Stillness Flowing (audiobook)

Monk’s Training: Part 1 INTRODUCTION

Luang Por Chah chose to live his life as a Buddhist monk. He received permission from his parents to enter a monastery at the age of nine, and apart from a brief period in his teens, he lived in monastic communities until his death at the age of seventy-four. The Sangha was his family, and, as a teacher, its welfare was his main pre-occupation. While he gave considerable importance to propagating the Dhamma in society at large, he did so only to the extent that it did not compromise his training of the monks and nuns in his monastery.

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Monk’s Training: Part 2 PARTS OF A WHOLE

The community at Wat Pah Pong consisted of monks, novices, postulants and maechees (white-robed nuns). The majority of the novices were teenage boys, ineligible from taking full monks’ Ordination until the age of twenty. As for the monks, they could be divided into three groups: monks of regular standing, visiting monks and temporary monks.

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Monk’s Training: Part 3 THE MARVEL OF INSTRUCTION

The body of Luang Por Chah’s teachings is generally considered to consist of the material recorded on reel-to-reel tapes and audio cassettes and then transcribed and printed in books, originally in Thai and subsequently translated into many other languages. But for his monastic disciples, the formal discourses captured by those audio recordings and reproduced in books were only one part, and perhaps not the most important part, of what they received from him.

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Monk’s Training: Part 4 A WELL-ROUNDED TRAINING

One of the foundations of Buddhist practice is the conviction that purposeful effort has meaning. The Buddha rejected the beliefs that human life is determined by a divine will or fate or randomness. He proclaimed that human beings created their own life and environment by the quality of their actions of body, speech and mind. Luang Por’s teachings expressed this ‘Right View’ again and again. Monks were to take responsibility for their lives through their own consistent efforts. They all had the potential for liberation within them. The question was whether they had the determination and the patient endurance to realize that potential.

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Luang Por and the Western Sangha: Part 1 INTRODUCTION

From the mid-fourteenth century until its sack by the Burmese in 1767, Ayutthaya was the capital of the Thai nation. Established on an island in the Chao Phraya River, it was ideally situated to act as an entrepôt port at a time when land routes were safer than sea, and merchants in the Orient sought to avoid sending their goods through the Straits of Malacca. Within two hundred years, Ayutthaya had become one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Asia. Its population of approximately a million people exceeded that of London. Some five hundred temples, many with pagodas covered in gold leaf, lent the city a magical, heaven-like aura that dazzled visitors from other lands. By the mid-seventeenth century, with communities of traders from France, Holland, Portugal and England housed outside the city wall, the inhabitants of Ayutthaya had become accustomed to Westerners or ‘farangs’. The kings of Ayutthaya often employed foreign mercenaries as bodyguards. To the Thais, these strange white beings seemed to resemble a species of ogre: hairy, ill-smelling, quarrelsome and coarse, lovers of meat and strong spirits, but possessors of admirable technical skills, particularly in the arts of war.

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Luang Por and the Western Sangha: Part 2 THE FIRST DISCIPLE

In 1967, a Wat Pah Pong monk named Ven. Sommai returned from a tudong trip to northern Isan with a monk who literally stood head and shoulders above him. Even the most restrained monks in Wat Pah Pong were unable to resist at least a surreptitious glance. The new monk was six foot two inches tall, had a fair complexion, an angular nose and bright blue eyes. His name was Sumedho.

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Luang Por and the Western Sangha: Part 3 THROUGH WESTERN EYES

The question which every Western monk would get asked sooner or later (and usually sooner), was why he chose to become a monk. It was often a more difficult question to answer than might be expected. It wasn’t so easy to distinguish causes from triggers, or to be sure that an uplifting narrative was not being patched together with hindsight. Monks usually settled on recounting the events leading up to their decision and their departure to Thailand. There was, for instance, Pabhakaro, an American helicopter pilot, who first came to the country on ‘R&R’ during the Vietnam War. There were the Peace Corps volunteers, and the young travellers backpacking through Asia like the Canadians, Tiradhammo and Viradhammo. There were also those like the British Brahmavamso and the Australian Nyanadhammo who came with the express intention of becoming monks.

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Luang Por and the Western Sangha: Part 4 ON THE NOSE

Luang Por showed much compassion for the difficulties of his Western disciples, but he could also tease them when they became self-indulgent. On one occasion, he mimed wiping imaginary tears from his eyes and saying tragically, ‘He’s my father, I’m his son …’, before chuckling and shaking his head. The performance left a deep impression on Ven. Varapanyo, for whom it was ‘an example of the way Luang Por saw through the self-important attitude that Westerners are especially prone to, how it needlessly glorifies, and increases, suffering’.

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Luang Por and the Western Sangha: Part 5 KNOWER OF THE WORLDS

Although the overwhelming majority of Westerners who entered the monastic life at Wat Pah Pong were male, there were also a small number of Western women who came to train as maechees. Chief amongst these, was an American known by her adopted name Khamfah, who arrived with her husband Paul, after fleeing their home in Laos ahead of the Communist takeover in late 1975. The couple decided to try to stay for five years, with the proviso that, if at any time, both of them wanted to leave, then they would do so; however, in the case that one wanted to go and the other wanted to stay, then they would both carry on and endure through their difficulties. It was challenging for both of them, but they survived the five years.

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Luang Por and the Western Sangha: Part 6 THE TWAIN SHALL MEET

By 1975, there were almost twenty Western monks at Wat Pah Pong – about a quarter of the resident Sangha. This rapid and significant influx brought with it inevitable tensions. Although the organization of the monastery and a common faith and confidence in Luang Por kept the situation workable, minor but niggling conflicts between the Thais and the ‘farangs’ became increasingly common. The first generation of Western monks was predominantly North American. These were young men used to an informal, unregimented life, to expressing their feelings about things freely, using their initiative. Many of them had robust personalities. In an era when travel to Southeast Asia was a lot more daunting than it is today, the path to a forest in Northeast Thailand was not an easy or straightforward one to take. Having to conform to the Vinaya, to many rules and regulations that they could not always see the reason for, could easily provoke the rebellious side of their nature.

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