them into
the wilds.
It was after Ajaan Mun's return to the
northeast that a third type of Buddhism emanating from Bangkok -- State
Buddhism -- began to impinge on his life. In an effort to present a united front
in the face of imperialist threats from Britain and France, Rama V (1868-1910)
wanted to move the country from a loose feudal system to a centralized
nation-state. As part of his program, he and his brothers -- one of whom was
ordained as a monk -- enacted religious reforms to prevent the encroachment of
Christian missionaries. Having received their education from British tutors,
they created a new monastic curriculum that subjected the Dhamma and Vinaya to
Victorian notions of reason and utility. Their new version of the Vinaya, for
instance, was a compromise between Customary and Reform Buddhism designed to
counter Christian attacks that monks were unreliable and lazy. Monks were
instructed to give up their wanderings, settle in established monasteries, and
accept the new state curriculum. Because the Dhammayut monks were the best
educated in Thailand at the time -- and had the closest connections to the
royal family -- they were enlisted to do advance work for the government in
outlying regions.
In 1928, a Dhammayut authority unsympathetic
to meditation and forest wanderers took charge of religious affairs in the
northeast. Trying to domesticate Ajaan Mun's following, he ordered them to
establish monasteries and help propagate the government's program. Ajaan Mun
and a handful of his students left for the north, where they were still free to
roam. In the early 1930's, Ajaan Mun was appointed the abbot of an
important monastery in the city of
It wasn't until the 1950's that the movement
he founded gained acceptance in
Buddhist history has shown that wilderness
traditions go through a very quick life cycle. As one loses its momentum,
another often grows up in its place. But with the wholesale destruction of
Thailand's forests in the last few decades, the Kammatthana tradition may be
the last great forest tradition that Thailand will produce. Fortunately, we in
the West have learned of it in time to gather lessons that will be help in
cultivating the customs of the noble ones on Western soil and establishing
authentic wilderness traditions of our own.
Perhaps the most important of those lessons
concerns the role that the wilderness plays in testing
and correcting trends that develop among Buddhists in cities
and towns. The story of the Kammatthana tradition gives lie to the facile
notion that Buddhism has survived simply by adapting to its host culture. The
survival of Buddhism and the survival of the Dhamma are two different things. People
like Ajaan Mun -- willing to make whatever
sacrifices are needed to discover and practice the Dhamma on its own terms --
are the ones who have kept the Dhamma alive. Of
course, people have always been free to engage in Buddhist traditions in
whatever way they like, but those who have benefited most from
that engagement are those who, instead of reshaping Buddhism to fit their preferences,
reshape themselves to fit in with the customs and traditions of
the noble ones. To find these customs isn't
easy, given the bewildering variety of traditions that Buddhists have spawned
over the centuries. To test them, each individual is
thrown back on his or her own powers of relentless honesty, integrity, and
discernment. There are no easy guarantees. And perhaps this
fact in itself is a measure of the Dhamma's true worth. Only
people of real integrity can truly comprehend it. As Ajaan
Lee, one of Ajaan Mun's students, once said, "If a
person isn't true to the Buddha's teachings, the Buddha's teachings won't be
true to that person -- and that person won't be able to know what the Buddha's
true teachings are."
Revised: Wed 6 February 2002
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“Thou belongest
to That Which Is
Undying, and not merely
to time alone,” murmured the
Sphinx, breaking its muteness at last. “Thou art
eternal, and not merely of the vanishing flesh. The soul
in man cannot be killed, cannot
die. It waits, shroud-wrapped, in thy heart, as I waited,
sand-wrapped, in thy world. Know
thyself, O mortal! For there is One within
thee, as in all men, that comes and stands at the bar and bears
witness that there IS a God!”
(Reference: Brunton, Paul. (1962) A Search in Secret
Amen