Luang Por Sodh Candasaro

Luang Por Sodh Candasaro (the name on his monastic title is Phra Mongkolthepmuni) was born Sodh Mikaewnoi in Suphan Buri province, in 1884 according to Wikipedia and the date the temple marked as his 131st birthday in 2015. He ordained at Wat Songpinong in his home district.

About 1916 he became abbot of Wat Paknam Bhasicharoen, a run-down temple in the Phasi Charoen district on the Thonburi bank of the Chao Phraya. Wikipedia reports that under him the community grew from thirteen monks to about five hundred. Wikipedia says he turned it into a school for Buddhist studies with a government-approved primary school and a kitchen that made the temple self-sufficient. He held a series of ecclesiastical titles, the last of them Phra Mongkolthepmuni in 1957.

He taught a meditation method that Wat Paknam today calls Vijja Dhammakaya. The temple’s own pages present it as the method discovered by Luang Por Sodh, built on the Buddha’s teaching, and give practical instruction for sitting, preparing the mind, and working with a mental image (nimitta) and the repeated phrase sammā arahaṃ. This page does not assess those claims.

He died at Wat Paknam on 3 February 1959. The temple’s site has a section of recorded Dhamma talks (เสียงธรรม), which this page has not reviewed.

Later groups also draw on this meditation tradition. Only Luang Por Sodh and Wat Paknam are described here.