The Forest Monks
IT’s
5:50 A.M AND I’M in Chaiyaphum province,
Thailand, following a single-file column of
russet-robed monks as they tread barefoot down
the red-dirt road that runs between their
monastery and the nearby village. The first
greetings of the day are all of the canine
variety. Farm dogs look up from nipping fleas to
bark at the monks as they wind their way through
the dawn. The monks are accompanied by their own
companions, four scruffy dogs that hang around
the monastery and seem to have appointed
themselves the monks’ guardians. When one of the
farm dogs gets a little too excited, baring its
fangs and developing a raw edge to its bark, the
monastery mutts swiftly pin it onto its
back.
In
Theravada Buddhism, the school of Buddhism
practiced here, the monks’ discipline requires
them to neither cultivate their own food nor buy
it, so their sustenance depends on whatever alms
the villagers might donate this morning. This is
my first time joining an alms walk. Every day,
though, three processions of monks set out, each
covering different corners of the village. I
can’t quite wrap my head around how this kind of
collection is supposed to work as a long-term
prospect. Villagers living near a monastery face
the burden of feeding themselves while also
keeping dozens of monks and nuns alive. Although
monks eat little, limiting themselves to a scant
meal or two a day as part of the effort to
overcome the desires of the body, there are many
of them.
When I drove in the
day before with the group of conservation
biology students I’m here with, the village had
not looked especially large or prosperous, just
a few cross streets of smallholder farmers’
houses. There were no traffic lights, no
commercial buildings other than a couple of
dusty pantry markets and an informal repair
garage, with spare parts and tires piled against
the walls. Would families keep giving, I
wondered? Could they?
In all
honesty, I hadn’t expected to worry much about
the village, which had seemed like just another
cluster of houses to pass on the way to Wat Pa
Sukato, the forest monastery where the monks
dwell. The other students and I are here for
five days to study the monks’ conservation
efforts, led by the head of the monastery, Phra
Paisal Visalo. A spare, soft-spoken man in his
mid-60s, Phra Paisal conveys unmistakable
authority despite wearing the same style of
hand-dyed robe and sporting the same shaved head
as the other monks. For several days, he and
Vichai Naphua, a good-humored, bearded layman
who has long worked with the monastery and is as
robustly framed as Phra Paisal is lean, have
been orienting us to decades’ worth of activism,
both here and at the many forest monasteries
across Thailand that have nudged Buddhism toward
greater engagement in ecological
issues.
How could those
practicing a religion founded on compassion turn
their backs on severe environmental
crisis?
Writer Greg
Harris visits a forest monastery in Thailand and
learns how, in the face of severe environmental
crisis, Buddhist monks there are setting aside
their religious imperative to keep a distance
from worldly affairs and taking up
activism.
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