From Chithurst to Abhayagiri: A Second Generation Crosses the Atlantic

Ajahn Amaro represents a distinct stage in the Thai Forest Tradition's move west from the one Ajahn Sumedho himself embodies: where Sumedho trained directly under Ajahn Chah in Thailand before establishing the lineage in England, Amaro trained entirely within the already-established English monasteries, ordaining under Sumedho at Chithurst in 1979 rather than making the journey to Thailand himself. That distinction mattered for what came next. By the mid-1990s the lineage had a settled institutional base in Britain but almost no presence in North America, and Abhayagiri, founded in 1996 in rural Mendocino County, California, had to repeat much of the same translation work Chithurst had done fifteen years earlier, adapting Thai forest monastic forms to a new country's laws, climate and lay community, but now guided by monastics who had themselves been trained in the West rather than in Thailand. Amaro's later move back to England in 2010, to serve as co-abbot of Amaravati alongside the teacher who had ordained him three decades earlier, closed a kind of loop in the lineage's own institutional history: by that point the tradition had grown enough monasteries across enough countries that a monk trained on one continent could return to lead on another, evidence, to historians of Western Buddhism, of how thoroughly the tradition had by then taken institutional root outside Thailand.