From Seattle to northeast Thailand
Robert Karr Jackman — Sumedho's birth name — was born in Seattle in 1934 and arrived in southeast Asia in the mid-1960s the way many of his generation did: through the United States Navy and the Peace Corps. He was assigned to Borneo as a Peace Corps volunteer, encountered Buddhist meditation through a Chinese-Malaysian Mahāyānist community there, and made his own way to a small monastery in Nong Khai in northeast Thailand on the Lao border, where he was ordained in 1966 first as a novice and in 1967 fully as a bhikkhu. The pivotal move was lateral: in 1967 he travelled to Wat Pah Pong, the forest monastery Ajahn Chah had founded a decade earlier in Ubon Ratchathani, and asked to be admitted as a trainee. Chah accepted him on the standard forest-tradition terms. Sumedho stayed for the next nine years.
Nine years inside the forest discipline
The training was the *thudong* one: one meal a day taken from the morning alms-round, robes sewn from discarded cloth and dyed in jackfruit-wood tea, no money handled directly, sleeping under a kuti's woven mat on a hand-built platform in the forest. Sumedho learned to read and speak Thai well enough to function as a translator for the Western visitors who began arriving from the late 1960s onward. Jack Kornfield was among them, and the two were contemporaries inside the same monastery for the years before Kornfield returned to the United States. Ajahn Chah's instruction was conducted in vernacular Lao-Thai peppered with rural Isaan idiom; Ajahn Chah's recorded discourses in *A Still Forest Pool* preserve the register Sumedho was trained inside, and the patient transmission of that register — just watch what your mind does — into clearer English than Chah ever spoke is the work Sumedho did for the rest of his teaching life.
Cittaviveka and Amaravati: the English Saṅgha
In 1976 the English Saṅgha Trust — a small London-based organisation that had been waiting more than a decade for a senior Western monk capable of teaching — invited Ajahn Chah to send a successor. Chah travelled to London with Sumedho, surveyed the situation, and left Sumedho behind as the lineage's first permanent Western abbot. The first base was a small flat at the Hampstead Vihara; in 1979 the Trust acquired Hammer Wood in West Sussex, a wood-bordered Victorian house and twenty hectares of forest that became Cittaviveka — Chithurst Buddhist Monastery — and the first European monastery operating under an unmodified Thai-forest *Vinaya*. In 1984 the Trust acquired the larger Amaravati site in Hertfordshire, eighty kilometres north, and Sumedho moved as its founding abbot. The monastic network the two sites anchored now operates branch monasteries in Northumberland, Devon, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, New Zealand, the United States, Canada and Australia, all training under the Wat Pah Pong Vinaya Sumedho carried out of Thailand in 1976. He retired as abbot of Amaravati in 2010 and returned to Thailand.
Where to encounter him in the index
Sumedho's own published corpus — Cittaviveka: Teachings from the Silent Mind, The Way It Is, The Sound of Silence, Intuitive Awareness — has not been ingested as rows in the index. The lineage he carried can be entered through several adjacent doors. *A Still Forest Pool* is the central discourse-collection of Sumedho's own teacher; compiling Chah's spoken teaching into English was the project Sumedho's generation of Western disciples set themselves once they had left Wat Pah Pong, and the resulting volume is the cleanest English-language statement of the practice register Sumedho was trained inside. Pema Chödrön's long-form conversation with Sumedho on monastic life is the only direct recording of Sumedho's voice the index currently holds — a comparative discussion of the Tibetan and Thai-forest monastic forms, recorded after Sumedho's return to Thailand. Thanissaro Bhikkhu on what the Buddha actually taught about no-self is by an American Thai-forest contemporary who took a parallel route — ordaining under Ajahn Fuang Jotiko rather than Ajahn Chah — and whose published commentary on the Pāli canon is the broader American Thai-forest output of which Sumedho's British programme is the European counterpart.
The Insight Meditation parallel channel
The Western Vipassanā field as it now exists ran on two parallel channels. The British one is the monastic-residential programme Sumedho built: full Vinaya, life ordination, alms-round economy, no fee-for-teaching. The American one is the Insight Meditation Society at Barre, Massachusetts, founded in 1976 by Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg — lay-led, retreat-based, fee-funded, with the Vinaya not transmitted. The Goldstein–Salzberg *Insight Meditation* course and Brach and Kornfield's *Power of Awareness* carry the American programme; Joseph Goldstein's *Mindfulness* is its textbook; Jon Kabat-Zinn's MBSR is the secular-clinical extension of the same root. The two channels overlap in personnel, share the same teacher in Ajahn Chah, and diverge on the single decisive question of whether monastic ordination is required for transmission. Sumedho's standing answer was that it is; the American answer has been that it is not. Both answers have been tested over half a century of operation, and both have produced practitioners the other channel respects.
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