Ajahn Mun Bhuridatta

Kammatthana means the place of work, and by extension the objects of meditation given to a practitioner. The tradition that carries the name is a Thai and Lao movement of wandering forest monks, and it took its modern form under Ajahn Sao Kantasilo and his student Ajahn Mun in the northeast of Thailand at the turn of the twentieth century.

Its context is a reform. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Siamese state was centralising the monastic order, standardising ordination, imposing Pali examinations and bringing village monasteries under a national hierarchy administered from Bangkok. Learning meant textual learning, and it meant the capital. Ajahn Mun's response was to go the other way: the ascetic observances of living at the foot of a tree, eating one meal from the alms bowl, wearing robes made from discarded cloth, and walking from place to place through forest that was still, in his lifetime, genuinely wild.

The practices he taught centre on mindfulness of breathing, on the recitation of the word buddho as a way of gathering attention, and on the contemplation of the parts of the body as a corrective to attachment. The emphasis throughout is that these are to be done rather than studied, and that a forest is a better teacher of impermanence than an examination hall. The movement's standing rose steadily through the twentieth century as its monks became known for exactly the qualities the centralised order was thought to have lost.

Ajahn Mun published nothing. The principal account of him is a biography written by his disciple Ajahn Maha Bua, drawing on what Ajahn Mun had told his students and on what those students remembered, and it is a devotional life rather than a documentary one. It records visions, encounters with deities and with the spirits of departed teachers, knowledge of others' minds, and an account of his final attainment. Readers inside the tradition take these as reportage; historians take them as a portrait of what the tradition values, which is not the same question.

That leaves the ordinary facts thin. He was born in Ubon Ratchathani in 1870, ordained, trained under Ajahn Sao, wandered in Thailand, Laos and Burma for decades, spent long periods in the north around Chiang Mai, returned to the northeast, and died at Sakon Nakhon in 1949 with a large gathering present.

The tradition reached the English-speaking world mainly through Ajahn Chah, who met Ajahn Mun only briefly and belongs to the wider lineage rather than to his immediate circle, and whose Western students founded forest monasteries in Britain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand from the 1970s onward. Those monasteries keep the alms round, the single daily meal and the emphasis on practice over scholarship, in landscapes that contain no forest of the kind Ajahn Mun walked in. This is a living tradition and it is described here rather than instructed.