Ajahn Sumedho

A Thai forest monastery built around strict discipline, communal silence and long solitary meditation is not an institution that transplants easily, and Wat Pah Nanachat, the training monastery Ajahn Sumedho helped Ajahn Chah establish in 1975, was as much a translation project as a religious one: retaining the forms of Thai monastic training while conducting enough of it in English that non-Thai speakers could actually absorb the instruction rather than merely imitate the schedule. Ajahn Sumedho's own move to England two years later carried that translation project a stage further, into a country with no existing Buddhist monastic infrastructure at all. Chithurst, founded in 1979 in a donated rural property, and Amaravati, founded in 1984 on a larger site north of London, had to work out from first principles how a Thai forest monastery's daily rhythms, alms rounds, communal meals, formal precepts, could function inside British law, British weather and a lay community with no inherited familiarity with any of it. The two monasteries succeeded well enough to become a template: monasteries in their lineage were subsequently founded across continental Europe, North America and Australia and New Zealand, nearly all traceable through teachers who trained at one or the other, which is why historians of Western Buddhism generally treat Ajahn Sumedho, rather than Ajahn Chah himself, as the figure most directly responsible for the Thai Forest Tradition's durable presence outside Thailand.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Ajahn Sumedho was born Robert Karr Jackman in Seattle in 1934 and raised in an American Christian family, a documented American origin distinct from the Thai forest institution building his first article covers. At eighteen he served four years as a United States Navy medic during the Korean War, then completed a bachelor's degree in Far Eastern Studies and, in 1963, a Master's degree in South Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, a documented course of military and academic training distinct from anything in the account of Wat Pah Nanachat or Chithurst his first article traces.

After a year as a Red Cross social worker, Jackman served in the Peace Corps as an English teacher in Borneo from 1964 to 1966, a documented overseas posting distinct from the deliberate monastic translation project his first article credits him with leading in Thailand and then England. Only after that posting did he travel to northeast Thailand, where he was ordained a novice at Wat Sri Saket in 1966 and received full ordination as a bhikkhu the following year, beginning a decade of training under Ajahn Chah at Wat Nong Pah Pong before the 1975 founding of Wat Pah Nanachat his first article opens with.

That the monk credited with carrying Thai forest monasticism into durable institutions across Britain and beyond had spent his twenties first as a wartime medic and then as a Peace Corps teacher on the other side of the world from any Buddhist training, marks Robert Jackman's pre-ordination decade as a documented case where the discipline Sumedho later brought to building monasteries abroad was already visible in the years he spent serving, and looking, before he ever took robes.