The Mindful Way
BBC archive footage of Ajahn Chah at Wat Pah Pong
Ajahn Chah
The only widely-circulated film footage of Ajahn Chah, captured by the BBC in 1979 at Wat Pah Pong as part of a documentary on Theravada renunciate life. He is filmed in conversation with Western disciples, walking the forest, instructing monks, and teaching with the wry, exacting plainness that became the signature of the Thai Forest tradition. For an entire lineage that grew explosively after his death — Ajahn Sumedho, Ajahn Brahm, Ajahn Pasanno, Ajahn Amaro, the entire Amaravati and Abhayagiri sanghas — this footage is the one moving image of the source.
The single most foundational piece of moving footage in the modern Theravada world. Without this film, the founder of the most influential Forest sangha of the 20th century would exist for the West only as text and photograph.
The sangha responds.
More foundational talks from Theravada.
Four Ways of Letting Go
Recorded at Bodhinyana Monastery in Western Australia, Ajahn Brahm's 'Four Ways of Letting Go' has crossed 2.5 million views and become — by any measure — the most-viewed English-language dhamma talk ever uploaded. Brahm walks through four progressively deeper releases: the body, the senses, thought, and finally the knower itself. He does it the way only he can — with the disarming jokes, the British timing, the absolute precision underneath. It is the talk that has converted more people to sitting meditation in the streaming era than any other.
The Sound of Silence
Ajahn Sumedho — the senior Western disciple of Ajahn Chah and the founding abbot of Amaravati — opens up his signature method. The 'sound of silence' or 'nada' is not a sound the meditator makes but one the meditator notices: a continuous high-frequency inner hum that the mind, when quiet enough, can rest in. Sumedho turns it into a complete awareness practice, one that is portable, durable, and remarkably accessible. For three decades it has been the practice that holds the Forest sangha's English-speaking lay community.
Just One More
Dependent Origination and the Cycles of Addiction
Ajahn Amaro, abbot of Amaravati, takes paticca-samuppada — the Buddha's teaching on dependent origination — and lays it down on top of the cycles of compulsion and addiction that the modern lay person actually lives inside. The talk traces craving to clinging to becoming with surgical clarity, and shows the precise points where the loop can be broken. Amaro is at his finest here: scholar-monk, contemplative, and someone who has clearly been around enough lay suffering to speak of it without distance.