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Suan Mokkh · 1906–1993
พุทธทาสภิกขุ
Reforming Thai monk who founded Suan Mokkh and taught mindfulness with breathing (ānāpānasati)
Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu was a Thai monk who founded Suan Mokkh, a forest monastery near Chaiya in southern Thailand, and taught from it for six decades. His name means "servant of the Buddha". He taught ānāpānasati, mindfulness with breathing, and read key teachings, such as dependent origination, as descriptions of what happens in the mind here and now.
He was born on 27 May 1906 near Pum Riang, in what is now Chaiya district. In 1926, at the age of twenty, he went forth as a monk. A few years of study in Bangkok convinced him, in the words of Suan Mokkh's biography, that "purity is not to be found in the big city".
In 1932 he set up Suan Mokkhabālārama, "the Grove of the Power of Liberation", near his home town, and about ten years later moved it to its present site. Suan Mokkh's own history describes it, at the time of its founding, as "the only forest Dhamma Center and one of the few places dedicated to vipassanā meditation in Southern Thailand". The monastery is listed as Wat Suan Mokkh.
Much of his teaching was given as talks at the monastery. The archive founded by Santikaro, a former monk and his main English translator, holds around 730 hours of audio recordings.
The meditation method taught at Suan Mokkh is ānāpānasati. The International Dharma Hermitage describes it as covering both concentration and insight meditation, and says the first days of its retreats train concentration mainly by focusing attention on the breath. The instructions are drawn from Buddhadāsa's own recorded talks.
The framework is the sixteen steps of the Ānāpānasati Sutta (MN 118), which move from the breath and the body to feelings, the mind and insight into impermanence. His Mindfulness with Breathing: A Manual for Serious Beginners, translated by Santikaro, sets out his approach. The Suan Mokkh ānāpānasati page describes the practice as it is taught today, and ānāpāna covers breath meditation in other traditions.
He was chosen to give a keynote address on behalf of the official Thai monastic delegation at the Sixth Buddhist Council in Rangoon in 1954. He also developed what he called "Dhammic Socialism", linking scripture with socially engaged Buddhism.
His influence reached Western teachers as well. Jack Kornfield lists Ajahn Buddhadasa among his teachers.
A much-debated part of his teaching concerns paṭicca-samuppāda, dependent origination. The Theravada commentaries traditionally explain its twelve links as spanning three lives. Buddhadāsa rejected that reading as something that cannot be practised, and taught the twelve links as a sequence that runs in the present moment, very quickly, showing how suffering arises from the sense of a lasting self. His book Paticcasamuppada: Practical Dependent Origination sets out this view.
Writing in the St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, Dhivan Thomas Jones describes him as an outspoken critic of the three-life interpretation. Defenders of the traditional reading, Bhikkhu Bodhi among them, hold that the three-life interpretation is closer to what the Buddha intended.
Suan Mokkh's biography says he died in 1993 after a series of heart attacks and strokes, and that the final stroke came while he was preparing notes for a talk on his 87th birthday, two days later, on 27 May.
Sources then disagree on the date of death. The International Dharma Hermitage says he "died at Suan Mokkh on July 8, 1993". Wikipedia gives 25 May 1993, the day of that final stroke. This page gives only the year.
His last project was the International Dharma Hermitage, founded in 1986 near Suan Mokkh for visitors from abroad. As of 2026 it runs a ten-day silent retreat in English that starts on the first day of every month. Registration is in person on the last day of the previous month, with no advance booking, and the hermitage charges a registration fee of 2,000 baht that covers all costs.