What the Buddha Never Taught

20th Anniversary Edition of the National Bestseller

Tim Ward

• Publisher: Thomas Allen Publishers
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780887628238
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

The 20th Anniversary Edition of the bestselling classic with a new foreword by Wade Davis. "Tim's journeys took him not only to Asia, but into an inner world of spirit and faith. He has lived on the streets of India, pursued the Dharma in Himalayan monasteries, and joined the community of monks at Wat Pah Nanachat in the jungles of Thailand – a commitment detailed with such humour, honesty and grace in What the Buddha Never Taught ". – Wade Davis, author of The Wayfinders, from the new foreword. There is a place in the jungles of northeastern Thailand where Westerners can live according to the monastic rules laid down over 2, 500 years ago by the Buddha. Author and journalist Tim Ward sought enlightenment and spent a season in this unique Buddhist monastery-one of the strictest in Southeast Asia. His affectionate "behind the robes" book about the rigors and foibles of monastic life at Wat Pah Nanchat has become a modern Buddhist classic. How does a monk handle coming face to face with a cobra coiled behind a toilet door? Can Mr. Chicago - a former real estate tycoon - really find liberation in a 10" X 10" wooden hut? How does a would-be-monk manage to meditate with the incessant clouds of mosquitoes hovering overhead, when the precepts prohibit killing all sentient beings? And how do Tim and the others react when Thai villagers put a Mars Bar in their begging bowls? By turns humorous, iconoclastic and inspiring, What the Buddha Never Taught was a best seller in Canada, a Book of the month selection in the US, and has been translated into five languages, and used as a university text for classes in Asian and Religious studies.

1


The Farang
Wants to Go to a Wat

I TOLD NIMALO, the Australian novice, that they ate deep-fried cockroaches on the bus. I expected him to laugh. “Beetles, not cockroaches,” he told me in all seriousness. Of course. Silly of me. Certainly beetles would be a much tastier snack.

I rode all day. It was dark when the bus neared the city of Ubon Rajathani, less than fifty kilometres from the Laos border. Then I started asking other passengers where to get off for Bung Wai village. The Thais blinked at me, smiled politely and let me babble as if it was for my own entertainment. Finally the driver got it into his head that I wanted off. He stopped the coach and let me out into the night. It was raining. I found a local bus stop nearby.

“This stop for Bung Wai bus?” I said to a young Thai soldier in uniform. He grinned at me.

“Bung Wai bus?” I said to a man wearing glasses and a wristwatch. He shrugged his shoulders, smiled shyly and looked away.

A farmer’s wife controlling two whining children glanced at me nervously. I kept quiet. A bus came. Everybody climbed on board. I put one foot on the steps.

“Bung Wai bus?” I said to the driver. He looked at the ticket girl, a short woman who wore the regulation blue skirt and fat legs. She gave a helpless little smile.

“Bung Wai bus Bung Wai village,” I explained.

She looked wordlessly at the driver. He revved the engine, and looked down the highway. I stood my ground, not getting on, not getting off.

“Bung Wai. Bung Wai!”

The driver gestured impatiently, beckoning me to board. I knew he hadn’t understood. I gave in. Shaking the rain from my rucksack, I sat down next to the most-likely-to-be-educated person on the bus, a student wearing a white shirt with three ballpoint pens in his breast pocket.

“This bus go Bung Wai?” I tried again.

The student looked back at me, polite but puzzled.

I unzipped the outer pocket of my pack and pulled out a small white book. Finding the name I was looking for, I pronounced it several times in various tones, hoping I’d hit a combination understandable to his Thai ears.

“Pah Nanachat. Pah Nanachat. Me go Wat Pah Nanachat, Bung Wai bloody village.”

The young man’s smile turned a bit wary at my insistence. I flipped through the pages, hoping for a picture of Ajahn Chah, but it was in the other book, four hundred kilometres away in Bangkok. I drew my legs up and folded them under me, then placed my hands together in my lap, straightened my spine and closed my eyes meaningfully for a few seconds. I opened them again and looked piercingly at the student. He scratched his head. But the soldier called over to him, and mimicked my posture. The student grinned openly and nodded his head. Everyone on the bus looked relieved. The farang wants to go to a wat.

The bus, however, had reached Ubon Rajathani by this time. My hazy sense of direction told me I would have to backtrack to reach Bung Wai. The student got down with me in the city. Apparently he knew what I wanted, but not where to find it. He seemed determined to help. He was tall for a Thai, almost my height, but skinny and younger than I first had thought: fifteen perhaps. My new guide stopped a group of soldiers on the street. One of them seemed to know the place for which a foreigner like me would be looking. He smiled and spoke in broken English.

“You go farang wat? Wat Pah Pong, Wat Pah Pong.”

“I go Wat Pah Nanachat, Wat Pah Nanachat. Ajahn Chah.”

“Ajahn Chah, Ajahn Chah. Wat Pah Pong. Wat Poh Pong,” he corrected me.

“I see. Why not? Wat Pah Pong then.”

Everybody seemed happy about this decision. The soldiers hailed a tuk-tuk for the student and me. Wat Pah Pong was also mentioned in Ajahn Chah’s books so I assumed somebody there would at least be able to speak English. In Bangkok, one can be lazy. English will get you by. Out here in the northeast you might as well speak Portuguese.

The tuk-tuk driver said he would take us to Pah Pong monastery for thirty baht. The three wheeler drove us east through the rest of the city then out along a muddy dirt road into the jungle. In twenty minutes we arrived at a set of great iron gates. They were locked tight. The student found a small side door in the high concrete wall which was open. It was a black night and still raining. I pulled my flashlight from the bottom of my pack and went through the small entrance with the student clutching my arm. Beyond the wall we found a huge hole in the road about twenty metres wide. My light was reflected by puddles on the bottom. We could see that the sides were smooth, like an excavation pit.

“I guess Pah Pong isn’t here right now,” I said to my guide. He pulled me back through the gate. Outside, our driver was talking with the proprietor of a small noodle shop near the wall. His chairs were all piled up for the night on top of rickety wooden tables. A kerosene lamp flickered. He shook his head as we joined the driver. He pointed to the road leading west from the gates. “Pah Nanachat.” I heard him say.

“Yes, Pah Nanachat!” I nodded furiously. Our driver took new directions and the three of us crawled back into his tuk-tuk. He stuck a dipstick into his petrol tank and muttered something quietly. Then he started the engine. We roared along the slippery new trail until it opened onto a different highway. There the driver hesitated. The student argued with him over which way to turn. Finally we turned right, back towards the city. But the student harangued the driver until he turned around and headed in the opposite direction. When we neared the lights of a small roadside village, the driver stopped and left his seat to get help in a nearby house. He returned, giving us a confident thumbs up signal. Half an hour later we were completely lost. The engine began to sputter in the rain. The driver seemed ready to mutiny, let me off on the highway and go home. He and the student argued loudly. A wooden signpost loomed in our headlight. It was written in Thai and English: ‘Wat Pah Nanachat. Bung Wai International Forest Monastery.’ Together we made gleeful noises. The tuk-tuk followed the turn off. It was only a mud and gravel track. We were soon surrounded by jungle. A footpath appeared through the rain. The tuk-tuk slithered sideways in the open muddy space next to it. The driver left his engine running.

I gave him what he asked, one hundred baht for the job, and thanked them both. I prayed they would have enough petrol to get back to town safely. My student waved at me as the machine swung around. After watching the little light disappear down the road, I clicked on my flashlight, shone it into the dense, wet trail and wondered what comes out at night when the rains flood the earth. Pack slung over one arm, I walked into the black jungle.

I expected a nerve-steeling walk of several kilometres before reaching the forest retreat. It irritated me when the grey outlines of buildings emerged after only five minutes. Ahead I saw lights. The path widened and the tree cover thinned as I reached a large barn-like building. A side doorway was open. It was a temple. At the front was an altar like a stage, dominated by two large brass Buddhas. Smaller brass figures knelt in worship on either side. Lesser images in front of the main idols glittered by the light of two candles. In front of the altar, five rows of red mats had been set out. In the back row sat a young man dressed in white. His head had been shaven. He sat in typical Thai meditation posture, legs crossed with the left foot resting on the right calf. His hands were folded in his lap, eyes closed, still as the Buddha images. He took no notice of me. He was Caucasian.

I bowed three times to the statues, as Tan Sumana Tissa had shown me, touching my forehead to the ground three times from a kneeling position. I took a seat in the third row and folded up my legs, just to try the place out. To the left of the altar stood a glass case containing a complete human skeleton.

I repeated my bows, stood, and left the temple in search of an office. No one was expecting me. In the rain again, I noticed that light was coming from a window at the back of the temple. There was a door. I heard voices inside so I knocked. It opened. A white-skinned man wearing white robes blinked into the dark at me through steel-rimmed spectacles.

“Do you speak English?” I asked.

“I suppose so,” he said humourlessly.

“I’m sorry I’ve come so late,” I stammered. “I took a day bus. The tuk-tuk got lost in the rain. I just arrived.”

“Yes,” he said. He turned to an adolescent Thai boy wearing ochre robes seated next to a tape recorder on the floor of the room, and spoke to him in Thai.

“I will take you to the Ajahn,” said the man, turning back to me.

I followed his white robes across the clearing, into the jungle again. They seemed luminous in the night. The rain had stopped but water dripped everywhere from the dense cover overhead. We came to a small wooden house raised high off the ground by stilts.

“Sawadi krup,” said my new guide, as we walked up towards the dark building.

A dark figure appeared at the railing above. A voice spoke down to us in Thai. When the reason for the interruption so late at night was explained, the figure descended the wide wooden staircase. I shone my flashlight on him and was surprised to see he was another Westerner. The man was tall and thin, perhaps forty years old—but with no hair. He had a ski jump nose. His eyes seemed blue beneath his pink scalp.

“Thank you, Michael,” the Ajahn said. The man in white raised his palms together in front of his face in a wai, the Thai gesture of respect. He turned, and walked back through the jungle like a ghost.

“We can sit down here,” said the Ajahn. He wore the ochre robes typical of Theravada Buddhist monks, a muddy yellow-brown, but his accent was Australian. We sat on the marble surface of the foundation beneath his quarters, he on a low platform, me kneeling in front of him.

I explained briefly that a monk in Bangkok had given me two of Ajahn Chah’s books on meditation and had recommended Wat Pah Nanachat as the best place in Thailand for foreigners to learn how to put the Buddha’s teachings into practice. I said I wanted to stay for three months or so.

The head monk nodded. “I’ve been expecting you. For now you can sleep in the guest room above the kitchen. Once you get to know your way around, you may shave your head. That’s the sign you wish to stay for some time and practise. We will give you a kuti to live in once you have been shaven. You may think it is strange that we attach so much importance to shaving the hair, but people are attached to their hair. Here we teach how to overcome our attachments. This is the way to end suffering. You start with the hair. There’s no hurry though. When you are ready. There’s a lot to learn when you first get here. I won’t say much now. It’s late and you will forget.

“You will hear the bell at three in the morning. Everyone is expected to be in the sala—that’s the main temple—by three thirty for morning chanting and group meditation. The meal is at ...