The Autobiography of a Forest Monk
The Autobiography of Phra Ajaan Lee
Phra Suddhidhammaransi Gambhiramedhacariya
(Dhammadharo, Lee)
by
Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo
Translated from the Thai by
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Copyright © 1994 Metta Forest Monastery
Access to Insight edition © 1994
For free distribution. This work may be republished, reformatted, reprinted, and redistributed in any medium. It is the author”s wish, however, that any such republication and redistribution be made available to the public on a free and unrestricted basis and that translations and other derivative works be clearly marked as such.
Source: Transcribed from a file provided by the translator.
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Contents
Foreword
The Autobiography of Phra Ajaan Lee
Epilogue
Glossary
Part I: Personal Titles
Part II: Terms
Notes
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Foreword
Phra Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo was one of the foremost teachers in the Thai forest ascetic tradition of meditation founded at the turn of the century by Phra Ajaan Sao Kantasilo and Phra Ajaan Mun Bhuridatto. His life was short but eventful. Known for his skill as a teacher and his mastery of supranatural powers, he was the first to bring the ascetic tradition out of the forests of the Mekhong basin and into the mainstream of Thai society in central Thailand.
The year before his death, he was hospitalized for two months with a heart ailment, and so took the opportunity to dictate his autobiography. He chose to aim the story at his followers — people who were already acquainted with him but didn”t know him well enough — and he selected his material with a double purpose in mind, choosing incidents that made both for good stories and for good lessons. Some of the lessons are aimed at monks, others at meditators in general, but they deal primarily with issues he had not been able to include in his written guides to meditation.
As a result, the book contains very little on the substantive events in his own meditation. If you have come to this book in hopes of gauging the level of Ajaan Lee”s meditative attainments, you have come to the wrong place, for on this topic his lips are sealed. Most of what he wanted to say on the subject he had already included in his other books. As for his own personal attainments, he never mentioned them even to his closest students.
What he talks about here are the events that surrounded his life as a meditator, and how he dealt with them: the challenges, the strange characters and the unusual incidents he encountered both in the forests and in the centers of human society. He presents the life of meditation as one of adventure — where truth is a quality of the heart, rather than of ideas, and the development of the mind is a matter of life and death — and it is in this that a large part of the book”s educational and entertainment value lies.
Ajaan Lee”s method of drawing lessons from his experiences is typical of Thai meditation teachers — i.e., he rarely draws any explicit lessons at all. One notable exception is the fine passage towards the end where he discusses the benefits of living a wanderer”s life in the forest, but otherwise he leaves it up to his readers to draw their own lessons from the incidents he relates. Rather than handing you lessons on a platter, he wants you to be earnest enough in your desire to learn that you will search for and find useful lessons no matter where you look. When you get used to being taught this way, the payoff is that you find you can learn from everything, for as Ajaan Lee says himself, there are lessons to be learned from animals, trees, and even vines.
Some readers will be t…
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