Epilogue

　　Mrs. Pow-panga Vathanakul died on September 11th, 1976. She had asked her husband, Mr. Vai Vathanakul, to keep her funeral rites simple and to cremate the body within a few days. (This is the ideal for those who practice Dhamma.) But when the time came her own family insisted on the customary Thai funeral.

　　Khun Vai, for his part, put together a book to give to family and friends at the funeral. Memorial books are customary on such occasions but Khun Pow had rather preempted this by already distributing, when she ill, some Dhamma books that she had had printed. Khun Vai, however, produced his book with the idea of it being a ”case study”. Four of the Dhamma talks translated above came from this book, and it seems worthwhile here to mention some of the other points that Khun Vai brought together. In many ways they are also highly relevant to Buddhists outside Thailand, living under modern conditions.

　　Relatives and friends contributed a section about Khun Pow”s life and career:

　　She was born in 1925 in Bangkok and studied there, entering the Accountancy Department of Chulalongkorn University. However, poor health (resulting from a thyroid condition) forced her to cut short her course after only two years. She went out to work for an insurance company in 1946, and was one of the first staff of the newly established firm. Business conditions were difficult in those early days but Khun Pow worked her way up so that in 1948 she was made Secretary to the Board.

　　The company sent her (and Khun Vai) on study tours abroad to other insurance companies, in India and Europe, and for six months in the U.S.A. The American insurance managers were highly impressed with her "excellent judgment... in underwriting problems..." and considered her "... an unusually capable woman and apt scholar..." (There is even a photograph of her in the men-only executive dining-room of a very large German insurance company, being the second woman to have broken that barrier.)

　　In 1958 she was made General Manager of the company. Nine years later she stepped down from that post — although staying on as Secretary to the Board — so that she would have more time for Dhamma practice. At that time the company had more than 400 employees with another 400 insurance agents. When, in 1975, she fully retired she had been with the company for almost thirty years, having overseen a large part of the company”s growth. She now turned more to concentrate on Dhamma.

　　In the company she had been renown for her hard work and discipline, and had expected the same from her workers. She was also known for her care and helpfulness. This is perhaps made evident by the gathering of over a thousand former colleagues and co-workers who came to pay their final respects at her funeral rites. (It had been formally announced in the newspaper as per custom, although no invitations had been sent out to all those inpiduals.)

　　Another section concerns Khun Pow”s Dhamma practice:

　　In 1957 Khun Pow started to visit Bangkok monasteries to listen to sermons and join in the meditation. When, for health reasons, she retired from being General Manager she had more time for her Dhamma studies, and a scholar monk at a major Bangkok monastery was designated by the abbot to teach her the third, and then second grade General Dhamma studies. (And she was the only person who managed to pass the second grade examination, at the monastery that year.)

　　In 1970 a friend gave Khun Pow a Dhamma book about the meditation masters in the North east of Thailand. She was deeply impressed and when one of them, the Ven. Acharn Maha Boowa, visited Bangkok she went to pay her respects and asked permission to go and stay at Wat Pa Bahn Tahd. On first going to a jungle monastery she found herself too frightened to co…

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