About RidgeClub

RidgeClub is a small, carefully kept library for anyone drawn to the Buddha’s teaching as it has been lived in the forest monasteries of Thailand. It gathers three things: texts worth returning to — suttas, chants, and verses, in the Pāli and in English; the teachers of the Thai forest tradition, from Ajahn Sao and Ajahn Mun to the monasteries their students founded around the world; and a library of the best places to go deeper, nearly all of it offered freely by the monasteries themselves.

How it’s chosen

Everything here is chosen by hand, and it changes with the calendar — a reflection for each day, the moon days and holy days of the Thai year, and whatever the season calls for. The aim isn’t to be complete but to be trustworthy: a few of the best doors into a very deep house.

Where a translation is our own, it says so. Everything else is credited to its translator and source, and linked rather than copied whenever it belongs to someone else.

Why the ridge

A ridge is the line where two slopes meet. From it you can see both valleys at once.

The Theravāda tradition speaks of two kinds of truth: the conventional truth of people, places, and things (sammuti-sacca), and the ultimate truth of experience as it actually arises and passes away (paramattha-sacca). Neither cancels the other. The practice is to see both clearly, and to walk between them without falling to either side.

The club is everyone who walks that way.