Carrying the Forest Tradition to the West

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.