A Still Forest Pool: Wisdom from the Theravada Forest Tradition of Ajahn Chah
About this ebook
The wisdom of Ajahn Chah helped ignite interest in meditation in the West, where many of his students became contemporary spiritual leaders. Spending many years walking and meditating in a forest monastery in Thailand, Ajahn Chah engaged in the uncomplicated and disciplined Buddhist practice called dhudanga, a quiet, intensive, and joyous practice of the forest monks.
In A Still Forest Pool, Ajahn Chah’s humble yet powerful words awaken the spirit of inquiry, wonderment, understanding, and deep inner peace. His teachings contain what has been called “the heart of Buddhist meditation,” the direct and simple practices of calming the heart and opening the mind to true insight. This way of mindfulness, or insight meditation, has become a rapidly growing form of Buddhist practice in the West.
Attachment, according to Ajahn Chah, causes all suffering. Understanding the impermanent, insecure, and selfless nature of life is the message he offers for human happiness and realization. To vividly grasp the meaning of attachment leads us to a new place of practice—the path of balance, the Middle Path.
With A Still Forest Pool, you will learn to take the steps on the meditative path that will change and fulfill your life.
This title was previously published in 1985; this new edition includes new material by Jack Kornfield.
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About the author
Ajahn Chah (1918–1992) was part of a movement to establish simple monastic communities in the remote forests of Thailand. At this date, over one hundred forest monasteries have been established that look to his teaching as their inspiration. Ajahn Chah’s simple yet profound style of teaching has a special appeal to Westerners. In 1979, the first of several branch monasteries in the West was established in England, and there are now more than ten monasteries in the United States, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
Jack Kornfield, PhD, trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India, and Burma. He has taught meditation internationally since 1974 and is one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West. Jack cofounded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and the Spirit Rock Center in Woodacre, California. He holds a PhD in clinical psychology and is a husband, grandfather, and activist. His seventeen books have sold two million copies and been translated into twenty-two languages. They include The Wise Heart; A Path with Heart; After the Ecstasy, the Laundry; The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace; and No Time Like the Present. For more, visit jackkornfield.com.
Paul Breiter was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1948 and traveled to Thailand in 1970, where he took ordination as a monk. He soon met Ajahn Chah and became his student. Paul learned Thai and the local Lao dialect (Isan) and served as Ajahn Chah’s translator for the many Westerners who came to study with him. He kept a journal of his translations of Ajahn Chah’s teachings, some of which he published with Jack Kornfield in the original release of A Still Forest Pool (Quest Books, 1985). He traveled with and translated for Ajahn Chah when he visited the United States in 1979. He later published an account of his time studying with Ajahn Chah, Venerable Father: A Life with Ajahn Chah. He also published two books of Ajahn Chah’s teachings through Shambhala Publications, Being Dharma (2001) and Everything Arises, Everything Falls Away (2005).
