Ajahn Tong Sirimangalo

Ajahn Tong Sirimangalo was a Thai monk from northern Thailand who spent most of his life teaching satipaṭṭhāna vipassana, insight meditation based on the four foundations of mindfulness. He was born Tongkaew Brahmasena on 21 September 1923 in Hot district, Chiang Mai province. He became a novice in 1934, took full ordination on 7 February 1944, and received the Pali name Sirimangalo. In Thai usage he is often called Luang Pu Tong.

In 1952 a senior northern monk chose him as the northern Sangha’s representative to study vipassana for a year at Wat Mahathat in Bangkok. His biography adds that he also spent a month studying with Mahasi Sayadaw in Myanmar. He opened a vipassana training centre at Wat Muang Mang in 1954, which that biography calls the first in Chiang Mai, and from 1973 began restoring the abandoned Wat Ram Poeng, where a centre for Thai and foreign meditators still runs. He became its abbot in 1988.

In 1991, at the request of the Supreme Patriarch, he became abbot of Wat Phra That Si Chom Thong in Chom Thong district, where he built a meditation centre with more than a hundred huts. That centre now offers courses for foreign students. The International Buddhism Center at Wat Phra That Doi Suthep describes its own method as following Mahasi Sayadaw’s teaching, passed down through Ajahn Tong.

The practice taught at these centres is formal: mindful prostration, walking meditation and sitting meditation, noting the body, feelings, mind and mind-objects, with a daily interview with a teacher. He held a series of ecclesiastical titles, the last of them Phra Brahmamongkol, conferred in 2016. He died in December 2019, aged 96. Sirimangalo International, founded by his Canadian student Yuttadhammo Bhikkhu, teaches his method online and at a centre in Sri Lanka.