Independent reformer · southern Thailand
Ajahn Buddhadāsa
Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu
พุทธทาสภิกขุ
1906–1993 Suan Mokkhabalārāma (Suan Mokkh), Chaiya, Surat Thani
One of Thailand's most influential Buddhist thinkers: the monk who founded Suan Mokkh, the Garden of Liberation, and spent sixty years calling the teaching back to its heart.
Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu — “servant of the Buddha” — was born on 27 May 1906 in Chaiya, in southern Thailand, and ordained in 1927. After a few years of study in Bangkok he returned home, disillusioned with monastic life in the capital, and in 1932 took up residence in an abandoned forest temple near his village. It became Suan Mokkhabalārāma, the Garden of the Power of Liberation.
He was not a forest master in Ajahn Mun’s lineage, and his teaching was often controversial: he read the Pāli Canon directly and critically, set aside folk belief and ritual, and insisted that the Dhamma was about freeing the mind from “I” and “mine” here and now. His teaching on mindfulness of breathing, in sixteen steps, remains one of the fullest guides to that practice.
Before his death in 1993 he established the International Dharma Hermitage across the road from Suan Mokkh, where retreats for foreigners are still held.