Luang Pu Thet Desaransi (Ajahn Thate)

Luang Pu Thet Desaransi, known in English as Ajahn Thate, was born on 26 April 1902 in the village of Nah Seedah in Udon Thani Province, into a family of rice farmers. He followed wandering forest monks as a youth, and on 16 May 1923 he was ordained as a monk at Wat Sutat in Ubon, in the Dhammayut order.

His teachers were Ajahn Sao Kantasilo and Ajahn Mun, and his autobiography has a chapter on staying with Ajahn Sao. Its translators write that in his later years he was considered the most senior disciple of these two founding teachers of the north-eastern forest tradition.

He spent decades wandering and living in forests and caves, in the north-east, the north and the south of Thailand. His autobiography is frank about his practice. It records, for example, that he once believed a still, one-pointed mind would transcend all suffering, and that wisdom’s only function was to bring the wandering mind back to stillness. Access to Insight notes that the book describes some of the wrong turns he made in practice.

In 1964 he came to live in the forest at Hin Mak Peng on the Mekong in Nong Khai, and over the following decades he and his disciples built it into a monastery. In March 1993, after a lung infection, he moved to Wat Tham Kham in Sakon Nakhon, a place he had long found good for practice and health. He died there on 17 December 1994. As he had asked, his body was later taken to Wat Hin Mak Peng, where he was cremated on 8 January 1996.

In Steps Along the Path, morality is the beginning of the religious life; the next step is training the mind in concentration through tranquillity meditation, and on that basis insight is developed. Two short guides in Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation are free at Access to Insight: Buddho, on using that word to settle the mind, and Steps Along the Path, which includes advice on how to respond when visions and signs arise in meditation. His autobiography, translated by Bhikkhu Ariyesako, is the fullest account of his life in English.