Foreword: About the Author
Phra Ajaan Lee was born in 1906 in a rural village in Ubon Ratchathani province, northeastern Thailand. At the age of 20 he was ordained as a monk at the temple in his home village, and there began his study of Buddhist doctrine and monastic discipline. He discovered, much to his distress, that life in his temple—as in most temples in Thailand at the time—had little to do with the practice of the Buddha’s teachings. As he wrote later in his autobiography, ‘Instead of observing the duties of the contemplative life, we were out to have a good time: playing chess, wrestling, playing match games with girls whenever there was a wake… Whenever I looked into the books on monastic discipline, I’d start feeling really uneasy. I told myself, “If you don’t want to leave the monkhood, you’re going to have to leave this temple.”’
Soon after making this resolution, he happened to meet a monk of the wandering ascetic tradition founded by Phra Ajaan Sao Kantasīlo (1861 - 1941) and Phra Ajaan Mun Bhūridatto (1870 - 1949). Impressed both with the man’s teachings and with his way of life, Ajaan Lee set out on foot to find Ajaan Mun and to become his student. He spent two very intensive periods studying with Ajaan Mun: once, that first year, in the forests of Ubon; and then again, four years later, at Wat Chedi Luang in Chieng Mai. Ajaan Mun and Ajaan Sao were unique in their time in teaching that the way to nibbāna was still open, and the training they gave their students in the direction of that goal was also unique, involving not only intensive meditation practice but also the total re-education of the student’s character: his habits, values, and powers of observation.
As Ajaan Lee wrote in his autobiography, ‘Staying with Ajaan Mun was very good for me, but also very hard. I had to be willing to learn everything anew… Some days he’d be cross with me, saying that I was messy, that I never put anything in the right place—but he’d never tell me what the right places were… To be able to stay with him any length of time, you had to be very observant and very circumspect. You couldn’t leave footprints on the floor, you couldn’t make noise when you swallowed water or opened the windows or doors. There had to be a science to everything you did—hanging out robes… arranging bedding, everything. Otherwise, he’d drive you out, even in the middle of the Rains Retreat. Even then, you’d just have to take it and try to use your powers of observation.
‘In other matters, such as sitting and walking meditation, he trained me in every way, to my complete satisfaction. But I was able to keep up with him at best only about 60 percent of the time.’
After Ajaan Lee’s second period of training, Ajaan Mun sent him out into the forests of northern Thailand to wander and meditate on his own. Ajaan Lee’s wanderings eventually took him through every part of Thailand, as well as into Burma, Cambodia, and India. Of all of Ajaan Mun’s students, Ajaan Lee was the first to bring the teachings of the forest tradition into the mainstream of Thai society in central Thailand. In 1935 he founded a temple, Wat Paa Khlawng Kung, in a cemetery near Chanthaburi, on the southeast coast; and in 1955 he founded Wat Asokaram in a marshy area at the mouth of the Chao Phraya River on the outskirts of Bangkok. He drew students—monks and lay people, men and women—from all levels of society and all walks of life. In 1957 he was given the ecclesiastical rank of Chao Khun, with the title Phra Suddhidhammaraṅsī Gambhīramedhācariya. He passed away in 1961.
Even in his last years, though, he continued to retreat regularly into the forest. To quote again from his autobiography: ‘Living in the forest, as I like to do, has given me a lot to think about… It’s a quiet place, where you can observe the influences of the environment. Take the wild rooster: If it went around acting like a domestic rooster, the cobras and mongooses would make a meal of it in no time… So it is with us: If we spend all out time wallowing in companionship, we’re like a knife or a hoe stuck down into the dirt—it’ll rust easily. But if it’s constantly sharpened on a stone or a file, rust won’t have a chance to take hold. So we should learn always to be on the alert…
‘Living in the forest, the mind becomes confident. The Dhamma you’ve studied—or even that you haven’t studied—will make itself clear, because nature is the teacher. It’s like the sciences of the world, which every country has used to develop amazing powers: None of their inventions or discoveries came out of textbooks. They came because scientists studied the principles of nature, all of which appear right here in the world. As for the Dhamma, it’s just like science: It exists in nature. When I realized this, I no longer worried about studying the scriptures and I was reminded of the Lord Buddha and his disciples: They studied and learned from the principles of nature. None of them followed a textbook.’
‘For these reasons, I’m willing to be ignorant when it comes to texts and scriptures. Some kinds of trees sleep at night and are awake during the day. Others sleep by day and are awake by night.’
