Living on the Rim: Ecology and Forest Monks in Northeast Thailand

Abstract

With the rapidly disappearing primary forests in Thailand s Laospeaking provinces, some reclusive forest monks have been teaching villagers practical, moral, and environmentally friendly strategies for survival. Historically, the extension of Thaiisation , and an urbanized vision of progress and development, led to the unbridled clearing of these potentially hostile, patternless places. It is here, on the rim of social order, that ascetic monks have long wandered and eventually settled in peaceful coexistence with nature. Aware of the consequences of deforestation to the wider community and to their own tradition, the forest monastery and its monastic inmates have become in recent years a vital means of protecting the remaining frontier forests. This paper looks firstly at the cosmologica!, social, and political implications of forest monks, the state, and the environment; and secondly, a case-study of how one forest monk addressed these problems, constructed around orthodox Buddhist teachings.