Ajahn Amaro

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.

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 Amaro was born Jeremy Charles Julian Horner in Kent, England, and studied physiology and psychology at the University of London before setting out in 1977, degree finished, on an open ended overland journey through Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, a documented pre monastic life distinct from the comparison with Ajahn Sumedho's own earlier path his first article draws. He found Wat Pah Nanachat in northeast Thailand, was drawn in by Ajahn Chah's teaching and Ajahn Pabhakaro's encouragement, and was ordained by Ajahn Chah in 1979, a documented ordination distinct from anything in the account of the two English monasteries, Chithurst and Abhayagiri, his first article traces him building afterward.

In 1983, four years into his monastic life and not long after returning to England, Amaro undertook a tudong, a wandering ascetic walking practice, on foot from Chithurst in West Sussex to Northumberland in the far north of England, a journey of more than eight hundred miles that he later documented in his own book, Tudong: The Long Road North, a documented physical undertaking distinct from the institutional founding and co-abbotship his first article recounts. The walk carried no fixed lodging or guaranteed food, following the traditional forest monastic practice of relying on whatever hospitality the road provided.

That the monk his first article credits with helping settle the Thai Forest Tradition institutionally in two countries also chose, early in that same career, to walk the length of an unfamiliar country with no more than a bowl and a robe, marks the 1983 tudong as a documented case where Amaro's later administrative and teaching authority rested on a much older, plainer kind of proof: a body willing to walk the distance a teaching asked of it.