These are the Roots of Trees

I had no idea how I’d get to Dtao Dum Forest Monastery. I just had to trust that, it being Thailand and Buddhism, somehow it would happen. When it did I got only half an hour’s notice by phone to have my bag packed and be outside the house in Bangkok where I was staying. My lift, a white mini- bus packed with a vast assortment of flowers and Buddhist offerings, was there before me and waiting in the front passenger seat was a small lady in her 60’s dressed in white. The phone call had told me she was called Tiwapon. As she had no English I found out nothing more; she simply made room amidst the offerings and sacks of flowers in the back and indicated for me to get in. Then we set off through the early morning’s already crowded streets for the freeway heading west to Kanchanaburi.

Three hours later we were bumping down a track to a farm compound where two young guys stood waiting by a fully laden four-wheel drive pick-up. As we pulled up Tiwapon turned and shouted something in Thai and, to my surprise, a sleepy female voice replied from beneath the offerings. A younger woman in white sat up from the back seat and clambered out to direct the transfer of the mini-van’s contents to festoon the laden pick up. The two young guys, each now holding a large machete, then clambered on top; the young woman got behind the wheel; I was given a seat inside and Tiwapon got in, cradling a special cardboard box. This had already been the cause of several stops as we passed through Kanchanaburi. At each a lady had scurried from within a small shop or house to touch the offered box and mumble a prayer. The mini-bus then left to return to Bangkok and we headed west towards the hills rising out of the plain.

We were soon driving on dirt tracks through a dry rural landscape with small farms and high sandstone crags covered in forest. The farms petered out and the forest, of bare deciduous trees and bamboo, closed in. The track became steadily more uneven, the potholes and ruts larger but our lady driver was not phased. She hardly slowed for any of it, including having to bank the vehicle over till it seemed it would topple. When forced to stop by a fallen tree or bamboo, the two lads would be shouted for, and they would run forward to hack at it and drag it out of the way. After two hours of this we passed through a checkpoint manned by a lonely forest guard at the boundary of Sai Yok National Park and then later another checkpoint in an even more remote spot. We were climbing by now, there was less bamboo and the deciduous trees were giving way to evergreen ones. The forest was changing from the winter dry deciduous forest of much of Thailand, to the rain forest of the mountainous border with Burma.

As dusk gathered we arrived in a valley of steep-sided hills covered in green forest with a few buildings in the bottom. Tiwapon went off somewhere and came back with a mosquito net. She led me up steps into a wooden sālā with open sides and a small Buddha image at one end. She showed me to a trunk with bedding in it and indicated some rolled mats. Then she left and I was alone for the night amidst the droning cicadas and the other loud noises of a rainforest at night.

Soon after dawn a young American monk appeared. He had come to set up the sālā, he told me, for their morning meal. He was then joined by two other Western monks and, before we could say more than “hello,” by Tiwapon, her companion and the two young guys all bearing trays laden with cooked food. After we had eaten, the monks told me we were now going up the mountain with Tiwapon and another four- wheel drive vehicle which had just arrived with three men from Bangkok. The monks carried the cardboard box in the new vehicle while I went with Tiwapon who now had four large sacks filled with petals, presumably plucked from all those flowers. As we drove along, crossing and re-crossing a stream, Tiwapon threw large handfuls of petals out of the window, into the path of the following vehicle. We left the stream to climb steeply on a track with long drops to the side and several switchbacks, eventually coming out on a mountain top with another sālā and a magnificent view across forested hills enveloped in faint morning mist.

While I stood their stunned by the view, everyone else formed into a line, the three monks in front, one holding the box the other two with their hands held palms together. Tiwapon produced a small Buddha image which she gave to one of the men, then the monks started to chant and slowly circumambulate the sālā. Tiwapon and the other lady followed, scattering petals, and the rest of us came along behind. Once we had been round the sālā three times the monks carried the box inside and placed it reverentially on the shrine. Then, after some conversation in Thai, all the Thais left in the two vehicles and I finally got to find out what it was all about.

The monks explained that Tiwapon had originally invited the Western monks to live there. That was when she leased the surrounding forest for a mining operation. With the coming of the National Park status the mining had been stopped but the monks had stayed on. Now their temporary lease had to be renewed and Tiwapon was worried because some of the local power-brokers, including a National Park officer, wanted the site instead for an eco-tourist lodge. The box contained Buddha relics which Tiwapon and her daughter had collected in Bangkok as their way of trying to protect the monastery.

I found out more the next day, when Tiwapon returned to build a place for me to stay on my retreat. While the workers, directed by her daughter, cleared a site, I asked her how it had all begun, while the monks translated for me: “It was the time when there were lots of monks walking through the forest,” she said. “They always stayed with Khun Sunan and I took food there. The first time I met Ajahn Pasanno I did not speak to him. Next time I invited him to my forest. Then he came back with other Western monks.”

Ajahn Pasanno is now the co-abbot of Abhayagiri Monastery in California and it was he who had arranged for my stay. But in the 1980’s he was just a junior monk wandering with a klot, an umbrella from which a mosquito net is hung, and an alms bowl. He had told me how awe-inspiring the vast tracts of primary rain forest had been then but also how painful it had been, as it was the residents of the tree- felling camps which had often fed him. By the time he became the abbot of Wat Pah Nanachat, the Thai monastery established by Ajahn Chah for his Western disciples, there was little forest left in Thailand. Tiwapon however had resisted the money offered for her six thousand hectares and, being at an altitude of two thousand feet, it had a pleasant climate in the hot season. So he had brought most of his monks here to Dtao Dum, walking in for two days from the main road, during the hot season every year.

Tiwapon also described how difficult it had been for her to protect the forest. The Thai government had handed out cheap logging and mining concessions, but had provided no enforcement and no police. “It was like the Wild West. Hardest was when the National Park came. Local big men knew the government had promised that anyone farming could keep the land so they hired all my Burmese mineworkers to burn the surrounding forest. There were fires everywhere,” she pointed to the hills falling away to the east. “So I came to Ajahn Pasanno to ask him what to do. He said, ‘Tell the District Governor.’ He came, stopped them and made them leave. But then they wanted to kill me. When I went to town I went a different way each time so they did not know where I was. Two times they sent a man but each time I was lucky.” Eventually she received an award from the King for her dedication to nature conservation.

We were talking with Tiwapon for several hours and I could see how much she enjoyed telling the history to me and the three monks, for whom most of it was also new. Before she left we went to inspect the site I was to use. The workers had shored up steps leading to an old clearing on the side of the hill. It had been freshly tidied up for me. The decayed bamboo from the old platform had been piled on one side and a new platform built, the size and height of a large double bed. There was a pole above the centre line supported by posts at each end and the monks showed me how to hang my klot and mosquito net, and how to tie the net in a big knot when not in use. The workers had cleared the adjacent walking meditation path and cut back the vegetation on the slope to reveal a spectacular view out across the forested valley.

Listening to Tiwapon’s account I was yet again impressed with how much Ajahn Pasanno had done for nature conservation in Thailand. The previous month I had travelled with him from Bangkok on his annual visit to be met at the regional airport by a large deputation from Nature Care, the NGO he had helped found. When he left Thailand to start Abhayagiri monastery in California they had begged him to remain their patron and they were now delighted to see him again. Then at Wat Pah Nanachat I wandered around the forest, much of which had been planted when he was abbot. The original monastery was established in a forest remnant left as the village cremation ground. This he had doubled in size, twice over, with land donated or purchased by local supporters and then planted with native trees. There were now small cabins, or kutīs, for the monks to meditate and live in, scattered through the new forest.

Then there was Wat Poo Jom Gom. As the main monastery attracted more and more visitors Ajahn Pasanno sought somewhere quieter as a branch monastery. It was the District Governor who suggested the poor region on the border with Laos which still had forest. There they stayed in caves on the side of a rocky plateau overlooking the Mekong, and there Ajahn Pasanno was moved to action by the steady degradation of the forest, caused by the local people. He encouraged his supporters to form an organisation to help locals create village committees to manage their own forests. Again a strong woman was pivotal in this. Suranee was the Regional Director of the Department of Nutrition, and already wanting to do something to protect the natural resources of the area. She led the group which greeted us at the airport, and was with the Nature Care staff when they came later to make a formal report to Ajahn Pasanno. It was she who then offered to give me a tour.

This we did in the bright yellow Department of Nutrition vehicle driven by her government driver. First we stopped at the Nature Care headquarters, outside her office in the regional capital, Ubon Ratchathani. Originally she had provided one room, she explained, but now they needed a whole building for all the staff and volunteers. There the director outlined the various projects they now ran – I was amazed by the number and diversity of them. As well as the original forest protection work, which had resulted in a region-wide network of village forest committees, there were water scheme projects, cultural projects and projects to generate sources of income for villages such as a co-operative orchid production business. Suranee explained that Ajahn Pasanno had always emphasised that Nature Care should serve the villagers and facilitate them helping themselves rather than imposing ideas on them from outside. So the orchid project had come out of a problem one village had wanted to solve. The village was next to a new National Park from which they collected orchids for sale to tourists at the border crossing with Laos. The National Park officials wanted them to stop, so Nature Care had helped them to develop the orchid farms.

We went to visit several projects, driving eastwards into a land of poor soils, scrub woodland and occasional villages. The first project was based in a village school that educated both children and adults in traditional culture; at another village we met the chairman of the village forest committee. He explained how the committee made decisions to protect the forest, such as a recent fifteen-year moratorium on cutting trees for building timber, or setting aside areas where mushrooms should be left so they could produce seed. Members of the women’s group unfolded a plan of the village, with its fields and forest, that they had painted on a large cotton sheet. Shyly they told us how they policed the forest. They were collecting forest products every day so they could then report illegal logging to the government forest department or tell the committee that a villager was breaking their rules. Nature Care had helped many villages to set up such women’s groups and they now helped each other. This group had a garment-making co-operative using the cloth woven by women in other villages. It was now so successful they could no longer supply all the people who came to buy their products.

On a later visit to Wat Poo Jom Gom with Ajahn Pasanno he took me to visit the caves that had been their original accommodation. There I tried telling him how impressed I was with the nature conservation work he had channelled into existence. However, typical of him, he wouldn’t let me give him too much praise. He told me it was simply the traditional role of the monk, giving the example of Ajahn Mahā-Boowa, a greatly respected Thai abbot. He encouraged one wealthy supporter to build Bangkok a new women’s prison after he’d read in a newspaper that the women were living in a dilapidated hundred-year-old building plagued with rats. His junior monks would cut out any articles like that from the newspapers so that he could pass them on to supporters to deal with.

Ajahn Pasanno said many senior monks directed their supporters to help society – that was what Thai people expected of them – guidance in good acts. Western monks particularly cared about nature but they were not alone in this, Thai monks also undertook forest projects; meanwhile Western monks also worked in other areas, like Ajahn Jayasāro who had become the abbot of Wat Pa Nanachat after Ajahn Pasanno, who was particularly interested in the realm of education.

While I travelled with Ajahn Pasanno I had seen for myself just how much Thailand expected of senior monks. Every day he spent from six in the morning until late in the evening receiving people and meeting with monastics seeking his guidance. So it was no wonder that he enjoyed our day walking in Poo Jom Gom; he said it was the first time he had had a break from teaching since he had come to Thailand. We climbed up through the dry forest, much of it growing from amidst rocky pavement, until we were above a cliff overlooking the Mekong River, twisting in wide blue strands through an even wider sandy bed. Beyond it the forested hills of Laos disappeared to the horizon. We clambered down to one of the caves the monks still used. There an old English monk showed us round his simple abode; a wooden platform was wedged beneath an overhang, his few belongings hung from notches in the rock.

After that I visited Ajahn Jayasāro where he now resides at the end of a gated and guarded valley in the hills, a couple of hours drive to the north of Bangkok. His simple small wooden building, tucked away amidst newly planted woodland, was a sweet contrast to the elaborate second homes for Bangkok’s wealthy being built in the rest of the valley. It was he who explained to me how Western forest monks had become so important for Thailand.

“We are able to use the concepts and language that the new urban generation relate to so, through us, sophisticated Thais have been able to re-discover Buddhism and meditation.” He regularly gave talks in Thai on the radio and television and there is a meditation center where he teaches retreats, built by one of his supporters, amidst the new houses of this secluded community.

Then there are the two Buddhist schools he is the patron of. “Up until now all the private schools have been either Christian or International ones teaching Western values. The state schools are nominally ‘Buddhist’ but there is no real Buddhist input.” The first school was for primary children in Bangkok but the next is a secondary boarding school being built near by. “I hope they’ll become models of how a Buddhist school can be. This school will have ‘Ecology and the Environment’ as its speciality as that fits in with Buddhist values.”

With the rapid changes happening in Thai society, the way Buddhism serves it is also changing. The traditional village temples I saw attracted few recruits and seemed to have less relevance to the people, but the forest tradition with its emphasis on meditation has many young monks and it is now supported by the Thai middle classes, able to drive out to remote sites in their cars. They seemed, in fact, almost to be giving too much support. The simple forest lifestyle has been replaced by modern comforts and wonderfully appointed buildings, and for the Western monks there is yet more potential interest and support. That is why Ajahn Jayasāro is tucked away where people can’t find him and why Dtao Dum is so important. Despite its extreme remoteness – four hour’s drive from the nearest village – they still get visitors in four-wheel drives.

My retreat there was both the most enjoyable I have done in my life as well as one of the most testing. Initially I was on that hillside, looking out at giant hornbills and other forest birds gliding by. There it was only the insects which were difficult; the mosquitoes at dusk with their danger of malaria and, in the heat of the afternoon, the tiny sweat bees which, although otherwise harmless, had a strong desire to go up my nose or into an ear, a certain way of preventing samadhi. But when the preparation work in the cooler, inner forest was complete, I moved to one of the clearings there.

Dtao Dum is right next to Burma. Some of the best rainforest left in Southeast Asia stretches along this border and most of the way to the Indian Ocean. It has good populations of tiger, elephant and many other large mammals such as tapirs, which all occasionally wander into Dtao Dum’s inner forest. Parties of monkeys and gibbons swing through the trees every day, twice an elephant passed my clearing in the night leaving fresh steaming dung on the path, and I glimpsed deer, goat-like serows, several martens and a forest cat on my daily walk down to the sālā to collect my meal.

Being completely alone in a small jungle clearing can be frightening. When a tiger roared in the distance I was petrified. I was doing yoga and all I could think of was to get onto my platform. As if that would have saved me from a tiger! Then there was the binturong, a harmless nocturnal creature that lives in trees but which has a loud blood-curdling scream, first produced when I was doing walking meditation in the dark. The monks also warned me of the twenty foot python living near the main path I took each day down to the sālā. That kept me mindful, as did the thought of the smaller, more deadly snakes and the nine-inch centipedes which gave excruciatingly painful bites. But the most difficult were the smallest. With plentiful wildlife inevitably the creatures living on them will be common too. Leeches waited, waving, near the bridges and ticks were everywhere. Some were huge and my body’s reaction to their bites was like an erupting fist-sized volcano, which remained raw and itching for the rest of my stay.

So practice in the jungle might not have been ideal for concentration, but it did lead to insight. The constant oscillation in extremes of pleasant and unpleasant: the heat, then startling beauty to take one’s breath away; the insects; or fear, then delight at a squirrel or bamboo-rat scampering through the clearing. This helped me contemplate the Buddha’s teaching on how we both designate phenomena and react to them, keeping ourselves forever restless. We do the same with states of mind: bright wakefulness, dullness, concentration, lethargy. Wanting the pleasant, not wanting the unpleasant – the movement towards one inevitably creating the other, because the designation is always relative. By the end I had so tired of it all that I treasured the ordinary and a simple sense of all-rightness.

My visit to the Western monasteries in Thailand has left me both deeply thankful and very impressed. Before my journey I had not realised that Western monks also benefited Thailand, and how they continue to give excellent training there to the many foreigners who still arrive. Young and old, like the monks at Dtao Dum. Venerable Pāsādiko (previously John Shakleford) was from the US. He took up Zen in the 1970’s, had tried various spiritual traditions then decided at fifty, to “Take it seriously and become a monk.” That had been nine years before. While Cullam McConnel (now Sāmanera Sallekho) was only twenty-six when he came recently from Ottawa, having found the monasteries on the Internet. Both were now very committed to the simple life of a forest monk. Guiding the monasteries has now passed to the next generation; monks whom Ajahn Pasanno and Ajahn Jayasāro trained are now in turn training others. At Dtao Dum it is Ajahn Siripañño, who has a Thai mother but was brought up in England, who is now the abbot there; while at Wat Pah Nanachat it is the German monk, Ajahn Kevali, who has been invited into that role. Both are still in their thirties. Some of those monks they train will eventually return home to help run the Western monasteries already seeded by this tradition, some will plant new ones, and others will be sure to stay in Thailand.

I am told that the threat to Dtao Dum has now receded. There is a new government in power and a sympathetic Minister of the Environment has established a programme which recognises forest monasteries in National Parks as a way to protect the forest. That is how it should be. Forest monks do indeed protect the forest. They need to as, amongst the many other noble and wholesome reasons, it is their natural habitat, somewhere to practise in the way the Buddha recommended – at the foot of a tree.