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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