A Teacher
Ajahn Chah
Letting go and the naturally still mind, taught plainly through ordinary monastic life.
The transmission
Ajahn Chah (1918-1992) was a Thai forest monk of the Theravada Thai Forest Tradition whose plain, humorous, and disarmingly direct teaching on mindfulness, letting go, and the nature of the mind drew a stream of Western students to his jungle monastery.
Ordained in the strict lineage descended from Ajahn Mun, he founded Wat Nong Pah Pong in 1954, a forest training centre built on simplicity, discipline, and continuous awareness in walking, eating, sweeping, and sitting rather than on esoteric technique.
His genius was to point past doctrine to the immediate experience of a mind that grasps and suffers, and a mind that releases and rests. As Westerners began to arrive, he established Wat Pah Nanachat in 1975 as a monastery run in English for foreign monks, appointing his student Ajahn Sumedho as its first abbot.
Through this branch and through students such as Jack Kornfield, Ajahn Sumedho, and Ajahn Brahm, Ajahn Chah’s teaching became one of the deepest sources of Western insight and mindfulness practice, feeding the Insight Meditation Society in America and the Amaravati and Abhayagiri monasteries in Britain and California.
His talks, gathered posthumously into collections like A Still Forest Pool and Food for the Heart, distil a single instruction into countless images: the mind is intrinsically tranquil, and peace is found not by adding anything but by letting go.
Delivered in the idiom of rice fields and forest paths, his words carried the authority of a life lived, not merely described.
What they gave
Letting go as the heart of practice: Reduced the whole path to non-attachment - “if you let go a little you will have a little peace; if you let go completely you will have complete peace.”
- Mindfulness in ordinary monastic life: Made continuous awareness in everyday activity, not special states, the true field of meditation.
- The still forest pool: Taught that the mind is intrinsically tranquil, and that watching it patiently, like still water, lets wisdom and clarity arise of themselves.
- Training a generation of Western teachers: Founded Wat Pah Nanachat for foreign monks and trained the students who carried insight meditation to America and Europe.
In their words
If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you will have complete peace.
The mind is intrinsically tranquil. Out of this tranquility, anxiety and confusion are born.
Peace within oneself is to be found in the same place as agitation and suffering.
Do everything with a mind that lets go. Don’t accept praise or gain or anything else.
The line they stand in
Ajahn Chah stood in the Thai Forest Tradition of Ajahn Mun Bhuridatta, the twentieth-century revival of strict forest-dwelling Theravada practice. His own students carried that lineage westward: Ajahn Sumedho founded the Chithurst and Amaravati monasteries in England, Ajahn Brahm established Bodhinyana in Australia, Ajahn Pasanno helped lead Abhayagiri in California, and Jack Kornfield co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts, making Ajahn Chah one of the central conduits of Theravada practice into Western insight and mindfulness culture.
Essential Works
- A Still Forest Pool: The Insight Meditation of Achaan Chah1985
- Being Dharma: The Essence of the Buddha's Teachings2001
- Food for the Heart: The Collected Teachings of Ajahn Chah2002