FOREWORD Phra Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo was one of the foremost teachers in the Thai forest as

                                          
                                          
                                          
                                          
                                FOREWORD
  
  Phra Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo was one of the foremost teachers in the 
  Thai forest ascetic tradition of meditation  founded at the turn of 
  the century by Phra Ajaan Sao Kantasilo and Phra Ajaan Mun Bhuridatto. 
  His life was short but eventful.  Known for his skill as a teacher and 
  his mastery of supranatural powers, he was the first to bring the 
  ascetic tradition out of the forests of the Mekhong basin and into the 
  mainstream of Thai society in central Thailand.
  
    The year before his death, he was hospitalized for two months with a 
  heart ailment, and so took the opportunity to dictate his 
  autobiography.  He chose to aim the story at his followers -- people 
  who were already acquainted with him but didn't know him well enough 
  -- and he selected his material with a double purpose in mind, 
  choosing incidents that made both for good stories and for good 
  lessons. Some of the lessons are aimed at monks, others at meditators 
  in general, but they deal primarily with issues he had not been able 
  to include in his written guides to meditation. 
    
    As a result, the book contains very little on the substantive events 
  in his own meditation.  If you have come to this book in hopes of 
  gauging the level of Ajaan Lee's meditative attainments, you have come 
  to the wrong place, for on this topic his lips are sealed.  Most of 
  what he wanted to say on the subject he had already included in his 
  other books.  As for his own personal attainments, he never mentioned 
  them even to his closest students.
    
    What he talks about here are the events that surrounded his life as 
  a meditator, and how he dealt with them:  the challenges, the strange 
  characters and the unusual incidents he encountered both in the 
  forests and in the centers of human society.  He presents the life of 
  meditation as one of adventure -- where truth is a quality of the 
  heart, rather than of ideas, and the development of the mind is a 
  matter of life and death -- and it is in this that a large part of the 
  book's educational and entertainment value lies.
    
    Ajaan Lee's method of drawing lessons from his experiences is 
  typical of Thai meditation teachers -- i.e., he rarely draws any 
  explicit lessons at all.  One notable exception is the fine passage 
  towards the end where he discusses the benefits of living a wanderer's 
  life in the forest, but otherwise he leaves it up to his readers to 
  draw their own lessons from the incidents he relates.  Rather than 
  handing you lessons on a platter, he wants you to be earnest enough in 
  your desire to learn that you will search for and find useful lessons 
  no matter where you look.  When you get used to being taught this way, 
  the payoff is that you find you can learn from everything, for as 
  Ajaan Lee says himself, there are lessons to be learned from animals, 
  trees, and even vines.  
    
    Some readers will be taken aback by the amount of space Ajaan Lee 
  gives to signs, portents and other supranatural events.  Things of 
  this sort tend to be downplayed in the laundered versions of Theravada 
  Buddhism usually presented in the West -- in which the Buddha often 
  comes off as a Bertrand Russell or Fritz Perls in robes -- and 
  admittedly they are not the essence of what the Buddha had to teach.  
  Still, they are an area that many people encounter when they explore 
  the mind and where they often go astray for lack of reliable guidance.  
  Ajaan Lee had a great deal of  experience in this area, and has many 
  useful lessons to teach.  He shows by example which sorts of 
  experiences to treat simply as curiosities, which to take seriously, 
  and how to test the experiences that seem to have important messages. 
    
    In my many conversations with his students, I have learned that 
  Ajaan Lee limited his narrative to only the milder events of this 
  sort, and often deals so much in understatement that it is possible to 
  read through some of the incidents and not realize that anything out 
  of the ordinary is going on at all.  When the book was first printed 
  after his death, many of his followers were disappointed in it for 
  just this reason, and a number of them got together to write an 
  expanded version of Ajaan Lee's life that included many of the more 
  amazing events they had experienced in his presence.  Fortunately -- 
  from Ajaan Lee's perspective at least -- this manuscript has since 
  disappeared.
    
    To be frank, one of the things that first drew me to Ajaan Lee, 
  aside from the clarity and subtlety of his teachings, were the tales I 
  had heard of his powers and personality.  My teacher, Ajaan Fuang 
  Jotiko, was a close disciple of his, and much of my early education as 
  a monk consisted of listening to his stories of his adventures with 
  Ajaan Lee.  For me, if the //Autobiography// had lacked the drama of 
  the event in Wat Supat, or the panache of his encounter with Mae Fyyn 
  (having her light him a cigarette as one of her first acts after he 
  had cured her paralysis), it wouldn't have been Ajaan Lee.
    
    However, I should say something here about the miracles surrounding 
  the relics that play a large role in the latter part of the book.  
  There is an old tradition in Buddhism that many of the bodily relics 
  of the Buddha and his arahant disciples transformed into small 
  pellet-like objects that come and go of their own accord. The 
  Theravadan version of this tradition dates back at least to medieval 
  Sri Lanka, and may go much further back than that.  There are old 
  books that classify the various types of relics by shape and color, 
  identifying which ones come from which parts of the Buddha's body and 
  which ones from which disciple.  The tradition is still very much 
  alive in Thailand, especially now that the bones of many of the dead 
  masters of the forest ascetic tradition have turned into relics.  As 
  for relics of the Buddha, I have talked to many people who have seen 
  them come and go, and I have had such experiences myself, although 
  nothing as dramatic as Ajaan Lee's.
    
    I mention all this not to make a case for the existence and 
  provenance of the relics, but simply to point out that Ajaan Lee was 
  not alone in having such experiences, and that the rational approach 
  of Theravada Buddhism has its uncanny side as well.
    
    At any rate, my feeling is that Ajaan Lee mentioned the issue of the 
  relics for two reasons: 
    
    1) He was compelled to because it was a part of the controversy that 
  surrounded his name during his lifetime, and his students would have 
  felt that something was amiss if he didn't provide some explanation of 
  the topic. The incident he mentions at Wat Supat was not the only time 
  that relics appeared while he was teaching meditation to groups of 
  people, and in fact he once mentioned to Ajaan Fuang that the 
  frequency with which this happened often irked him:  Just as his 
  students would be settling their minds in concentration, these things 
  would appear and that would be the end of the meditation session.
    
    2)  As Ajaan Lee mentions in the book, he believed he had a karmic 
  debt requiring that he build a chedi to enshrine relics of the Buddha, 
  and he needed to convince his supporters of the importance of the 
  project. 
    
    So keep these points in mind as you read the relevant passages, and 
  be open to the possibility that throughout the book there are issues 
  between Ajaan Lee and his audience flowing under the surface of the 
  narrative that you can only guess at. 
    
    Also bear in mind that the book was left unfinished.   Ajaan Lee had 
  planned to tack on a series of addenda dealing with events scattered 
  in time and place throughout the body of the narrative, showing their 
  connections and providing more details, but he left only the sketch of 
  the first addendum, a piece explaining why he chose to name his 
  monastery Wat Asokaram.  The sketch is so purposefully disjointed and 
  cryptic, though, that I have chosen to leave it out of this edition.    
    
    You will find, as you read through the book, occasional details of 
  Thai culture and the rules of the Buddhist monkhood that might be 
  unfamiliar to you. I have tried to anticipate these points, marking 
  them with asterisks in the text and explaining them in the footnotes 
  at the back of the book, but forgive me if I have missed anything you 
  find puzzling.  The footnotes are followed by a glossary of Pali and 
  Thai terms I had to carry over into the translation, and you might 
  find it useful to read through Part I of the glossary -- to get some 
  sense of what is conveyed by a person's name in Thai society -- before 
  jumping into the book itself.
    
    Ajaan Lee as a speaker was always very conscious of his audience, 
  and I suspect that his autobiography would have been a very different 
  book if he had written it with a Western audience in mind.  My 
  translating the book as it stands has been an act of trust:  trust 
  that the value of Ajaan Lee's message is universal, and trust that 
  there are readers willing to take the empathetic journey into another 
  culture and mind set, to see how the possibilities of the human 
  condition look when viewed from another side of the globe, and to 
  bring some of that new perspective back with them on their return.
  
                                          Thanissaro Bhikkhu
                                          (Geoffrey DeGraff)
  
  
  
  Metta Forest Monastery
  Valley Center, CA 92082-1409
  January, 1994
  
  
  
  
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