Awareness Itself

Introduction

Ajaan Fuang Jotiko, my teacher, was born in 1915 to a small farming family in the province of Chanthaburi, near the Cambodian border of southeastern Thailand. Orphaned at the age of eleven, he was raised in a series of monasteries and received ordination as a monk when he turned twenty. As he began to study the monastic discipline, though, he realized that the monks of his monastery were not really serious about practicing the Buddha’s teachings, and he longed to find a teacher who would give him a training more in line with what he had read. His chance came during his second year as a monk, when Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo, a member of the forest ascetic tradition founded by Ajaan Mun Bhuridatto, came to set up a meditation monastery in an old cemetery just outside of Chanthaburi. Taken with Ajaan Lee’s teachings, Ajaan Fuang reordained in the sect to which Ajaan Lee belonged and joined him at his new monastery.

From that point onward, with few exceptions, he spent every Rains Retreat under Ajaan Lee’s guidance until the latter’s death in 1961. One of the exceptions was a five-year period he spent during World War II, meditating alone in the forests of northern Thailand. Another was a six-year period in the early fifties when Ajaan Lee left Ajaan Fuang in charge of the Chanthaburi monastery and wandered about various parts of Thailand in preparation for finding a place to settle down near Bangkok. When in 1957 Ajaan Lee founded Wat Asokaram, his new monastery near Bangkok, Ajaan Fuang joined him there, to help in what was to be the last major project of Ajaan Lee’s life.

After Ajaan Lee’s death, Ajaan Fuang was generally expected to become abbot at Wat Asokaram. The monastery by that time, though, had grown into such a large, unwieldy community that he did not want the position. So in 1965, when the Supreme Patriarch of Thailand, in residence at Wat Makut Kasatriyaram (The Temple of the King’s Crown) in Bangkok, asked him to spend the Rains Retreat at his temple, to teach meditation to him and to any of the other monks at the temple who were interested, Ajaan Fuang jumped at the chance.

He spent a total of three Rains Retreats at Wat Makut, wandering about the countryside looking for solitude during the dry seasons. Although he had immense respect for the Supreme Patriarch as an individual, he grew tired of the politicking he saw at the higher ecclesiastical levels and so began looking for a way out. It came in 1968, when a woman named Khun Nai Sombuun Ryangrit donated land to the Patriarch for a small monastery in a mountainous region near the coast of Rayong province, not far from Chanthaburi. Ajaan Fuang volunteered to spend time at the new monastery, Wat Dhammasathit, until a permanent abbot could be found. The monastery, though, was in a very poor area where the local people were not enthusiastic about the idea of a strict meditation monastery in their midst, so no one could be found to take on the position of abbot. Thus, shortly before the Supreme Patriarch’s death in a car accident in 1971, Ajaan Fuang accepted the position of abbot at Wat Dhammasathit himself.

It was soon after this that I first met him, in April of 1974. Wat Dhammasathit had the look of a summer camp down on its luck: three monks living in three small huts, a lean-to where they would eat their meals, a kitchen with room for a couple of nuns, and a small wooden structure on top of the hill — where I stayed — which had a view of the sea off to the south. The land had been donated shortly after a fire had stripped it of all its vegetation, and the hillsides were covered mostly with cogon grass. Yearly fires still swept through the area, preventing trees from taking hold, although the area on the mountain above the monastery was covered with a thick, malarial forest.

In spite of the poor conditions, Ajaan Fuang seemed to have a clear-eyed, down-to-earth wisdom that allowed him to transcend his surroundings — an inner peace, happiness, and stability that I envied and admired. After spending a few months practicing meditation under his guidance, I returned to America and then found my way back to Thailand in the fall of 1976 to be ordained as a monk and to begin training under him in earnest.

In my absence, he had begun to develop a small but devoted following of lay meditators. In early 1976 the new abbot of Wat Makut had invited him back to teach there on a regular basis, and for the rest of his life — until his death in 1986 — he split his time evenly between Bangkok and Rayong. Most of his students came from the professional classes of Bangkok, people who were turning to meditation for spiritual strength and solace in the face of the fast-changing pressures of modern Thai urban society.

During my first years back in Rayong, the monastery was an incredibly quiet and secluded place, with only a handful of monks and almost no visitors. Fire lanes had begun to hold the fires in check, and a new forest was developing. The quiet atmosphere began to change, though, in the fall of 1979, when construction began on a chedi at the top of the hill. Because the chedi was being built almost entirely with volunteer labor, everyone was involved — monks, laypeople from Bangkok, and local villagers.

At first I resented the disruption of the monastery’s quiet routine, but I began to notice something interesting: People who never would have thought of meditating were happy to help with the weekend construction brigades; during breaks in the work, when the regulars would go practice meditation with Ajaan Fuang, the newcomers would join in and soon they too would become regular meditators as well. In the meantime, I began learning the important lesson of how to meditate in the midst of less than ideal conditions. Ajaan Fuang himself told me that although he personally disliked construction work, there were people he had to help, and this was the only way he could get to them. Soon after the chedi was finished in 1982, work began on a large Buddha image that was to have an ordination hall in its base, and again, as work progressed on the image, more and more people who came to help with the work were drawn to meditation.

Ajaan Fuang’s health deteriorated steadily in his later years. A mild skin condition he had developed during his stay at Wat Makut grew into a full-blown case of psoriasis, and no medicine — Western, Thai, or Chinese — could offer a cure. Still, he maintained an exhausting teaching schedule, although he rarely gave sermons to large groups of people. Instead, he preferred to teach on an individual basis. His favorite way of getting people started in meditation was to meditate together with them, guiding them through the initial rough spots, and then have them meditate more and more on their own, making way for new beginners. Even during his worst attacks of psoriasis, he would have time to instruct people on a personal basis. As a result, his following — though relatively small compared to that of Ajaan Lee and other famous meditation teachers — was intensely loyal.

In May, 1986, a few days after the Buddha image was completed, but before the ordination hall in its base was finished, Ajaan Fuang flew to Hong Kong to visit a student who had set up a meditation center there. Suddenly, on the morning of May 14, while he was sitting in meditation, he suffered a heart attack. The student called an ambulance as soon as he realized what had happened, but Ajaan Fuang was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.

Because he had requested a few years earlier that his body not be cremated, plans began immediately to build him a mausoleum. I was given the task of assembling his biography and any tape-recorded talks that might be transcribed and published as a commemorative volume. I found, to my amazement, that I knew more about his life than anyone else. The people with whom he had lived when he was younger had either died or grown so old that their memories were failing them. All of a sudden the anecdotes he had told me during my first years back with him — of his youth and his years with Ajaan Lee — became the substance of his biography. How much I probably missed, given the fact that my abilities in Thai and familiarity with Thai culture were still developing, was disconcerting to think about.

Even more disconcerting was to discover how little of his teachings were left for posterity. Ordinarily, he refused to let people tape-record his instructions, as he maintained that his teachings were intended for the people listening to put into practice right then and there, and might be wrong for other people at other stages in their practice. The few tapes that were made came from simple, introductory talks that he gave to first-time visitors who had come to give a group donation to the monastery, or to people who were just getting started in meditation. Nothing of a more advanced nature was on tape.

So after we printed the commemorative volume, I started a project of my own, writing down what I could remember of his teachings and interviewing his other students for similar material. The interviewing took more than two years and involved a fair amount of editing to extract teachings that would be helpful for people in general and would work in a written format. The result was a small book entitled, The Language of the Heart. Then, shortly before I returned to the States to help start a monastery in California, another Ajaan Fuang tape was found, a sermon in which he was giving more advanced instructions to one of his students. I transcribed it and arranged to have it printed as a small booklet named, Transcendent Discernment.

The book you are holding in your hand is drawn from these three books. Most of the material comes from The Language of the Heart, although parts of that book had to be cut either because they referred to incidents peculiar to Thai culture, or because the puns and wordplay made them untranslatable. Ajaan Fuang loved playing with language — his sense of humor was one of the first things that attracted me to him — and many of his memorable sayings were memorable for just that reason. Unfortunately, most of these passages lose their impact on translation, and the explanations they would require might quickly become tedious, so I have omitted nearly all of them, leaving in a few — such as the “litter” story — to give a taste of his way with words.

In addition to the passages from The Language of the Heart, I have included almost all of Transcendent Discernment along with highlights from the commemorative volume. Not everything is a straight translation from these books, for in some cases I have had to retell the anecdotes to make them more accessible to a Western reader. I have been careful throughout, though, to translate the message of Ajaan Fuang’s own words as exactly as possible.

In putting this book together, I have had the opportunity to reflect on the student/teacher relationship as it exists in Thailand, and in Ajaan Fuang’s dealings with his disciples, both lay and ordained. He provided an atmosphere of warmth and respect in which his students could discuss with him the particular problems of their lives and minds without being made to feel like patients or clients, but simply as fellow human beings to whom he was offering a solid reference point for their lives. Since coming to the West, I find that this sort of relationship is sadly lacking among us and I hope that as Buddhism becomes established here, this sort of relationship will become established as well, for the sake of the mental and spiritual health of our society as a whole.

A group of Thai people once asked me what was the most amazing thing I had ever encountered in Ajaan Fuang, hoping that I would mention his mind-reading abilities or other supernatural powers. Although there were those — his knowledge of my mind seemed uncanny — I told them that what I found most amazing was his kindness and humanity: In all our years together, he had never made me feel that I was a Westerner or that he was a Thai. Our communication was always on a direct, person-to-person level that bypassed cultural differences. I know that many of his other students, although they would not have phrased the issue quite this way, sensed the same quality in him.

I offer this book as a way of sharing some of what I learned from Ajaan Fuang, and dedicate it, with deepest respect, to his memory. He once told me that if it hadn’t been for Ajaan Lee, he would never have known the brightness of life. I owe the same debt to him.

Note: For this new, revised edition, I have reinstated the section entitled “Merit”, most of which was omitted from the first edition in 1993.