Luang Por Ajahn Sumedho is the senior Western disciple of the great Thai Forest master Ajahn Chah and is widely regarded as the principal architect of the establishment of the Thai Forest tradition in the West.
Born Robert Karr Jackman in Seattle in 1934, he served in the US Navy during the Korean War, studied Far Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked for the International Voluntary Services in Borneo and Thailand. He ordained as a samanera in Thailand in 1966 and took bhikkhu ordination the following year. In 1967 he met Ajahn Chah and spent the next ten years training at Wat Pah Pong in north-east Thailand. In 1975, Ajahn Chah authorised him to establish Wat Pah Nanachat — the international monastery, the first specifically founded for non-Thai monks in the Thai Forest tradition.
In 1977 he accompanied Ajahn Chah to England and was invited by the English Sangha Trust to lead the establishment of monasteries in Britain. He founded Cittaviveka (Chithurst Buddhist Monastery) in 1979 and Amaravati Buddhist Monastery in 1984. Through his work, the Thai Forest tradition now has stable, fully ordained communities across the United Kingdom, Italy, Switzerland, Portugal, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Ajahn Sumedho retired from the abbotship of Amaravati in 2010 and returned to Thailand, where he now resides in semi-retirement at a small forest monastery, continuing to teach by invitation. His teaching is characterised by an emphasis on the direct investigation of awareness — the "sound of silence" — and on what he calls "intuitive awareness" as the foundation of the practice.
His recorded talks are among the most circulated in the English-language Theravada world and form one of the principal teaching corpuses of contemporary Western Buddhism.
