Recollections of Ajahn Chah
Ajahn Pasanno
Ajahn Pasanno — co-founder of Abhayagiri and one of the longest-residing Western disciples of Ajahn Chah — gives the most complete first-person account in English of life with the master at Wat Pah Pong. The stories are concrete, sometimes funny, sometimes shattering: how Ajahn Chah handled doubt, illness, anger, and the constant flow of monks and laypeople asking impossible questions. Pasanno tells it without hagiography — and that is precisely why it is irreplaceable.
Irreplaceable first-person testimony from one of the last senior monastics with direct, sustained training under Ajahn Chah.
The sangha responds.
More foundational talks from Theravada.
The Mindful Way
BBC archive footage of Ajahn Chah at Wat Pah Pong
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.
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.