..续本文上一页essed on him the sufferings inherent in the cycle of life and death, and his single aim was to find a way out of the cycle. As a result, he soon left the scholarly environment of his preceptor”s temple and went to live with a teacher named Ajaan Sao Kantasilo (1861-1941) in a small meditation monastery on the outskirts of town.

　　Ajaan Sao was unusual in the Dhammayut order in that he had no scholarly interests but was devoted to the practice of meditation. He trained Ajaan Mun in strict discipline and canonical meditation practices, set in the context of the dangers and solitude of the wilderness. He could not guarantee that this practice would lead to the noble attainments, but he believed that it headed in the right direction.

　　After wandering for several years with Ajaan Sao, Ajaan Mun set off on his own in search of a teacher who could show him for sure the way to the noble attainments. His search took nealy two decades and involved countless hardships as he trekked through the jungles of Laos, central Thailand, and Burma, but he never found the teacher he sought. Gradually he realized that he would have to follow the Buddha”s example and take the wilderness itself as his teacher, not simply to conform to the ways of nature -- for nature is samsara itself -- but to break through to truths transcending them entirely. If he wanted to find the way beyond aging, illness, and death, he would have to learn the lessons of an environment where aging, illness, and death are thrown into sharp relief. At the same time, his encounters with other monks in the forest convinced him that learning the lessons of the wilderness involved more than just mastering the skills of physical survival. He would also have to develop the acuity not to be misled by dead-end sidetracks in his meditation. So, with a strong sense of the immensity of his task, he returned to a mountainous region in central Thailand and settled alone in a cave.

　　In the long course of his wilderness training, Ajaan Mun learned that -- contrary to Reform and Customary beliefs -- the path to nirvana was not closed. The true Dhamma was to be found not in old customs or texts but in the well-trained heart and mind. The texts were pointers for training, nothing more or less. The rules of the Vinaya, instead of simply being external customs, played an important role in physical and mental survival. As for the Dhamma texts, practice was not just a matter of confirming what they said. Reading and thinking about the texts could not give an adequate understanding of what they meant -- and did not count as showing them true respect. True respect for the texts meant taking them as a challenge: putting their teachings seriously to the test to see if, in fact, they are true. In the course of testing the teachings, the mind would come to many unexpected realizations that were not contained in the texts. These in turn had to be put to the test as well, so that one learned gradually by trial and error to the point of an actual noble attainment. Only then, Ajaan Mun would say, did one understand the Dhamma.

　　This attitude toward the Dhamma parallels what ancient cultures called "warrior knowledge" -- the knowledge that comes from developing skills in difficult situations -- as opposed to the "scribe knowledge" that people sitting in relative security and ease can write down in words. Of course, warriors need to use words in their training, but they view a text as authoritative only if its teachings are borne out in practice. The Canon itself encourages this attitude when it quotes the Buddha as teaching his aunt, "As for the teachings of which you may know, ”These teachings lead to dispassion, not to passion; to being unfettered, not to being fettered; to pesting, not to accumulating; to mode…

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