Mae Chee Kaew Sianglam

Mae Chee Kaew Sianglam was born on 8 November 1901 in Baan Huay Sai, a farming village in Kham Cha-ee district, Mukdahan province, the youngest of five children. She died on 18 June 1991. Almost everything published about her in English comes from Bhikkhu Dick Sīlaratano’s biography, which he compiled from Thai sources and wrote in English. It is a devotional account, and this page treats it as one.

In 1917 Ajahn Mun arrived in the foothills above the village with a group of monks. By the biography’s account he taught her to meditate as a girl, then told her not to meditate without him, and said she would one day wear the white robes of a nun. She kept to that for many years and returned to meditation in earnest only after she became a mae chee (an eight-precept nun, the usual status of Thai women renunciants).

In the spring of 1945 she and six other nuns moved to Baan Huay Sai. Two village elders gave them twenty acres of land about a mile south of the village, and they built a forest nunnery from bamboo and thatch. Later she left the nunnery to look for a teacher she felt could guide her, and reached Ajahn Kongma’s forest monastery in the Phu Phan mountains (see Wat Doi Dhammachedi).

In January 1951 Ajahn Maha Bua, a close disciple of Ajahn Mun, camped with a group of monks in the hills north of the village. The biography says he told her to turn her attention from the visions that had absorbed her in meditation to the mind itself, and that afterwards she visited him regularly, on lunar observance days, to hear his Dhamma talks. It calls her one of his most gifted disciples, which is why he is listed here as a teacher; the book’s account of his guidance centres on this period. In 1991 he bathed her body and set the date of her cremation, which took place in the nunnery compound.

Ajahn Maha Bua, speaking at the opening of her memorial stupa on 21 May 2006, called her a noble disciple of Ajahn Mun and said that the attainment of arahantship does not depend on gender. The stupa stands beside the nunnery in Baan Huay Sai, and is now a pilgrimage site.