..续本文上一页 frequency with which this happened often irked him: Just as his students would be settling their minds in concentration, these things would appear and that would be the end of the meditation session.

　　2) As Ajaan Lee mentions in the book, he believed he had a karmic debt requiring that he build a chedi to enshrine relics of the Buddha, and he needed to convince his supporters of the importance of the project.

　　So keep these points in mind as you read the relevant passages, and be open to the possibility that throughout the book there are issues between Ajaan Lee and his audience flowing under the surface of the narrative that you can only guess at.

　　Also bear in mind that the book was left unfinished. Ajaan Lee had planned to tack on a series of addenda dealing with events scattered in time and place throughout the body of the narrative, showing their connections and providing more details, but he left only the sketch of the first addendum, a piece explaining why he chose to name his monastery Wat Asokaram. The sketch is so purposefully disjointed and cryptic, though, that I have chosen to leave it out of this edition.

　　You will find, as you read through the book, occasional details of Thai culture and the rules of the Buddhist monkhood that might be unfamiliar to you. I have tried to anticipate these points, marking them with asterisks in the text and explaining them in the footnotes at the back of the book, but forgive me if I have missed anything you find puzzling. The footnotes are followed by a glossary of Pali and Thai terms I had to carry over into the translation, and you might find it useful to read through Part I of the glossary — to get some sense of what is conveyed by a person”s name in Thai society — before jumping into the book itself.

　　Ajaan Lee as a speaker was always very conscious of his audience, and I suspect that his autobiography would have been a very different book if he had written it with a Western audience in mind. My translating the book as it stands has been an act of trust: trust that the value of Ajaan Lee”s message is universal, and trust that there are readers willing to take the empathetic journey into another culture and mind set, to see how the possibilities of the human condition look when viewed from another side of the globe, and to bring some of that new perspective back with them on their return.

　　Thanissaro Bhikkhu

　　(Geoffrey DeGraff)

　　Metta Forest Monastery

　　Valley Center, CA 92082-1409

　　January, 1994

　　--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

　　The Autobiography of Phra Ajaan Lee

　　I was born at nine in the evening on Thursday, the 31st of January, 1907 — the second day of the waning moon, the second lunar month, the year of the Horse — in Baan Nawng Sawng Hawng (DoubleMarsh Village), Yaang Yo Phaab township, Muang Saam Sib district, Ubon Ratchathani province. This was a village of about 80 houses, pided into three clusters: the Little Village, the Inner Village and the Outer Village. In the Outer Village was a temple; that was the village in which I was born. Between the villages were three ponds, and surrounding the villages on all sides were scores of giant rubber trees. To the north were the ruins of an ancient town with two abandoned Buddhist sanctuaries. The spirits there were said to be so fierce that they sometimes possessed people, causing them to go live in the spirit shrines. From the looks of the ruins, I”d say they were built by the Khmers.

　　My original name was Chaalee. My parents were Pao and Phuay Nariwong; my grandparents on my father”s side were named Janthaari and Sida; and on my mother”s side, Nantasen and Dee. I had five brothers and four sisters. About nine days after I was born, I became such a nuisance — crying all the time — …

《The Autobiography of a Forest Monk》全文未完，请进入下页继续阅读…