The Traditions of the Noble Ones An Essay on the Thai Forest Tradition and its Relationship with the Dhammayut Hierarchy Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Metta Forest Monastery (This paper was presented at the Ninth International Thai Studies Conference, Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, IL; April, 2005) One of the most intriguing issues in the social history of the Dhammayut Forest Tradition founded by Phra Ajaan Sao Kantasilo and Phra Ajaan Mun Bhuridatto has been its conflicted and volatile relationship to the Dhammayut administrative hierarchy. The conflict between the two groups first broke into the open in 1926, when Somdet Mahawirawong (Tisso Uan) ordered a student of Ajaan Mun’s—Phra Ajaan Singh Khantiyagamo—together with a following of 50 monks and 100 nuns and lay people to leave a forest at Baan Hua Taphaan, in Ubon Rachathani province, an area under Tisso Uan’s jurisdiction. Ajaan Singh refused to comply, and drawn-out negotiations were required to prevent civil action against him and his following. The relationship between the two groups remained tense for more than two decades, during which time Tisso Uan repeatedly ordered the Forest monks to settle down, study the curriculum of texts sponsored by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and then devote themselves to becoming teachers and administrators. Even after Ajaan Mun’s death in 1949, Tisso Uan continued to insist that Ajaan Mun was unqualified to teach. The tide turned in the early 1950’s, when Phra Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo— another student of Ajaan Mun—was able to teach meditation to Tisso Uan, causing him to reverse his formerly low opinion of the Forest tradition. Tisso Uan began actively promoting the teachings of Ajaan Lee.Following his lead, other highly ranked Bangkok monks, including a later Supreme Patriarch (Juan Utthayi) of Wat Makutkasatriyaram and the current Supreme Patriarch (Charoen Suvattano), became avid supporters of the Forest tradition. Later generations of Dhammayut administrators continued this support through the end of the 20th century. Part of this support seems to have been based on genuine respect for the obvious mental powers of the Forest monks—tales of their psychic powers and the purity of their conduct filled the press—while another part has been ascribed to the useful function the Forest monks played in the 1970’s in helping to ease the Communist threat by converting large numbers of Communists in the forests of the Northeast. The parliamentary election of 2001, however, caused a marked turnabout. In that election, the government of Chuan Leekphai fell partly because it had tried to thwart Phra Ajaan Mahabua’s Save the Nation campaign aimed at 2 underwriting the Thai currency. Chuan’s fall alerted the Bangkok hierarchy to the new-found political influence of the Forest tradition, which many in the hierarchy found threatening. The Mahanikaya hierarchy, which had long been antipathetic to the Forest monks, convinced the Dhammayut hierarchy that their future survival lay in joining forces against the Forest monks, and against Ajaan Mahabua in particular. Thus the last few years have witnessed a series of standoffs between the Bangkok hierarchy and the Forest monks led by Ajaan Mahabua, in which government-run media have personally attacked Ajaan Mahabua. The hierarchy has also proposed a series of laws—a Sangha Administration Act, a land-reform bill, and a “special economy” act—that would have closed many of the Forest monasteries, stripped the remaining Forest monasteries of their wilderness lands, or made it legal for monasteries to sell their lands. These laws would have brought about the effective end of the Forest tradition, at the same time preventing the resurgence of any other forest tradition in the future. So far, none of these proposals have become law, but the issues separating the Forest monks from the hierarchy are far from settled. The dynamics of this relationship are of more than mere institutional interest. They have had an impact on the spread of the Forest Tradition and on the way it has expressed its ideals orally and in written form. Given the past role of forest traditions as sources for reform in Thai Buddhism, if this conflict leads to an end of the possibility for any forest tradition to survive in Thailand, the long-term prospects for the health of Thai Buddhism are grim. Although many books and articles have been written on the Forest tradition, none have adequately explained the reasons for the volatility of the tradition’s relationship to the Bangkok hierarchy. At least four hypotheses have been proposed to explain this relationship, but there are problems with each. Ferguson and Ramitanondh, in their article, “Monks and Hierarchy in Northern Thailand,” argue that the Forest monks were simply an advance guard for the spread of more sedentary Dhammayut monks into the Northeast. In their eyes, the Forest monks served to establish monasteries in outlying areas, which, as the areas became more settled, they would then abandon to seek still more isolated areas in which to practice. Meanwhile, town and village Dhammayut monks would then move into the abandoned monasteries, changing them from centers of meditation to centers of study and administration. Although many instances of this pattern can be cited, the problem with this thesis is that it does not explain the intense conflict that has periodically arisen between the Forest and the administrative monks. S. J. Tambiah’s explanation of the relationship between the two groups in his book, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets, suffers from a similar drawback. Tambiah states that although the Dhammayut order originated as a reformist, ascetic movement, its Bangkok hierarchy eventually was overwhelmed by its political alliance with the royal family and so eventually became more lax and “mainstream” in its practice; the Forest monks, on the other 3 hand, being further from the political center, were able to maintain the ascetic aspect of Prince Mongkut’s vision [Tambiah, p. 165]. There is a kernel of truth to this characterization, although it accepts unquestionably the idea that the decline in Bangkok Dhammayut practice was inevitable, and does not look into whether this decline was the result of conscious choices from the top. Tambiah’s thesis also shares the same problem as Ferguson and Ramitanondh’s thesis in that it cannot explain the animosity that developed between the Dhammayut hierarchy and the Forest monks in the 1920’s. In fact, Tambiah seems ignorant of any animosity in the relationship at all. In his eyes, the Dhammayut hierarchy originally adopted a policy of benign neglect toward the Forest monks, moving to a policy of more proactive support when this served its political purposes in the 1960’s. (Tambiah bases this part of his characterization, as he does so much of his portrayal of Bangkok ecclesiastical politics, on the testimony of “Mr. X,” a Mahanikaya informer. In this case, his dates for the hierarchical support for Forest monks are about ten years off.) Both Taylor [pp. 272-273] and Kamala [pp. 228, 287-288] accept Tambiah’s thesis that the rapprochement between the hierarchy and the Forest monks can be fully described in terms of Bangkok politics, ignoring the fact that the original impetus for the rapprochement came from the Forest monks themselves. Finally, Tambiah’s thesis cannot explain the volatility of the relationship between the two groups. J. L. Taylor, in Forest Monks and the Nation State, gives two separate analyses to explain the conflicted relationship between the Forest monks and the Dhammayut hierarchy. The first analysis follows the work of R. J. O’Connor in attributing the conflict between the two groups to Bangkok’s suspicion that the Forest monks deviated from orthodox Buddhist teachings to engage in magic and other indigenous practices; once the Forest monks had proven their orthodoxy, the hierarchy accepted them [Taylor, pp. 126-128]. This thesis, however, does not explain why the Bangkok hierarchy took so long to determine whether the Forest monks were orthodox or not—Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo had published a very orthodox description of the meditative path in 1936, and yet Tisso Uan did not accept his teachings until the early 1950’s. Taylor’s second explanation for the conflicted relationship between the two groups is based on his observation that the Theravada tradition has had a long history of distrust between monks who follow the scholarly vocation and those who follow the meditative one. He points out, accurately, that even during the period of relatively calm relations between the Forest monks and the Dhammayut hierarchy, there were still individual monks who maintained this sense of distrust [pp. 272, 284]. However, he undercuts his thesis by noting that certain scholarly monks were favorably inclined to the Forest tradition even during the period of strained relations [pp. 53, 58]. Thus, this second analysis has very little explanatory power. And nowhere does Taylor try to combine the two analyses to present an overarching explanation for the dynamic of the relationship between the two groups. 4 Kamala Tiyawanich, in her book, Forest Recollections, offers the most extensive attempt to explain the ups and downs in the relationship between the two groups. The conflict between the two she explains by turning Tambiah on his head, asserting that the Dhammayut Forest tradition was further away from the original Dhammayut vision than was the later Dhammayut hierarchy. She proposes that the Forest tradition began with a rejection of the reforms instituted by the Dhammayut movement and a return to pre-reform practices and ideals in five areas: meditation practice, dhutanga (thudong) practice, the use of traditional medicine and chants to cure disease, a lack of interest in the particulars of Vinaya practice, and a tolerant attitude toward practices that diverged from theirs.