People who spend time around Thai monasteries sometimes come away with an impression they are not always willing to say out loud: that the foreign monks seem more serious than the Thai ones. It is an impression, not a finding — there are no statistics behind it, and it should not be dressed up with any — but it does not come from nowhere either, and it is worth understanding what lies behind it. The short answer is that the passport has nothing to do with it. What makes the difference, to the impression at least, is the door each man came in through.
Two doors
Most men in Thailand who have ever worn the robe came in through custom. For generations, young men have ordained for exactly the length of one rains retreat, three months, to make merit for their parents, and above all for their mothers. Thai has an idiom for it, ko chai pha lueang, “holding on to the hem of the yellow robe”: the mother, who cannot ordain, holds on to her son’s robe, and in its longer form the idiom adds that this is how she reaches heaven. In the procession that takes the young man to the temple, it is usually she who walks in front, carrying the folded robes in her hands. Others ordain for a few days, sometimes for a single one, when a grandparent is cremated. That is buat na fai, ordaining “in front of the fire”, with the merit dedicated to the dead. And for a great many boys from poor rural families, the novice’s robe has long been the way to an education.
Custom has a further consequence, less often talked about. In Thailand the robe is always close at hand: there are temples everywhere, ordination is not hard to come by, and a monk is fed every morning, housed, and treated with respect. That makes the robe a way out as well as a way in — for a man whose business or marriage has failed, or for one who cannot find work — and, above all, a place to stay for one who discovers that life in robes is easier than the life he left. The ceremonial ordinations end on schedule, three months or a single day later. The ones that serve as a way out have no end date, and it is they, far more than the ceremonies, that account for the monk who stays in robes for years with very little conviction. This is not so much another door as the other side of the same one: the same custom that sends young men to the temple for three months makes staying, for anyone who wants to stay, very cheap.
None of those doors was open to the foreigner who arrived at Wat Pah Nanachat, the international monastery Ajahn Chah founded in the northeast for people who came from abroad to train with him. Nobody at home expected him to ordain, ordaining earned him nothing with anybody, and getting there meant leaving behind his family, his language and a career. Nor was the robe close at hand for him: a foreigner can come looking for a way out too, but much more rarely, because every one of the filters that follow stands between him and the robe. He had no door but conviction, or something he took for conviction.
A rigged comparison
If the foreign group looks better, the explanation is selection, not origin. Every foreigner still in robes after five years has already passed through a series of filters: the decision itself, his family’s opposition, visas, the language, the climate. Nor does the filtering stop at the door: every year in robes goes on costing a foreigner something, while for a Thai monk staying is cheap. The ones who did not pass are not there to be compared. The Thai Sangha a visitor sees, on the other hand, includes the men serving out their three months because it was expected of them, and everyone for whom the robe was simply the nearest way out, or the most comfortable place to stay. A filtered group set beside an unfiltered one will always come out ahead, and being foreign has nothing to do with it.
And it is not the passport that does the filtering. “Foreign monks” usually means Westerners, but a Lao or Cambodian monk who ordained for a rains retreat on his mother’s behalf is every bit as foreign, and he came in through the same door as a Thai. The comparison that would actually tell us something is a different one: Westerners set beside the Thai monks still in a forest monastery after the same five years, who have passed filters of their own.
The same pattern turns up wherever religion is inherited. Anyone raised among Catholics knows the cradle Catholic, baptized, confirmed and married in church because that is what one did, and knows the convert who arrived at the same church on his own and can usually recite the catechism better than anyone. In the late 1950s the psychologist Gordon Allport gave a name to the difference that usually goes with those two stories: an extrinsic religious orientation, in which religion serves something else — security, comfort, company, standing — and an intrinsic one, in which it is lived as an end in itself. In 1967, with J. Michael Ross, he built a scale to measure it, and it has to be conceded that the scale was developed among American Christian churchgoers and has been criticized ever since; by 1990 Lee Kirkpatrick and Ralph Hood were asking, in the title of a paper, whether it had been the boon or the bane of the psychology of religion. The distinction travels better than the measure. But it is worth noticing that it describes an orientation, not a door: that the two usually go together does not mean they always do, and that gap is what the rest of this essay is about.
What the suttas count as a reason
The suttas have a fairly exact idea of what the right reason for going forth is, and it is none of the above — not even conviction, as we usually understand it. In a discourse in the Saṃyutta Nikāya (SN 22.80) the Buddha reminds his monks that living on alms is the lowest of livelihoods — “you beggar, wandering about with a bowl in your hand” is a curse — and that young men of good family take it up all the same; not because kings or bandits drove them to it, nor because of debt or fear, nor for want of any other living,
but because they are sunk in birth, aging and death, in sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair; sunk in suffering, overcome by it, and they think: “Perhaps an end to this whole mass of suffering might be found.”
The tradition has a word for that impulse, saṃvega — the jolt of seeing one’s own situation clearly and feeling that there is no time to lose. It is not enthusiasm and it is not idealism; it is the pain itself, looked at directly. This is how the Buddha tells his own going forth in the Majjhima Nikāya (MN 26): young, his hair still black, in the first flush of life, he shaved off his hair and beard and put on the ocher robe while his mother and father, who did not want it, wept with tears running down their faces. In another discourse (AN 3.39) he remembers how delicately he was raised in his father’s house, and how the reflection that he too would grow old, fall ill and die took from him, entirely, the intoxication of youth, of health and of being alive. (The quotations here are rendered from the Pali; Bhikkhu Sujato’s and Bhikkhu Brahmali’s complete English translations are on SuttaCentral.)
The clearest case is Raṭṭhapāla’s (MN 82). He was the only son of a wealthy family, and his parents refused three times to let him go. He lay down on the bare ground, said he would either die there or go forth, and let one meal after another go by uneaten, seven of them, until his friends talked his parents around. Years later King Koravya put to him the question people still ask. The king knew of four reasons a man shaves his head and leaves home: the loss of youth, of health, of wealth, or of family. Raṭṭhapāla was young, healthy, rich and surrounded by relatives. So what had he seen? His answer was four sayings he had heard from the Buddha: the world is unstable and is being carried off; the world has no shelter and no protector; the world has nothing of its own, and one must leave it all behind and go; the world is always lacking, never satisfied, the slave of craving.
There is an irony here that should not be passed over. In the canon, a son’s going forth is something parents weep over, and the Vinaya rule requiring their permission came out of one father’s grief: Suddhodana, the Buddha’s father, asked him to ordain no one without it, after watching first his son leave, then his other son, Nanda, and finally his grandson, Rāhula. Love for a child, he said, cuts through the skin, the flesh, the sinews and the bone, and reaches the marrow. In Thailand, ordaining is something a son does for his parents. Both are true. It is the same act, seen from its two ends.
The robe as a way out
The texts also know that not everyone arrives by that road, and they know it from the start. The first chapter of the Mahāvagga, the part of the Vinaya that tells how the community took shape, contains a list of people who are not to be ordained, and nearly every entry comes with its story. There were five common diseases in Magadha, and the physician the sick went to, Jīvaka, was too busy with the king and with the monks to see anybody else. Some of the sick reasoned that the monks ate well and slept in beds out of the wind, and that if they ordained, the monks would nurse them and Jīvaka would treat them. One of them planned it with complete candor: “When I am well, I will disrobe.” He did. Jīvaka later saw him out of robes, and from then on no one with those diseases could be ordained. It went the same way with some of the king’s soldiers, who preferred the robe to a military campaign, with a debtor running from his creditors and with a slave running from his owners — the last two counting on a decree of King Bimbisāra that nobody who had gone forth with the monks was to be touched. Each case produced a rule.
The list of those who may not be ordained reads, in part, as a list of reasons that are not reasons. Using the robe as a way out is as old as the robe.
Counterfeit gold
Among the future dangers the Buddha foretells in the Aṅguttara Nikāya are two that might have been written for this question. In one (AN 5.79) there will be monks undeveloped in body, conduct, mind and wisdom who give ordination to others they cannot train; those others will not develop either, and will ordain others in their turn, and so, the text says, corruption of the teaching produces corruption of the discipline, and corruption of the discipline produces corruption of the teaching. In the other (AN 5.80) there will be monks fond of fine robes, fine food and fine lodgings, who leave the forest for the towns and cities. And in the Saṃyutta Nikāya (SN 16.13), when Mahākassapa asks why there used to be fewer rules and more awakened monks, the Buddha answers that the true teaching does not disappear as long as its counterfeit has not appeared — as gold does not disappear until counterfeit gold appears — and that it does not go under all at once, like a ship.
Ordination as custom and as comfort, on the scale of a whole country, comes very close to the condition these passages describe: far more ordinations than teachers able to train the ordained, monks who stay because the robe is comfortable, and a form that can stay standing long after its content has gone. That is a claim about structures, not about the individuals who follow the custom, and it needs saying plainly, because many of the great teachers of the forest tradition were village boys who came in exactly that way.
The door does not decide
And here the argument has to narrow, because the door does not decide where anyone ends up, and the texts say so before anyone else does. The same discourse that defines the right motive (SN 22.80) goes on to describe the man who went forth for exactly that reason and still lives covetous, resentful, unmindful, his senses unguarded. The Buddha compares him to a brand from a funeral pyre, burning at both ends and smeared with dung in the middle, of no use as timber in the village or in the forest: he has lost the pleasures of the household life and has not reached the goal of the ascetic one. He came in through the right door and arrived nowhere.
Nanda, the Buddha’s half-brother, came in through the worst door imaginable. According to the commentaries — the story is not in the canon — the Buddha ordained him on his wedding day: he left his bowl in Nanda’s hands as he was leaving, Nanda followed him all the way to the monastery out of respect, not daring to hand it back, and when the Buddha asked whether he would like to become a monk he could not bring himself to say no. Once inside, he stayed for the worst reason. In the Udāna (Ud 3.2) he wants to leave the robe because he cannot stop thinking of the loveliest girl among the Sakyans, who, her hair still half combed, had watched him leave the house and said, “Come back soon, young master.” The Buddha guaranteed him five hundred celestial nymphs instead, and Nanda stayed. His companions began calling him a hireling, a monk bought and paid for, and it was the shame of that which drove him into solitude and hard practice, until he was fully liberated — at which point he released the Buddha from the promise himself. He came in through the worst door and reached the end of the path.
Ajahn Chah, the teacher behind Wat Pah Nanachat, came in through the door of custom. At nine he went to live as a temple boy at Wat Bahn Kor, his village monastery; he became a novice shortly before he turned thirteen, left the robe at sixteen to help his parents on the farm, and returned at twenty for full ordination, on April 26, 1939. According to his biographers, it was his father’s death, in his fifth year as a monk, that made him think seriously about what he was there for. He found his conviction inside, years after he had come through the door.
Conviction, for its part, has its own ways of failing. There is the idealism that breaks against the real life of a monastery — the heat, the routine, the hierarchy, the other people — and that was never saṃvega to begin with. There is the man running from a life rather than toward a practice, who calls an exit a vocation, not so very different from the sick men of Magadha. And there is the convert’s rigidity, which knows exactly how things ought to be done and cannot forgive itself, or anyone else, for doing them otherwise.
The text that best describes that last failure is the simile of the heartwood (MN 29), which the Buddha gave not long after Devadatta, having demanded stricter rules of him, had split from the community. It begins with a man who goes forth with exactly the thought of SN 22.80 — sunk in birth, aging and death, hoping to see an end to suffering — and who, once a monk, gains possessions, honor and renown, is satisfied with them and stops there, like someone looking for the heartwood of a tree who goes home with the branches and leaves. The next one avoids that. He practices carefully and becomes impeccable in conduct. But he is satisfied with that, praises himself for it and looks down on others: “I am virtuous, of good character; these other monks are immoral, of bad character.” He too has stopped short. He has taken the outer bark and mistaken it for the heartwood.
If a foreign monk ever came to think that of his Thai companions, he would not be demonstrating the superiority of conviction. He would be falling, from inside conviction, into exactly the failure the text describes for anyone who has something to be proud of.
Does it matter, then, why someone ordains? For understanding groups, a great deal; for predicting what becomes of any one man, almost nothing. What decides is what happens after the door: who trains him — the danger AN 5.79 foresaw was not who came in, but who would be there to train them — and whether he keeps looking for the heartwood once he has the bark.
The bowl on the road
There remains something custom does that conviction cannot do on its own. The foreign monk, who came by conviction from the other side of the world, eats every morning because a village woman is waiting for him on the road — one who has been filling bowls since she was a girl, who learned it from her mother, and who may well have seen her own sons ordain for a rains retreat on her behalf. Without that custom there would be no food in the bowl, no almsround, and no monastery at the end of the road.
The foreign monk came in by conviction; every morning, on the road, he eats from custom.