Birken Buddhist Forest MONASTERY: Asian Migration, the Creative Class, and Cultural Transformation in the New Pacific British Columbia
Birken Buddhist Forest MONASTERY: Asian Migration, the Creative Class, and Cultural Transformation in the New Pacific British Columbia Luke Clossey and Karen Ferguson* ne night in the mid-1990s police and ambulance responded to a medical emergency at a broken-down shack on the road between Mount Currie and D’Arcy in the Birkenhead Valley Onear Pemberton, two hundred kilometres north of Vancouver in the Coast Mountain range. Bumping their heads against the low doorframe, they were surprised to find inside a collapsed neighbour from down the road being tended to by a dozen young Thai women, a thirty-year-old German man, and a Canadian in his early forties. The men were wearing ochre robes and were bald, beardless, and eyebrow-less. This was Birken Forest Monastery. The Canadian was Venerable (Ven.) Sona (né Tom West), a Buddhist monk born and brought up mostly in the suburbs of Vancouver but now following the orthodox Thai forest tradition of Theravada Buddhism. In June1994 , he travelled from the Sri Lankan Buddhist Vihara Society (BVS) temple in Surrey, BC, to a cluster of unwinterized, off-grid shacks on the gold rush–era Pemberton Portage Road near Pemberton. There, along with his German-born fellow monk, Ven. Piyadhammo, he succeeded in establishing only the second North American foothold of the Thai forest tradition founded by a non-Asian monk.1 This tradition has since spread globally to become one of the most successful Theravada monastic orders outside Asia, particularly among non-Asian converts. * We’re grateful to our research participants for their generosity in sharing their memories with us.
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