In the Cool Shade of Compassion: The Enchanted World of the Buddha in the Jungle

by Kamala Tiyavanich, Holly Gayley (Translator)

A fascinating collection of stories of the Thai forest monks that illuminates the Thai Forest tradition as a vibrant, compassionate, and highly appealing way of life.This work ingeniously intermingles real-life stories about nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Buddhist monks in old Siam (today’s Thailand) with experiences recorded by their Western contemporaries. Stories of giant snakes, bandits, boatmen, midwives, and guardian spirits collectively portray a Buddhist culture in all its imaginative and geographical brilliance. By juxtaposing these eyewitness accounts, Kamala Tiyavanich presents a new and vivid picture of Buddhism as it was lived and of the natural environments in which the Buddha’s teachings were practiced.This book was previously published under the title The Buddha in the Jungle.

Genres: Buddhism

380 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 4, 2018

Reviews

[David Patterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tales of Thailand when it was the Kingdom of Siam. The author is clearly in love with the old premodern Siam of the 19th and early 2oth centuries before it became a modern centralized state, before the Sangha was centralized and administered from Bangkok. At that time local communities were largely independent and the Buddhism that was practiced was deeply intertwined with local custom and belief. Some might criticize the author for romanticizing the past, but romance is part of the truth.

One of the problems that Western Buddhists have in developing their own communities and institutions is that they have no real sense of what on the ground Buddhism looks like, either in more traditional settings or as it appears modern Buddhist countries. It would be useful for them (us) to read accounts like this to develop a sense of how people worked things out and what being a Buddhist meant in the context of society and everyday life. Adding books like this and modern ethnographies (The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk is an interesting study of modern Thai Buddhism for instance) to the study of ancient texts would be a worthwhile endeavor.