Featured read Meditation
Meditation is sold as harmless, and for most people it is. For a minority it brings anxiety, panic or old trauma to the surface, sometimes for months or longer. The research has only lately caught up with something the Pali Canon recorded at Vesālī, where the Buddha's answer was not to stop teaching meditation but to teach a gentler kind.
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Practical guidance on Buddhist meditation — posture, technique, working with pain and distraction, and the traditional objects of contemplation. Written from years of practice in the Thai Forest Tradition.
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Essays on happiness, meaning, spirituality and the ordinary difficulties of being a person — approached through a Buddhist lens but without requiring one.
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Monasteries, temples and customs of Thai Buddhism — including visits to Wat Pah Nanachat and the ancient city of Ayutthaya, and notes on the Thai Forest Tradition of Ajahn Chah.
ExploreOn the full moon of the twelfth month, Thailand sets small candle-lit rafts adrift and asks them to carry an apology, an offering and the year's bad luck. It is usually called a Buddhist festival, and in part it is, by adoption, as a king of Siam explained more than a century ago.
The Buddha told a monk who did everything alone that this was only one kind of living alone. Pascal and a famous electric-shock experiment show why the other kind is so hard — and the forest monasteries show what it takes.
Two teachers walked the same roads before the same kings and left two religions that look alike from a distance and disagree at the root: on the self, on karma, and on the way to freedom.
The Buddha was one wandering teacher among many. One sutta records a king who put the same question to six of the most famous, and keeps every answer — the best map we have of the world the Buddha taught in.
Most Thai men who have worn the robe came in through custom; a foreigner at a forest monastery almost always comes in by conviction. The difference is real, but it does not decide who becomes a good monk — and the suttas say so first.
