..续本文上一页sty, not to self-aggrandizement; to contentment, not to discontent; to seclusion, not to entanglement; to aroused persistence, not to laziness; to being unburdensome, not to being burdensome”: You may definitely hold, ”This is the Dhamma, this is the Vinaya, this is the Teacher”s instruction.”"

　　Thus the ultimate authority in judging a teaching is not whether the teaching can be found in a text. It lies in each person”s relentless honesty in putting the Dhamma to the test and carefully monitoring the results.

　　When Ajaan Mun had reached the point where he could guarantee that the path to the noble attainments was still open, he returned to the northeast to inform Ajaan Sao and then to continue wandering. Gradually he began to attract a grassroots following. People who met him were impressed by his demeanor and teachings, which were unlike those of any other monks they had known. They believed that he embodied the Dhamma and Vinaya in everything he did and said. As a teacher, he took a warrior”s approach to training his students. Instead of simply imparting verbal knowledge, he put them into situations where they would have to develop the qualities of mind and character needed in surviving the battle with their own defilements. Instead of teaching a single meditation technique, he taught them a full panoply of skills -- as one student said, "Everything from washing spittoons on up" -- and then sent them into the wilds.

　　It was after Ajaan Mun”s return to the northeast that a third type of Buddhism emanating from Bangkok -- State Buddhism -- began to impinge on his life. In an effort to present a united front in the face of imperialist threats from Britain and France, Rama V (1868-1910) wanted to move the country from a loose feudal system to a centralized nation-state. As part of his program, he and his brothers -- one of whom was ordained as a monk -- enacted religious reforms to prevent the encroachment of Christian missionaries. Having received their education from British tutors, they created a new monastic curriculum that subjected the Dhamma and Vinaya to Victorian notions of reason and utility. Their new version of the Vinaya, for instance, was a compromise between Customary and Reform Buddhism designed to counter Christian attacks that monks were unreliable and lazy. Monks were instructed to give up their wanderings, settle in established monasteries, and accept the new state curriculum. Because the Dhammayut monks were the best educated in Thailand at the time -- and had the closest connections to the royal family -- they were enlisted to do advance work for the government in outlying regions.

　　In 1928, a Dhammayut authority unsympathetic to meditation and forest wanderers took charge of religious affairs in the northeast. Trying to domesticate Ajaan Mun”s following, he ordered them to establish monasteries and help propagate the government”s program. Ajaan Mun and a handful of his students left for the north, where they were still free to roam. In the early 1930”s, Ajaan Mun was appointed the abbot of an important monastery in the city of Chieng Mai, but fled the place before dawn of the following day. He returned to settle in the northeast only in the very last years of his life, after the local ecclesiastical authorities had grown more favorably disposed to his way of practice. He maintained many of his dhutanga practices up to his death in 1949.

　　It wasn”t until the 1950”s that the movement he founded gained acceptance in Bangkok, and only in the 1970”s did it come into prominence on a nationwide level. This coincided with a widespread loss of confidence in state monks, many of whom were little more than bureaucrats in robes. As a result, Kammatthana monks came to represent, in the eyes of many monastics and lay p…

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