It is the middle of a hot October afternoon in Nakhon Pathom, a city some 40 miles west of Bangkok, with the kind of heat that settles over the city and refuses to move. We have come to Phuttamonthon Park to seek shade and escape the traffic, and find a nearby temple, Wat Nyanavesakavan, offering a sheltered seating area with a large, serene Thai Buddha statue behind it, gilded and catching the afternoon light. Birds are busy in the trees surrounding us, as are vans blasting political slogans in the distance. It seems a fitting place to talk with a man who spent the better part of two decades living outdoors.
Robin Moore was born and raised in the United States and spent eighteen years as a monk, known then as Suriyo Bhikkhu, in the lineage of Ajahn Chah, the great Thai forest master of the last century. He took higher ordination in England in 1990 with Ajahn Sumedho as his preceptor and then spent eight years in Thailand, three of which he spent simply walking – on tudong, the wandering, itinerant life that the forest tradition has never quite given up. Today, he lives in Bangkok and is one of the most respected translators of Thai Buddhist literature into English. His translation of Phra Payutto’s Buddhadhamma, a foundational treatise on Theravāda thought, runs to some 1,500 pages.
He is not at all what you might expect of a man with that résumé. He is funny, unhurried and disarmingly ordinary – words are chosen carefully, then often taken back and chosen again. The habit, it seems, of somebody who has spent twenty years weighing what a single Pali term should be in English.
Over the course of an afternoon, we covered the origins of the Thai Forest Tradition and the monks who wore robes stitched from cremation cloth; karma and how little free will we may actually possess; and what the word nirvana might mean when every honest description of it has to be made in the negative. At one point, discussing how rarely any of us are genuinely at peace, he described an experiment in which people were given a choice between fifteen minutes alone with their own minds and a mild electric shock. Most of them chose the shock. And at the end of that same answer, he offered his advice on all of it: try not to complicate the issue by thinking too much about it.
Study Buddhism: You grew up in the United States in a family that wasn’t especially religious. Where did your interest in spiritual questions begin?
Robin Moore: Neither of my parents were religious, and I’d probably describe my father as an atheist, and my mother as a humanitarian, or humanist, maybe, is the right word. My mother remarried when I was about eight, and my stepfather is a theologian, so we went to church every Sunday, and I would say that’s where my interest in asking spiritual questions began.
I prayed. I tried to create this connection. I thought, okay, if there really is an all-powerful, omnipotent God, then I’d like to be in his good books. But after doing prayers at night – the way I describe it, it’s like when you make a phone call and you get a busy signal. Eventually, I turned into the average teenager who was more interested in other things than spirituality. But that interest never died away. You could say it was latent. There was this real strong wish to make sense of what it is to be human, what it is to be alive.
At that time we were living near New Haven, Connecticut, and I was starting to misbehave and be a headache for my mother. We decided together that I would go to a very good boarding school called Northfield Mount Hermon, and that was a very significant, pivotal time for me. The school was founded in the late 19th century by Christian missionary Dwight Moody, who made it a stipulation that every student take one year of religious studies. And of course, amongst these religions was Buddhism.
Was there a particular moment in that year when Buddhism stopped being a subject on a syllabus and became something else?
It was more like a door opening to eastern religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and I wasn’t able at first to distinguish between them. It happened coincidentally that that sophomore year, in English class, I had a sort of bohemian English teacher, and he had us read The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. It was an epiphany of sorts, because all of a sudden a whole new way of looking at life was presented to me – so different to the secular model of basically everything is just material, or the theistic tradition I grew up in, where there is this god, but he’s not really visible.
Probably, by the end of that year, I was most attracted to Buddhism; it was like a magnetic pull. That was really the feeling, one of like meeting an old friend. And I became a little bit evangelical, even, because it’s like, okay, I’ve found it! My friends, my parents, my family, they were all getting annoyed with me, because they didn’t share my enthusiasm. And I was feeling confused, like, why don’t you see it?!
What was it in the teachings themselves that convinced you? What did Buddhism offer that the tradition you were raised in didn’t?
A feeling of confidence. I shouldn’t rely on some power outside of myself, or even some person. That really, the primary responsibility for whether I live a happy life or an unhappy life is the decisions I make. I have to take responsibility for my own actions and, in a sense, my own destiny. That was one really important aspect of Buddhism that got me hooked.
Another was this feeling that we call virtue – whether it’s kindness or patience or fortitude – that these are universal principles and we’re not born with a limited amount that we then have to live with throughout our whole life. This goes to the Pali word bhāvanā, or cultivation, of like planting a seed. The plant might be sickly, yes, but if we give it proper care, sunlight, water, nutrients, it can grow into a mature tree. Or the opposite: we can neglect a very healthy tree, and then it dies out of neglect.
And then you met the teacher who would eventually ordain you. What was that first meeting like?
I started doing meditation retreats every summer at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and then I spent a year on staff there in 1987, where I met Ajahn Sumedho and sat a retreat with him. He just seemed very down to earth. It was not some sort of amazing, “He’s my master, he’s the enlightened one.” It was more, in fact, just the opposite. He was so ordinary, it was extraordinary. But there’s a sense of meeting someone who is wiser than I am. And that’s, of course, at the heart of the principle of kalyāṇamitta, of having a teacher, a virtuous friend, good companions.
When my year was complete, I went to visit Amaravati in England and really felt I’d found my family, in a sense, my true family. And so then I asked to be ordained, spent two years as a novice there, in white. And then in 1990 I took higher ordination, or what’s known as upasampadā, with Ajahn Sumedho as my preceptor in England.
Those English monasteries were themselves branches of a Thai lineage. How did a forest tradition from northeast Thailand end up in the English countryside?
They are branch monasteries of Wat Nong Pah Phong, the main monastery of Ajahn Chah, one of the great Buddhist masters of the last century in Thailand. Ajahn Sumedho was his first Western disciple, who turned up at his doorstep around 1967 or 68. A few years later some Buddhists in England came to Thailand and said, look, we would like to support a monastery there. Ajahn Chah went to have a look for himself, and asked Ajahn Sumedho to be the first emissary. Whatever misgivings he might have had, he was ready for the challenge – there are now five branch monasteries in England, and quite many more throughout the world.
As a newly ordained monk you were then required to live under a teacher for five years. How binding was that?
As is the custom, you’re asked to live with a teacher, an ācariya – or in Thailand they call it ajahn – for five years. In that sense it’s like a vow of obedience. One doesn’t just say, “Oh, by the way, next week I want to go and check out that monastery or I want to go to Sri Lanka or Burma.” No. But then, after that period is finished, one is almost always granted more autonomy and freedom to choose where one goes.
I spent those five years up at Harnham Monastery in Northumberland, with Ajahn Munindo. And when that time was finished, I had heard so many stories about Thailand – almost like a mythology, wonderful stories of the old days and these great enlightened monks. So I had a lot of curiosity and wanted to see for myself, and asked permission to come. I came in 1994, and ended up spending eight years as a monk here.
Three of those eight years you spent walking. What does that life actually consist of?
In the rainy season, you’re obliged to stay in one place for three months. But apart from that, one can wander. So I spent three years just walking on what’s called tudong, which comes from the Pali word dhutaṅga, sometimes translated as “ascetic practice.” These thirteen dhutaṅga rules were certain allowances the Buddha gave for monks to test themselves: eat only one meal a day; eat only from your alms bowl; sleep in the forest; sleep in a cemetery. You can’t practice all thirteen at once, because some cancel each other out, but it’s a big part of the Thai forest tradition.
One of the thirteen rules is to only use robes that you find discarded, which usually just came from cremation grounds: the cloth used to bundle up the corpse. The relatives didn’t want to keep it, and were quite happy if mendicants came to take it, and then they would sew this patchwork of cloth into robes. It’s certainly quite a rough, difficult lifestyle out in the jungles, often walking many kilometers to the nearest village every morning to collect enough food for their one meal a day.
And part of the lifestyle is to be itinerant, not tied down to one place. A hundred years ago, because Thailand was mostly forested, that was easy to do. I met one monk who had walked from Thailand to Tibet, because national boundaries, customs and visas were not that strictly enforced before. Now it’s more difficult to travel between countries, but it’s also more difficult to find pristine jungles.
But this tradition of the wandering monk is still very much alive in Thailand. Even now along the highway you can see monks walking barefoot with their large umbrella, which is called the klot, which you also use as a tent: you hang it up on a piece of rope and put mosquito netting down the sides and get in, and it keeps the creepy crawlies out. Unless it rains very hard, you can stay bearably dry, but it’s also light. In a way, you’re like a turtle carrying a house on its back.
Where does the Thai Forest Tradition actually come from? Who were those first forest monks?
One of the interesting attributes of Thailand, unlike European countries, is that there’s been much less importance given to the written word, to books, to published material. Even today the tradition is still much more of an oral one. So, who were the Thai forest monks from 400 years ago? The origins, probably no one can detect or discover. There are accounts from the time of Ayutthaya and Sukhothai of famous monks invited to the court to counsel the royalty, but they’re not necessarily forest monks, because there is a separation that goes all the way back to the time of the Buddha, of the forest monks and the village monks.
This separation has caused a little bit of friction, though it’s quite peaceful and I’ve never heard of any blood being shed. The forest monks are more focused on meditation, and less on studying or memorizing the Tipiṭaka, whereas the village monks are more known for studying Pali and transmitting that knowledge to the lay people. We could say that Venerable Mahakassapa was the epitome of the forest monk, who lived in the jungles: we have poems that he wrote, how joyous it is to walk in these mountain glades and hear the trumpeting of elephants and see these blossoms. The beauty of nature and, of course, the joy of liberation.
In Thailand, we can go back at least one or two hundred years, and that’s where the picture becomes clearer. Certainly in the last hundred years, particularly with Ajahn Mun and his life, somehow that captured the imagination of the Bangkokians – it was really significant that wealthy Bangkok people, or you could say even aristocrats, took an interest in these monks with very much the ascetic style. Ajahn Mun was really the grandfather. A few monks don’t come from his lineage, but even Ajahn Chah did – and I say “even” because in Thailand you have these two nikāyas, these two schools, and they don’t always see eye to eye; in fact they didn’t participate in formal gatherings together until recently. And Ajahn Chah, when he met Ajahn Mun, asked, “Should I move over to your school?” And Ajahn Mun said, “No, that school needs excellent monks. Stay where you are.” It’s a very nice story, and it encapsulates the diplomacy of the Thais. They’re a people who don’t enjoy conflict, and they’re very good at finding skillful means to avoid it.
You’ve mentioned teachers throughout. In Theravāda, what is the relationship between a student and a teacher actually meant to be?
The student-teacher relationship in Theravāda is better described as a form of friendship than it is of, say, a master-disciple relationship. Even the Buddha himself, if I’m not mistaken, did sometimes refer to himself, or others did, as a kalyāṇa-mitta, as a beautiful friend or a virtuous friend. Just like your other teachers, or just even like your good friends: people who really have your genuine welfare at heart. There is less of an emphasis on raising the teacher high onto a pedestal than one might see in other traditions.
But of course it’s part of human nature to project, and sometimes that’s unhealthy. The trouble people have, say, in cults – and this is true in Theravāda Buddhism as well – is that they become so enamored with a teacher because of their charisma that the teacher can do no wrong, and the students lose the discriminative faculty, where they say, “Okay, I really am impressed, but I could be wrong. I can’t read their mind.”
At the end of the day, we can only ourselves be our own refuge. No one, not even the Buddha, can be. I mean, the Buddha can be a refuge, but that’s more symbolic – the Buddha as awakening. We don’t go to the historical personage of the Buddha, like he is somewhere and I pray to you, please come and grant my wishes. No, no. That, I think, is a distortion.
In Asia, too, the way people relate to authority is quite different from, say, America, where we’re taught to question and even challenge it. In Thailand, no way: you can be lazy or angry or greedy, but probably one of the worst things you can do here is say or do anything in public that might bring shame on the teacher. Theravādan Buddhism is also quite hierarchical – even in the monastic community, you sit according to the day you were ordained. Not according to your age, not your social position, not your title. And so you might not like the monk sitting next to you who happens to get the plate of cookies before you do, but that’s how it goes.
I mentioned before the vow of obedience of your first five years. It’s not that you live unquestioningly, without engaging one’s own critical faculties, but very much one defers, as long as there’s a basic trust in the other person. So, my ajahn, my teacher, says: on the full moon night, we’re going to sit up all night. So I’m going to go, and I maybe don’t like it, but I’m going to do it, partly as a way of practice, but also as a way of deferring out of respect. But it has to be based on trust.
Let’s turn to practice itself. You’ve spoken about kasiṇa meditation, which most Western practitioners have never even heard of. What is it, and why has it disappeared?
For some reason, and it may just be that the world has become more hectic, more frenetic, kasiṇa has really, not fallen out of favor, but fallen into obscurity. It is one particular type of meditation mentioned in the Tipiṭaka, and there are ten kasiṇa objects: four colors, the four elements of earth, water, fire and air, space, and then in the original Tipiṭaka consciousness, which was later replaced by light.
One way of separating Buddhist meditation is either more of what’s called samatha, a tranquility-based orientation, and vipassanā, which is more the analytic insight. Kasiṇa meditations are more in the former, the tranquility of really focusing, and in the scriptures it says these are really difficult. I was taught the fire kasiṇa, and would meditate with a candle flame somewhere where there wasn’t a breeze, so it stayed quite still, and I would recite “tejo kasiṇa” – tejo is fire – and synchronize that mantra with my breathing. It doesn’t have to be in Pali. There’s nothing sacred about the Pali language. What’s more important is that there is this repetition – where it’s not forceful, you don’t have to think a lot, it comes more or less naturally.
But in one of the scriptures it says, look, only one in a hundred or a thousand of people who start will be able to continue. And of those, only one in a hundred will be able to create what’s called the uggaha nimitta, where you can close your eyes and your mind generates that image. So it’s a really difficult form of meditation. But it’s very much a part of this tradition, and I think it would be a shame if it disappeared. And so I feel very uplifted when I hear people giving it a go.
You’ve suggested elsewhere that Westerners bring a particular attitude to practice that can get in their way. What is it?
Especially amongst Westerners, there is still very much a goal-oriented approach to practice. Somehow, if we can only be willful enough, then we can power our way to nirvana, because that’s the way most forms of success are measured in the West. And I feel that often gets in the way, that the willful striving becomes just another form of unhealthy desire, one of trying to be, become, get, obtain. Even these words like “to attain enlightenment” – it’s important to look at how we use language. So I would usually say “realize,” to steer people away from this idea that they are getting something.
You can look at this topic from both sides. On the one hand, Buddhism is called a kiriyavāda, a doctrine of action, or one of viriyavāda, of effort – strive, persevere, get your hands dirty. And yet there is another teaching, a very important teaching, that describes a process of nature that unfolds even without any cetanā, any urging. If you keep impeccable sīla, ethical self-discipline, if you establish yourself in a life of non-harming and of kindness and generosity, then your life will be free from remorse. Why? Because you haven’t done anything.
People often think they get away with a crime because they haven’t got caught, but they have to live with themselves. And then they have to kill that part of themselves, which you call a conscience, that reminds them. In this model, there are ten factors, which lead to joy, then delight, then tranquility, then happiness, all the way to enlightenment – and each one of these is not an act of will. When there’s non-remorse, there will be joy. It’s just a law of nature, dhammatā.
This seems like a paradox. How can it be a religion of action, of engagement, and yet a very important part of the process is completely not, in a sense? One way to describe that is a little bit like planting a tree. We like apple pie, so we want apples. It takes a while, whatever, fifteen or twenty years. So we plant an orchard, even if it’s for the sake of our children. We don’t put in a bitter gourd seed, we put in an apple seed – that’s important! But then, if we’re sitting there day and night with our flashlight, and constantly propping it up and watering it, we’ll kill it, because we’re doing too much.
We add to the supportive conditions, to bring about a desired result, but we let nature take its course. The apple seed has within it the potential to become a mature tree that bears apples. But we didn’t create the apple. It would be a real injustice to claim that, oh man, I’m God, I created an apple, by putting this seed in the ground. That is what I would call the art of doing nothing. It’s knowing when to step forward, when to sit back. And that’s a real fine-tuning.
That raises the question of what we are actually responsible for. Karma is probably the most misunderstood Buddhist idea in the West. How is it defined in the tradition?
The word karma, or kamma, literally just means action. But it’s not just any form of action, it’s volitional action. So it’s action that’s based on what in Pali is called cetanā, urging. One of the biggest misconceptions of karma today is that it is retributive justice: that what follows you from one life to the next is like a form of punishment or reward. Another is that it is the same as fate and destiny. Very often in the West you’ll hear, oh, that’s his bad karma, it’s my good karma that I have a nice mansion in the suburbs. And again, that’s not completely false. It has residual connections to how karma is taught.
Cetanā is usually translated as intention, and if one doesn’t get caught up in the semantics, we all understand this concept of choosing: that we do have will, we make choices throughout our life. And so, that is karma. Most of the time it’s very subtle, happening constantly throughout our day. Some of those decisions are insignificant, but some are very significant.
It’s in the chapter on dependent origination where Phra Payutto talks about that. We actually think we have free will, a lot of it. He said we have very, very little of it, which is really interesting. We think we’re in control – here I am steering my way through life, turn right, turn left, do good, don’t be greedy. But most of the time we’re just running on an autopilot based on habit and conditioning, and we don’t know it. We still go to bed at night thinking, I have free will. But really, we’re more a slave to our conditioning than we would ever like to admit. And those moments when we can see through the mist and say, yeah, this is how I want to steer the boat – those are important.
One important distinction is that there’s karma as a law of nature, and there are social prescriptions, like laws. In America we had prohibition not too long ago, when alcohol was illegal, and nowadays it’s completely normal – so was it bad then and not bad now? The law of karma is etched into the fabric of the cosmos; it has nothing to do with whether people enact it as a law. So the words good and bad are not very useful here, and this is why the Pali kusala and akusala exist – usually translated as skillful and unskillful, which ties in more with karma as part of the natural order. Many people are familiar with the quote where the Buddha said, if you try and really unravel karma, you’ll go crazy. It’s so intricate. It’s like trying to follow every electron and proton that’s zipping around. It’s better to just keep our feet on the ground, stay with basics. But it’s still important to integrate that into our practice. So, ask ourselves: where do these actions lead? Does acting in this way promote well-being? Does it promote peace of mind for myself and others? Or does it cause turbulence, conflict, turmoil and violence?
The three marks of existence are often presented as the most basic description of how things are. How would you define them?
The three characteristics, or the three marks – in the Pali it’s lakkhaṇa – are anicca, dukkha, anattā. Very brief definitions: anicca is impermanence. Everything in the world, both material and mental, has building blocks, is not lasting. People might not want to hear it, they might not agree with it, but it’s very hard to argue against. Can you come up with anything? Even the Himalayas. The Appalachian mountains used to be magnificent, I was told; now they’re so ancient, they’re basically just nobbled-down rocks worn away through millions of years by rain and ice.
Take a glass: it exists for a period of time, because there’s a synchronicity, a coordination, but eventually those particles will all go their own way – and very quickly, if we drop it on the floor. Then you have dukkha, which is related. In the context of the four noble truths, the first is dukkha, translated as suffering. Perfectly valid translation. It’s like: pain is mandatory, suffering is optional. We can’t escape pain. But suffering is, on some level, something we choose to do, whether we acknowledge it or not. In the context of the three marks, though, it should not be translated as suffering. I use the word unendurable, unenduring.
Bhikkhu Bodhi, superb translator that he is, uses the word suffering even when defining dukkha as part of the three marks. But the problem is that a glass is characterized by dukkha, and how can a glass suffer if it has no consciousness? It’s not sentient. Suffering is something we overlay upon things unnecessarily, through ignorance, through not understanding birth and death and change. We want things to be this way, and now it’s veering off.
And then anattā –insubstantiality, or non-self, not-self. So, there is no self – this is very difficult, I think, for people to come to grips with, because of this sense of control. And sometimes we do appear to be in control. I decided to not eat donuts, and now I feel better, I’ve lost weight. Cause and effect, and I was the one. But there is no one who is really able to control; things do not follow our desire.
So the last, anattā, is the most subtle, the most difficult. And it’s fair to say that if you really understand anattā, then you’re awakened. The others – like impermanence, sometimes begrudgingly, but most of us can accept that. Unenduring, that things are under stress, we can get. But anattā, even if we understand it conceptually, to really bring it into our lives and make peace with it, really awaken to it, is another matter altogether. And when you do, then you could say that your work is complete.
There’s another distinction that seems to cause a lot of confusion – between conventional and absolute truth. Can you clarify it?
Conventional truth is sammati sacca in Pali – sacca is truth, sammati here as “agreed upon” – and then you have paramattha sacca, or absolute truth. The concepts are not that hard. Sammati sacca is agreed-upon designations. At birth I was called Robin. They could have called me Trevor. My dad wanted to call me Maynard, because he was an economist. I would have resented that, I think! When I was a monk, I was called Suriyo. So, what is the truth? Well, they’re all just conventions, just to help in the convenience of communication.
So, a pen: we call it a pen. But if you go to another country where they speak another language, you can shout pen, pen, and people will eventually just get annoyed, because this is just our convention. That’s very simple, not hard to understand. And yet we get caught up in these conventions very easily. It probably relates to this idea of the perception of a fixed self: we like our designations also to be somehow solid.
Now, paramattha sacca – some people think, you hear the word absolute, it must mean ultimate, must mean nirvana. But it’s not. It refers to the way specific objects maintain characteristics that don’t change. Water will always have certain characteristics, otherwise it won’t be water. Or the eye will never be able to hear sounds, however much we want it to, because the eye functions just as the eye. But the eye is still subject to impermanence, so it’s not nirvana that we’re talking about. We’re just saying that there are elemental phenomena that maintain their properties. That’s all.
Which brings us to nirvana itself. What does the word actually mean?
Nirvana, as most Buddhists have probably heard, cannot be put into words. It goes beyond anything that we’ve experienced before. So the best way of describing nirvana is what it’s not. And the easiest way for me, which doesn’t require a lot of cerebral or abstract thinking, is: it’s the end of greed, hatred and delusion. Perfect peace. Perfect happiness, if you like, although that’s a little trickier, because people have preconceived ideas of what happiness is. Peace is a little better, because most people only have an inkling of what peace is.
Most of us, we know something’s imbalanced in our lives. We sense it. It’s like the leaf fluttering in the wind. There’s an agitation, an underlying restlessness, even when we’re at our happiest. Whatever it might be – some people want to watch Manchester United, some just want to go to the spa, feel completely relaxed. But if they were really honest – I think everyone, okay, just stop now, and do nothing for ten minutes. Are you really, honestly, at peace? Most people would say no.
In fact, there was a really interesting experiment done, I think at a university, where they gave people the option to either have a mild electric shock or spend fifteen minutes in a room alone doing nothing, with no distractions. And almost everyone chose the electric shock, because it’s so painful to face oneself and the disorder inside. So nirvana is, however you want to describe it, at peace, in order, and nothing needs to be done. Nothing needs to be changed. I think it’s a very succinct, powerful way of saying what it is by saying what it’s not.
The tradition also describes stages of awakening on the way there. How are those defined?
In terms of awakened beings, there are four stages: stream-enterer, once-returner, non-returner, and arahant. They are defined in relation to the ten samyojanas, usually translated as fetters. And going back to the definition of nirvana as the end of greed, hatred and delusion, it ties directly into that: a stream-enterer has cut the first three.
So, the fetters are really like chains. Imagine being a prisoner bound to a cold wall in the Tower of London. It’s gruesome, and it’s freezing cold and wet, and rats running around. And imagine what joy, if you had ten chains, and all of a sudden three of them were severed – there would already be a feeling of like, wow, maybe there’s hope! Of course, it’s even greater than that. The way it’s described at stream-entry is: the amount of suffering that remains in the heart is like comparing a handful of gravel to the Himalayas. It’s not just a minor adjustment in one’s life. It’s a really extraordinary, irreversible transformation. And an arahant has severed all ten, so is basically fully awakened, fully enlightened.
Parinirvana is the term used in the scriptures for the death of an arahant, including the Buddha. One can realize nirvana in this lifetime, just like the Buddha did at age 35, and then live until 80, still with a body, still with feelings, still able to speak. But then at death, there’s no rebirth. And then nothing can really be described – what is nirvana then, where is it? It’s not a place. So again, one can only speak in negation.
Even being an arahant – you know, even the Buddha needed to rest his back. It’s painful to be in these bodies, and for an arahant it’s not an exception. The Buddha died from, apparently, some quite excruciating stomach illness, not an experience anyone would welcome. But again, that’s dukkha on the level of the three marks. Not dukkha as suffering. He was perfect, he never complained. For the Buddha, there was not even a moment of, “I wish it was otherwise”. And that is really hard for us to conceptually come to terms with. And so I would say: try not to complicate the issue by thinking too much about it.
You spent years living outdoors. Is the natural world incidental to Buddhist practice, or is it part of it?
Every Buddha is enlightened under a tree. None of them were enlightened in a shopping mall or by a used car dealership. All out in nature.
At first I thought maybe I’m just a tree hugger, I’m just a hippie. I grew up basically walking around forests, and my parents really loved nature. But now I realize that the relationship to nature is very, very important. The original word for a monastery, ārāma, was originally used for a king’s pleasure grove – a place of natural delight, where there are flowers and trees and birds and squirrels. And so the Buddha chose that word for the monastery, and that’s not a coincidence.
I’m not trying to say that you can’t practice in a city, or if there’s the sound of traffic. In fact, Ajahn Chah – there were probably about thirty equally famous forest monks of his generation, but none who came anywhere close to attracting the amount of Western disciples. And he couldn’t speak a word of English! So, what was it? He was charismatic, but the others were too. I think he had this ability to use similes from nature that were really easy to understand. Whether it’s the spider, like in the middle, and it’s like the mind – so when a fly comes, the spider goes out, catches that fly, but comes back. Do that: be like the spider, he would say.
Even the word Dhamma, or Dharma – one of the translations is nature. So, if you want to become a Buddha, see the Dhamma; and one way to say that is, understand nature. There is, for me, undeniably a therapeutic effect of being out in nature. There’s an uncomplicatedness, or simplicity. You go out into nature – yeah, it’s not all pretty. There’s predators eating prey, there’s fear, there’s dangers. And yet there is a harmony and there is an order.
And yet that order is under enormous strain. Do you see the environmental crisis as a Buddhist issue?
We’re very good at being complacent. Sadly, I think most people don’t act until there’s a crisis. Pollution, environmental crises, ecosystems collapsing – most of them are due to human actions, and through greed, particularly through greed. We’re just exploitative of nature and natural resources.
It’s very peculiar, because people say they love their children and their grandchildren, but they don’t stop doing silly things so that the world is a nicer place for those grandchildren to live in. “You should steward the planet” – it says that in the Bible, doesn’t it? Probably no one would disagree, but how many people actually do it? Most of us look for the path of least resistance, the path of greatest comfort, and nature just gets in the way, and won’t put up a fight until it’s too late. I fear it’ll only take these sort of tipping points, where people begin to get frightened, before they’ll change their habits. Sadly.
I don’t know if the Buddha could have said anything to alter the course. It’s good to have words of encouragement, but sometimes people just have to learn by making mistakes. I’m actually an optimist at heart: I do think humanity is going to be around in 500 years, and that we’re going to sort it out, but it might take us some real bumps.
For those people who do feel at peace in nature, feel somehow buoyed, or refreshed – it’s not a coincidence, and it can directly help your Dharma practice. What I would say is, if you’re having trouble, spend some time in nature and see if that budges, you know, go on a camping trip. It’s amazing what these trees do. Apparently not conscious, but they’re turning carbon dioxide into oxygen, and communicating via their roots through kind of fungal networks, sending warning signals about predators. So, there’s both a harmony and equilibrium, a peace that gets mirrored, that can help us, I think.
After eight years in Thailand you went back to England, and eventually left the robes altogether. What happened?
After those eight years, I missed the monastic community in England, and so I asked to return there. At that time, the monastery in Devon was abandoned, and so I asked to try and revive that as a living monastery, and spent four years there as the abbot of Hartridge Monastery. And then, in 2007, due to ongoing poor health, I decided the best for me would be to step out of the robes, to disrobe and live as a layman, and see if a change in diet, amongst other factors, would improve my health.
So, when I disrobed, it was a little bit – is it Rip Van Winkle? A fairytale of some man who falls asleep and wakes up decades later. It was a little bit like that. I had missed out, in a sense. I didn’t know who Oasis is, or who won the last four World Cups. In a sense, I had lived in a cave in the Himalayas. And I had no commercial skills, no idea what I was going to do when I stepped out. I’d lived with a vow of poverty, so I had no money.
And that’s when the translation work began?
I had the good fortune that there was a woman in Thailand who – I had started doing translations of Buddhist texts as a monk, and she knew of my work, and she called me in England and said, I want you to come back to Thailand, I’ll pay for your ticket. I’ll get you started here and make sure you have enough money to live, and just finish this one work that I had started, which is Buddhadhamma by Phra Payutto. It was like a miracle! Soon after I came back, a non-profit publishing company contacted me and signed a formal contract. So I worked for them for five years and completed this book, which is about 1,500 pages. And I’ve been doing translations ever since.
For me it’s like a treasure chest. Certainly I can speak for Thailand. It’s really like there’s a chest full of emeralds and rubies and gold coins, and they’re not accessible, because most people don’t speak Thai and there aren’t enough translators around. Words are so powerful that they can change people’s lives. It’s a great feeling – one, to be able to support myself, make a living, and earn a livelihood, but also to do something that I love and feel that I’m maybe making a difference for people’s lives. So, I rejoice in this good fortune.
Thank you so much, Robin, for your time and for sharing so much of your life and incredible understanding of the holy Dhamma with us.