WILDERNESS MONKS

Wilderness plays three roles in early Buddhist texts: a place, a mode of livelihood, and an attitude toward practice. First, the wilderness is a place whose solitude, dangers, and rugged beauty provide an ideal environment for practice. The Buddha himself is said to have gained bodhi (awakening) in the wilderness and to have encouraged his disciples to practice there as well. Monks could wander there during the dry season and settle there any time of the year. Nuns, though forbidden from settling or wandering alone in the wilderness, were required to go on a brief group wilderness tour annually after the Rains Retreat.

In addition to its role as a place, the wilderness functioned as a mode of livelihood. Monks and nuns, wherever they lived, were forbidden from engaging in the activities—farming, herding, and mercantile trade—that historically have set domestic civilization apart from the wilderness life of hunters and gatherers. Third and most important, monks and nuns were enjoined to cultivate wilderness as an attitude, an inner solitude and non-complacency transcending all external environments. Combined, this attitude and mode of livelihood provided the means by which Buddhist monastics were taught to straddle the line between civilization and the wilds.

Nevertheless, early texts show a division between monks who specialized in living either in the cities or in the wilderness. Although the portrayal of each type mixes criticism with praise, wilderness or forest monks on the whole enjoy the better press. MahĀkĀŚyapa, one of the Buddha's strictest and most respected disciples, is their model and ideal type, whereas city monks can claim no similar exemplar. Wherever the two types are directly compared—as in the accounts of the controversy at Kauśāmbī and of the Second Council—city monks are portrayed as intent on comfort and political power, contentious, unscrupulous, and undisciplined. The monks in Vaiśālī, whose behavior sparks the Second Council, are lax in their observance of the Vinaya (monastic rules). The Kauśāmbī monks, having split over a minor infraction, abuse the Vinaya to create an escalating war of accusations. Wilderness monks, in contrast, are portrayed as harmonious and unassuming, earnest meditators, strict and wise in their discipline.

The first praise for city monks appears in early MahĀyĀna texts. Whereas conservative versions of the bodhisattva path, derived from the early canons, take the wilderness monk living strictly by the Vinaya as their exemplar, more radical versions extol the city monk living in luxury as one who is not to be judged by outside appearances.

There are also reports, beginning with the early canons, of wilderness monks gone bad, using the psychic powers developed in their meditation for their individual fame and fortune to the detriment of the saṄgha (monastic community) as a whole. Although jealous city monks may have concocted these reports, they speak to a fear that has repeatedly been borne out in Buddhist history: that the respect shown for wilderness monks could create an opening for abuse. This possibility, combined with a general mistrust for the wilderness and the misfits who tended to settle there, led to an ambivalent attitude toward wilderness monks, which vacillated between reverence and wariness. During periods of relative stability, the uncertainty as to whether wilderness monks were charlatans, saints, or insane tended to discourage contact with them.

Their main role in shaping Buddhist history thus came in periods of crisis, when people in the centers of power lost faith in the domesticated Buddhism of the cities and, overcoming their fears, turned to wilderness monks to spearhead reforms. This pattern is especially marked in the TheravĀda tradition. In the thirteenth century, for instance, after a foreign invasion had threatened the revival of Theravāda in Sri Lanka, King ParakrṄmabṄhu II placed a contingent of forest/scholar monks, lead by a SṄriputta Bhikkhu, in charge of the saṅgha's unification. The system of governance and standards of scholarship thus formulated for the saṅgha proved influential in Theravāda countries well into the twentieth century. They also ensured that the traditions of the Mahāvihāra—the sect to which Sāriputta belonged—became the Theravāda norm.

Similarly, in the nineteenth century, when King Mindon of Burma (Myanmar), tried to revive classical Burmese culture in response to the British colonial threat, he invited wilderness monks to teach insight mediation (vipaśyanā; Pāli, vipassanĀ) to his court, in hopes that the resulting spiritual superiority of his government would dispel the barbarians at the gate. Despite its failure in this regard, his patronage of vipassanā established a precedent for high-ranking Burmese throughout the colonial period and for the Burmese government when it regained independence. This in turn fostered the development of distinct schools of vipassanā practice, such as the Mahasi Sayadaw and U Ba Khin methods, that have since spread around the world.

As the twenty-first century dawns, wilderness monk movements thrive in all the major Theravāda countries, examples being the forest/scholar brotherhoods founded in the twentieth century by Kaḍavädduvē Jinavaṁsa in Sri Lanka and Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu in Thailand. The most prominent wilderness movement, however, is the Kammaṭṭhāna (Meditation) tradition founded in Thailand in the late nineteenth century by Āčhān Sao Kantasīlo and Āčhān Man Bhūridatto. Building on the Dhammayut sect's reforms earlier in the century, this movement differed in two ways from the tantric wilderness movements extant in Thailand at its inception, both in its strict adherence to the Vinaya and in its championing of meditation techniques drawn from the Pāli canon. Before the close of the twentieth century, the movement spread beyond Thailand into other parts of Asia and the West.

Although some wilderness movements have left long-lasting marks on Buddhist history, they themselves have tended to be short-lived. Their very success in gaining support leads directly to their domestication and decline. In the past, the ubiquitous forest has served as the testing ground for new wilderness movements in Asia as older ones pass away. With the rapid deforestation of the continent, this source of regeneration and reform is in danger of disappearing. At the same time, with the spread of Buddhism beyond Asia, there is the question of whether wilderness in its three roles—as place, mode of livelihood, and attitude—will counterbalance the inevitable domestication of Buddhism as it settles into its new homes.

See also:Ascetic Practices; Monasticism; Monks

Bibliography

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Ray, Reginald A. Buddhist Saints in India: A Study in Buddhist Values and Orientations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Swearer, Donald K., ed. Me and Mine: Selected Essays of Bhikkhu Buddhadāsa. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Taylor, J. L. Forest Monks and the Nation-state: An Anthropological and Historical Study in Northeastern Thailand. Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 1993.

Teich, Anne, ed. Blooming in the Desert: Favorite Teachings of the Wildflower Monk Taungpulu Sayadaw. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1996.

Tiyavanich, Kamala. Forest Recollections: Wandering Monks in Twentieth-Century Thailand. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu. "The Customs of the Noble Ones" (1999). Available from Access to Insight: Readings in Theravāda Buddhismwww.accesstoinsight.org.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu

(Geoffrey DeGraff)