xvithrough forests and mountains in search of secluded places that offer
body and mind a calm, quiet environment in which to practice med-
itation for the purpose of transcending all suffering. His was a life
lived entirely out of doors at the mercy of the elements and the vagar-
ies of weather. In such an environment, a dhutanga monk developed
a deep appreciation of nature. His daily life was full of forests and
mountains, rivers and streams, caves, overhanging cliffs, and wild
creatures large and small. He moved from place to place by hiking
along lonely wilderness trails in remote frontier regions where the
population was sparse and village communities far apart. Since his
livelihood depended on the alms food he collected from those small
settlements, a dhutanga monk never knew where his next meal would
come from, or whether he would get any food at all.
Despite the hardships and the uncertainties, the forest was a
home to the wandering monk: it was his school, his training ground,
and his sanctuary; and life there was safe provided that he remained
vigilant and faithful to the principles of the Buddha’s teaching. Living
and practicing in the relatively uncultivated, undomesticated rural
backwater that comprised most of Thailand at the turn of the 20th^ cen-
tury, a dhutanga monk like Ãcariya Mun found himself wandering
through a centuries-old setting little changed from the time of the
Buddha 2,500 years ago.
It is helpful to understand the temporal and cultural back-
ground to Ãcariya Mun’s wandering lifestyle. Thailand in the late
19 th and early 20th centuries was a loose confederation of principal-
ities that were largely inaccessible to the central authority because
most of the land was densely forested and paved roads were almost
nonexistent. During that period, 80% of Thailand’s landmass was
blanketed with pristine forests of mostly deciduous hardwoods and
thick sub-tropical undergrowth. The lives of people in the hinter-
land areas were sustained by subsistence farming and the hunting
of wild animals. Teeming with tigers and elephants, the vast forests