To be is to be contingent: nothing of which it can be said that "it is" can be alone and independent. But being is a member of paticca-samuppada as arising which contains ignorance. Being is only invertible by ignorance.

Destruction of ignorance destroys the illusion of being. When ignorance is no more, than consciousness no longer can attribute being (pahoti) at all. But that is not all for when consciousness is predicated of one who has no ignorance than it is no more indicatable (as it was indicated in M Sutta 22)

Nanamoli Thera

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

Germar Rudolf - History at Gunpoint


[Germar Rudolf, German trained chemist well known for Holocaust revisionism shows how European laws and professional sanctions make honest scholarship on the Holocaust impossible, calling it “history at gunpoint.” He recounts his own prosecutions in Germany and how Austria and other countries impose severe penalties for “Holocaust skepticism.”

Germar sees the issue of free speech as the most effective entry point for “normies” on the Holocaust rather than the details of revisionism.

He moves on to the reductions in Holocaust official death tolls—especially at Majdanek—as evidence of systematic exaggeration, (where the official death toll went from 2 million to the current 78,000) and lists early, later‑abandoned absurd murder‑method claims (e.g., electrocution, steam, etc).

He presents Sobibór as a case where witness accounts conflicted with the imposed “engine exhaust” narrative, which he calls “invented history.”

Framing early postwar investigations as a Polish Stalinist project aimed at psychologically breaking Germany and justifying territorial outcomes, he emphasizes this was not a “Jewish conspiracy,” though he says Zionists later benefited, especially after the Eichmann trial.

He says that camp conditions fit today’s legal definition of “genocide” despite no homicidal gas chambers, and argues Holocaust memory is used to justify current Israeli genocidal policy in Gaza.

He calls for open debate, opposes censorship (including around Oct. 7), and promotes his books, his encyclopedia, and a later talk on demographic decline.
– KATANA]

Germar Rudolf: Thank you. I need to get my instruments ready here. Now they fall apart. There was a cap to it and somehow that fell off. I apologize for this. All right.

I have something positive to say about this country to just attach right to the speech you just heard. And that is the fact that we can do what we do right now in this country. Because in many countries where our ancestors came from, we would not be able to do this! So there’s freedom of speech and freedom of assembly in this country. So there’s something good to say.

Also, what I wanted to mention is when it comes to the war against Iran, the Iranians are an Indo-European people. The language is closer to English and German than it is to Arabic. And when we should talk about the victims that this war causes, we should talk about the thousands and thousands of people of Indo-Europeans of Iranian ancestry that are being murdered.

Now, my topic today, as you would probably guess, is on Holocaust, because that’s what I’m known for and that’s what I’m good at. Before I do it, I give a little bit of an introduction of who I am. I would assume most of you know, but probably not all.

I am a German citizen. I grew up, born in the mid-1960s, grew up in West Germany, had a normal lower middle class upbringing, went to a normal public school, eventually studied chemistry, graduated. And in the process of graduating, I stumbled over that topic, research that had been done here in the United States by an expert in execution technologies who was looking into the gas chamber question and had some chemical arguments which caught my attention. And as a chemist, I couldn’t look away down the rabbit hole I went and never came back.

Now, the persecution that has resulted from my activity, because Germany is not a country where free speech and freedom of science, freedom of assembly has led me ultimately to this country. And there’s another good thing. The government has tried hard to keep me out. They actually arrested me. I was married to a US citizen. I had a granted immigrant visa. They arrested and deported me anyhow, with the reason given “no criminal case”. So in violation of that, I ended up in Germany. And Germany, I was put on trial for the research that I had published over the past five years while in exile. And they sentenced me to 44 months in total. And I had to spend that time.

Now, I’m not a singular case and I’m not the worst case of what’s going on in Europe.

Anyway. I fought my way back. I won in court. What they’d done to me was wrong. It was remedied as much as you can remedy losing five years of your life in prison. Was reunited with my family and I got the status of a permanent legal resident now in this country.

So 35 years of research on that topic have a number of years ago raised the question to me, how do I get the message out to the masses? The first 30 years, I would say I was looking for answers myself. I wasn’t sure whether I understood everything and whether I really got this story straight.

And then at the end of the 30 year mark, I was pretty sure. And then the idea came up of how do I get the message out now? One way is of course writing something that makes the information accessible. A lot of you actually bought it today from me. So I wrote an encyclopedia because that’s what scholars do all the time.

Actually, no, they don’t!

But I was in the unique situation that I had this knowledge. 35 years of sitting at the helm at the core of this skeptical, scrutinizing research. And I decided it needs to be done. And in lack of support from others and due to a cataclysmic development in my private life, I had the time to do it and I pulled it off.

So we have the knowledge published, we have it concisely presented and made accessible. There is still a step of how do I get people to listen? Because we’re talking about a taboo topic and people don’t want to hear it.

You, most of you probably are open minded. Some of you are, almost many I don’t know are convinced already that the mainstream narrative is phony. But we want to reach those who sit on the fence or even on the other side of it. How do we do that? And I want to give you a little bit of a instruction by example of the best approach.

And the best approach you already have seen. Some of you coming by our book stand there seeing those signs here and marveling over these graphics and the information that’s on there.

The best approach for the normies into this topic is not talking about lies that they’ve made up like jewish soap. They all have admitted it didn’t happen or lampshades or what. No! What you want to talk to them about is massive violation of civil rights! It’s free speech, is freedom of assembly that doesn’t exist over there. And make them see in concrete examples what that means!

When we’re talking about this topic here, people need to realize, every person needs to realize that every historian on this planet to one degree or another, if he wants to write Holocaust historiography or talk about it or write about it, he is doing history at gunpoint.!

That’s the only topic in the world right now, more or less on a global scale, where historians are threatened with at least destruction of their career, if not outright prosecution and imprisonment.

Scholars, not just historians, scholars you can do physics, you can do psychology, you can do any science and you will not get in trouble if you say something that’s controversial. It’s only this one! This particular part in history that gets people in trouble! Even in this country we have free speech. But any historian who touches that is a third rail topic, he will find his career ended.

This is the map of Europe. You see in red the countries that have outlawed Holocaust skepticism, that have outlawed doubt! Doubt is the core feature of us human beings, that sets us apart from animals who cannot doubt their central input. We can doubt what we see. We can systematically look for the truth and communicate with our fellow humans what the truth is or what we think the truth is, and can even make it independent of ourselves by putting it down encoded so that everyone can see it. That is what sets us apart!

And a government that outlaws doubt, outlaws search for truth, outlaws communicating the truth with others, is outlawing humanity! These countries have outlawed humanity! Stalinist Russia, as bad as it was, had no laws that would proscribe the result of any scholarly research in any field by penal law. This is the first in mankind history that we have that the European Union forces members who have not yet passed laws in the European Union to do it or they are threatened with sanctions. Finland just passed earlier this year, the last one, because they said we’re threatened by the EU by some kind of sanctions or measures. And that’s why we introduced that law.

Now what does that mean? I’ve told you about my 44 months for the research. You can see that there are two books, Chemistry for Auschwitz, if you want to look at it. It’s my original forensic research and lectures on the Holocaust.

Having done what I’m doing right now here to academic audiences in Germany, talking about my research in the calm and academic style led to being sentenced. There were worse cases.

I want to focus here on Austria. Some of you have looked through a list of all the countries and some are not on this map. Actually, of course, Canada has introduced a law north of us and Australia uses a backdoor way of doing it. And Israel, of course, is the first country that has outlawed skepticism. And there are other countries who use other laws. They twist and tweak in order to send people to prison.

And in the Arabic world, unfortunately, we should think there should be an open mind there. A lot of governments in the Arabic world are bought by Europe and America and they prosecute dissidents on that topic with extra legal means. They are not democracies under the rule of law, whatever that means. Because in some aspects we are not anymore either. But for them it’s pure arbitrariness.

So this is a global thing, a global problem. We just had a censorship hit us, a company in China. We wanted to have merchandise produced with certain slogans on it on Holocaust skepticism. And they pulled a plug. Not even in China they want to do it anymore!

Austria, the worst case, 20 years! You can go up to 20 years in prison. If you combine it, the skepticism, quote, unquote, “denial” with statements that they interpret as re-engaging in National Socialist activities. If you were, for instance, to argue that the Austrians are just one tribe of the Germans and they should live together with other Germans in Germany, which was a normal thought up to 1945. In the 17th century, 18th century, 19th century, in the 20th century, as the people of Austria always felt. And they were for the longest time the core in the center of Germany. And they got kind of pushed out with Prussia taken over in the late 19th century. And then after the collapse of Prussian Germany and Austria, the Austrian Empire after the First World War, they said:

“Okay, we had it, now let’s get reunified.”
 
That was the idea of the Wilson 14 points for the truce to have everyone self-determination. And the Austrians got it denied. And after the war, Second World War, they had special laws enacted if you violate them, up to 20 years. Denial combined with demands for self-determination.

To put a face to it, Austrian engineer Wolfgang Fröhlich was arrested in the early 2000s for a paper he had written. He’s an expert for disinfestation technology and disinfestation gas chambers. So he knows the technique and compared it to what was said to have been going on in German extermination camp during the war. And said:

“That’s technical nonsense, it can’t be!”

And he got eventually indicted and put in prison. And he was upset about what they did to him. And he kept writing letters and arguments from within prison, got more and more indictments and got sentenced over and over again! At the end of the day, he spent 16 years in prison for his engineering arguments. And he came out just around Covid, caught Covid and died shortly afterwards.

Western politicians complain about Iran or China putting dissidents for four, five, seven years in prison. At the same time they put them for 16 years in prison! That’s the worst case.

This graph here shows you the initiation of criminal investigation for thought crimes in Germany. Since 1994 some 4, 500, up to the most recent data for, … The year 2025 comes out maybe next month. Getting a little bit of a feedback here. [humming sound] The blue one is Right-wing thought crimes. That’s what we are committing here right now! Okay? Then you have the Left-wing ones. These are usually Antifa communists who make some radical statements about blowing up Parliament or having a communist revolution. And then you have the green ones, foreign religious, that usually means Muslim, Muslim radicals who want to introduce Sharia law or something like that. So for these two cases you really have to make aggressive statements that are not peaceful anymore.

Whereas in these cases if you’re just against mass immigration, you say anything critical about the jews, any dissent on the Holocaust, or more recently anything critical about Israel’s policy in Gaza. This is the Gaza escalation that you see.

Germany has extended their law that they outlaw more and more both by case law and by actually written code. And now this past data we were up to 40,000, 35,000 of them. Stuff that people like we do, like what we argue and talk about. 35,000 initiated criminal investigations does not result in 35,000 people sitting in prison. I want to make that clear. Most people never get caught for the slogan they have sprayed on some wall or sticker they left somewhere. And if for first time offenders, usually it ends up with slap on the wrist. It may just be a summary offense with a fine that has to be paid. And for first time offenders it rarely ends with prison. But then you have the 1 or 2% of these cases that end up actually with prison cases.

Only minority of that is Holocaust skepticism. And I have no numbers, they don’t in their paperwork. This is data based actually on what the German government releases. And they are put proud of it! Because they call themselves a combative, defensive democracy! Okay?

So they defend themselves in combating anyone they consider to be an enemy. But they are actually the biggest enemy of democracy. I wouldn’t even call it democracy, but a state under the rule of law that respects human rights that they never get a mirror held against them to look into it because that’s the enemy that caused this kind of persecution.

Back to history. This kind of an atmosphere that you have in Europe, in most countries and even in this country where historians don’t go to prison, but immigrants like me, I’m currently constantly on an ejector seat and I can get thrown out any minute if the Trump government so decides, because they don’t respect the law either.

What effect does it have, actually concrete, on historians? Here you see the lovely face of Wacław Długoborski, Auschwitz survivor who was put in charge, as I say, the Billy goat that was put in charge of the garden. He was put in charge of the Auschwitz Museum’s historical research center. And for many decades he has been that boss. And under his auspices, the lie that 4 million people died at Auschwitz was maintained until the Soviet Union collapsed.

Then it did collapse, and they suddenly reduced the number from 4 million to 1 million and said:

“Well, we have known it all along.”

And then in an interview in 1998, this historian was asked:

“Well, why did you lie? Why did you make that up if you knew all along that it was wrong? Why didn’t you correct the number earlier when you knew that it was wrong?”

And he basically said:

“Well, there was a prohibition in place in the Eastern Bloc in the communist countries that historians who would not toe the party line could be facing.”

How he expressed it, “disciplinary measures”.

What does that mean? You lose your job, you’re getting demoted, you have to become a street sweeper, or a janitor. That’s what that means in these communist planned economies.

Ironically, 1998, that’s when he gave the interview. That was the same year Poland, pressured by the European Union, in particular Germany, introduced a law, 1998, that made Holocaust skepticism a crime punishable with up to three years in prison.

So from communist “disciplinary measures” to Democratic “three years in prison”. What’s worse? I’d take disciplinary measures anytime over prison term. So he said that:

“Now we can tell the truth! Back then we couldn’t because we had disciplinary measures. We’ve corrected. Now it’s 1 million. Because you need to believe us, because now we are only threatened with three years!”

Any mainstream person who thinks everything is kosher with the Holocaust narrative that we fed now must realize:

“Yeah, kosher it may be, it means the jews like it!”
 
But it most certainly doesn’t mean authentic and reliable, because historians who are threatened at gunpoint to write history cannot be trusted! He admits:

“We couldn’t be trusted! We have been lying. We knew we were lying. We did it intentionally, but we did so because we were threatened with getting demoted or losing our job!”
 
And now we should believe you when you are threatened with three years, with five years, with six years, with, 20 years! How much more do you need to teach people, to tell people, to realize you can’t trust these people! History at gunpoint does not give you the truth in no section of society!

So once you have opened up people’s mind and that they realize the dimension of persecution, of suppression, of oppression and the unique nature the Holocaust is unique in terms of the length governments go to and societies go to suppress dissent, to keep complete control over the narrative! Nowhere else in society will you find it. That shows you who is the main beneficiary usually is also the one who pushes most. And it shows you that this is for them the most important topic to keep total control over!

Once you have opened people mind:

“Something is fishy here! You can’t trust those historians because they have admitted they have lied when they were threatened even less than they are threatened today!”

Then we go to the pith, the center of the story. Now I handed it out to you guys, free of charge, a little brochure and I want to go through a few things here that you find actually in the brochure. If this thing is too far away from you, I apologize. But you’ll find some of this in this brochure.

And the first one I’m going to is actually on the last page, the back cover if you wish. You know that thing technically speaking has no back cover. You see a graph there, a bar chart that shows claims of death tolls for the Majdanek camp. Now I would assume that most of you, at least most of normal populace have not heard about the Majdanek! Camp. It’s not anymore a major player in the bigger picture of the Holocaust in terms of mass extermination. It used to be completely different. The Majdanek camp actually was officially called the Lublin camp in central Poland was overrun by the Red Army in July of 1944.

So it was first major camp that the Soviets overran. And in a press conference right after the conquest of the camp, and I say “conquest”, the Red Army never liberated anyone! So you will not hear the word “liberation” when it even comes to camps, when it comes to the Red Army.

So they conquered the camp. In the press conference they claimed 2 million people were murdered there. It was the first big, still doing the war propaganda campaign on extermination, claim that started in August 1944. Big show! With all the world media, invited journalists from everywhere and cameras rolling.

Now in subsequent events, the Poles later that year still during the war, by the way, December ’44 had a show trial. They claimed 1.7 million. That’s a little bit of a reduction, but they weren’t generous. It’s kind of the same order of magnitude.

The Soviets then during the International Military Tribunal introduced an expert report. They claimed 1.5 million. Still again, 500,000 difference is not immaterial. But in the bigger picture, looking at it scientifically, it’s kind of the same order of magnitude. We don’t want to be nitpicking here.

However, the frenzy of immediate end of the war or post-war propaganda comes to an end and things cool down a little bit. And a Polish investigative judge reduces the number down to 360,000. And this is a considerable drop!

We’re down to 80%! Now, as I just showed you, there is a rule in communist countries you have to toe the party line and the new party line was 360,000. Couldn’t really go underneath that, even though they knew again, they knew in this case too, it is wrong! I think the number of prisoners sent to the camp was around that order of magnitude. And that assumes that every single one of them was murdered. And there’s plenty of documentation shown that was absolutely not the case!

The Soviet Union collapses and the number gets reduced again by a new historian in charge of the museum. 235,000. Not all that extreme a drop if you compare it with Auschwitz, compared to these two. But here we have already almost only 10%.

But that wasn’t the end of it. We Holocaust skeptics went into the archives after the Soviet Union collapsed, 1994, 95, 96. And researched the whole material, published a investigation on it. And it was so devastatingly demasking the propaganda of the homicidal gas chamber story, that pressure on the Majdaneck museum became so big that eventually in 2005, a new generation, a new historian dropped the death toll to 76,000. And that is only not even 4% of the initial 2 million claim.

And actually from the beginning they had claimed seven homicidal gas chambers. They maintained that number until the end. But five of them were so ridiculously, obviously, technically impossible to have ever been used for what they claim to have been used that to throw propaganda ballast overboard.

Thomas Kranz, the new Polish historian, threw five of them overboard. So what we have is an admission:

“That okay, we exaggerated, we lied, we lied, we fix, we fix, we keep fixing, we drop more and more of these lies!”

And then that’s what the situation is here today. They keep shifting the goalposts, they keep reducing the claim. You see, something is fishy with their attitude in general. But now:

“They got it right!”
 
Really, when you’re threatened with three years in prison? Why would I believe you?

Now we could say:

“Okay, one camp. What does one camp prove? That’s the most extreme downward revision by the mainstream.”
 
I haven’t shown our number that would here in 98, we published the book.

We find in the historical record 42, 200 death cases and no homicidal death chambers at all! They were all fumigation chambers!

So I’m just showing you what the mainstream itself has admitted to have been wrong over and over again! Is it a singular case? People make mistakes. Corrections for other camps? If you go in the brochure, if you want to go on page six, you see the table there now the same table here, the major camps that played a role in Allied war as well as immediate post-war propaganda as claimed extermination camps.

You see the initial death toll here on the left numbers column. And the death toll that is claimed by the mainstream.

Again, I say in the mainstream, Holocaust skeptical numbers? What really can be documented and what is forensically possible is an entirely different story.

So I want to show you that if you just use their own arguments and their shifty way of moving goalposts, you should make every believer see something isn’t right. And you see it here, mistakes stray statistically from the true value. If I make a mistake, I may under or overestimate, but they should stray to both sides. Here you see only one tendency, extreme exaggeration!

That’s not called a mistake, that’s called a lie! Truth is always the first victim of every war. And why should it be any different with the Second World War? The victors write the history and they never write it objectively. And why should it be any different for the worst war ever fought that ended for the losing side in a major disaster that mankind has not seen all that often in history? Cathage and the Punic wars probably had a worse fate than Germany because they got completely wiped. But other than that, Germany was in pretty bad shape after the Second World War.

So you see here, these are lies! They have been lying systematically! They have been correcting and admitting in Auschwitz, I showed you here in Majdanek again and again they lied. They knew they’re lying. And now they are threatened even worse than they were before. The question.

So for my Majdanek, 96% of the victims were invented. 70% of the homicidal gas chambers were invented. They got it wrong repeatedly acting under coercion, still under coercion even worse so today! Why believe them uncritically now? You wouldn’t!

And it doesn’t stop with numbers. If you go on the second table of the page six here, we’re talking about invented methods. What the mainstream, again, what the mainstream has admitted, we’re looking in the second column here, of all the stuff that is actually has been invented.

And I actually added a few more here on this one. And here you see for Auschwitz, war gases, high voltage electrocution, gas showers, gas bombs, pneumatic hammer, conveyor belt.

Treblinka, you have machine guns, mobile gas chambers, stunning gas, unslaked lime, hot steam, high voltage, chlorine, ether, a death bridge, burning alive.

So it goes on and on for the other camps. Suffocation with human excrements as a mass murder method is claimed for Bełzec by one witness. It gets absurd at times. But of course, all this stuff, sometimes based on only one witness, sometimes based on tens of witnesses on all kinds of wartime reports, got dumped! Interestingly, the stories that prevailed during the war, hot steam for Treblinkaa, high voltage for Belzec, chlorine gas for Sobibor, all got dumped! You won’t find a word of it today anymore, even though they were the ones that were most commonly claimed during the war, and even during the International Military Tribunal, by the way. It’s all gone!

What we have left now is this. Zyklon B, and engine exhaust gases. For a long time they even claimed they were diesel exhaust gases, which are technically impossible because they’re not toxic enough.

Just recently, well, not too recently, 15 years ago, a mainstream toxicologist tried to move the goalpost there again:

“Okay, diesel doesn’t work. Why don’t we say it was engine exhaust?”

So murder methods claimed during and right after the war were highly contradictory. Even once claimed main murder methods were all abandoned! Polish Stalinist officials streamline the narrative against facts! And mainstream historians hide these extreme revisions and manipulations from you! Because they are writing history on gunpoint!

How was it done? To give you one example, and unfortunately I don’t think I have that in this brochure. You would actually have to go, because that goes a little bit more into detail for which this brochure doesn’t have room. I have that detailed example in this book here. Nazi Gas Chambers, which you can either buy there as a hard copy or you can find it on holocausthandbooks.com free of charge as an ebook.

The one case that shows everyone, and should show every normie that the story was faked, is the case of Sobibor! Now again, Auschwitz, everyone knows, Treblinka, some of you may have heard. Bełzec, maybe. Majdanek, unlikely. Sobibor also, not very often. Sobibor is one of the three so-called “pure extermination camps”. Actually four. Chelmno is a special camp. It’s a separate issue.

Treblinkaa, Belzec and Sobibor are the three big ones that were jews were shipped to be murdered and nothing else. That’s the claim of the mainstream. Sobibor was the smallest of them. Treblinka. The other here started out with 3 million. Belzec, 3 million claim and Sobibor with, 20 million. It’s down to 200,000 now, plus, minus. There’s always this kind of an average of the mainstream claim because they can’t really agree exactly on how much. But the other ones are way higher.

Sobibor is an interesting case. The same judge who after the war downgraded massively the death toll from Majdanek to 360,000 also investigated the Sobibor camp and the Treblinkaa camp and wrote the story for it for the Polish Commission for German War Crimes. He investigated a number of witnesses. They are listed here by name.

Right after the war, the inmates that were alive in summer of 1943 had a revolt in the Sobibor camp. There’s actually a movie about that. Not very historically accurate, but the revolt did take place and many witnesses, survivors or inmates, ran away and they ended up testifying in front of that investigative judge. This is Zdzislaw Tukaszkiewicz. Now the interesting thing is of what they told him. Right now for Sobibor, they claim engine exhaust gas as the murder method.

And they are supposed to have been murdered in just a normal chamber. One door. They walk in, they get killed with gas, the other door at the other end opens out and they get carried out to mass graves or pyres to be burned. That’s the mainstream narrative right now! However, if you look at what these witnesses testified, if they describe the alleged murder method, many of them said chlorine. Nobody said engine exhaust. Not a single witness!

What they claimed of the mechanics of the gas chamber is very interesting because they kind of agreed, with a few exceptions of witnesses who didn’t say anything about that.

That the floors in those chambers were hydraulically opened up, they collapsed downward, discharge the dead victims into two carts running on tracks below in some kind of basement area, and would then be driven out to mass graves or to cremation pyres. And they agreed on that you will not hear a single thing about that in the mainstream narrative! What Zdzislaw Tukaszkiewicz did when he wrote, based on his interrogations, that’s the only evidence he had, he said:

“Well, they were killed with engine exhaust and with just a normal gas chamber with doors.”

Invented out of the blue! With no basis in fact of any of the evidence! He threw out all the witnesses!

Now where did he get that narrative from? He actually copied it over. I just mentioned he had also investigated the Treblinka camp. He had copied it over from the narrative he had developed from the Treblinka camp!

And if you were to go there. I don’t want to go do that now again, you can find the list of witnesses and what they said on Treblinka in here. You find in Treblinka this chaos here! Electrocution, engine exhaust, gas, vacuum, steam, all kinds of claims. He cleaned that up, threw everything out, kept the engine exhaust and wrote the narrative according to that.

And then he copied it over to Sobibor. That is invented history with no basis in fact, none whatsoever in the case of Sobibor! The clearest case where you can absolutely pinpoint what happened.

So that is what you find if you go into the historical record, which became accessible to us only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the archives in the east became accessible. And we could actually go to these interrogation protocols and then see what narrative they made of it.

There is an interesting question that arises. Why was that done? I mean, it’s an obvious question. You want to look, make your enemy look as bad as possible. So whatever comes after the war, you can manipulate and destroy them as much as possible. Psychological warfare is just a continuation of warfare with other means. And ethnically speaking, the whole Second World War broke out because the actual tinderbox that blew it up, there were many more conflicts around the globe was the ethnic conflicts between Poles and Germans, mainly over the city of Danzig.

And after the war, as you may know, Poland gained huge territories from Germany and expelled the population. My paternal ancestry was expelled from Silesia, so they were part of the victims of that. And Germany was not willing after the First World War to accept the loss of Danzig, which was a 95% German city. How would you make them expect to accept the loss of a quarter of its entire territory and the expulsion of 7 million civilians from their homeland, where they had lived for centuries. And were not just a majority in large parts of the world, just only Germans, all gone! How do you accept Germany to this time accept it?

If you break the German spine with a guilt complex, you can make them accept anything as justified punishment. And that’s what the homicidal gas chambers are good for!

Now I’ve looked into all of the people who have done the investigation on those camps and who have written the history. We’re actually talking about only four individuals that were doing the investigation. I’ve mentioned Zdzislaw Lukaszkiewicz for Treblinka, for Majdanek and for Sobibor. Jan Sehn was investigative judge for Auschwitz. For Belzec we have an historian. There was no trial on Belzec. That was Eugeniusz Szrojt. And for Chelmno, which isn’t even on here, it’s a special case. There it is actually. It was Wladyslaw Bednarz.

So we have four Polish individuals all working for the Polish commission for the investigation of war crimes and Stalinist organization set up by Stalin to stick it to the Germans and to use all kinds of fishy methods, as I just said, and with the aim of destroying Germany psychologically and make them accept all that was coming their way. And it worked “beautifully”, quote, unquote.

This is if you present these things that way, I have found you can get people to understand first of all that it’s not some lunatic idea, but that there’s something profoundly wrong in a society that prescribes the writing of any scholarly field under the threat of punishment. And what that must lead to is untruthfulness of scholars. And then showing them, yeah, they have admitted over and over again to have lied, to have shifted the goalpost to hide facts from us, to completely change their story.

And then psychologically, very important, it’s not the jews who did it. In a great conspiracy theory! That’s what I’m getting here. I’m not saying I want to win the jews over seeing how they were duped, they were. But you know, all those witnesses at the end of it, most of them are jews. They had an axe to grind. I can’t blame them. They were treated horribly. And in the frenzy of post-war propaganda, they were making stuff up!

And this is completely made up stuff here! And they even co-ordinated these witnesses. Coordinated, as they couldn’t have come up all with the same story. But the investigative judge couldn’t do anything with it. In other cases, they were so contradictory, they weren’t coordinating any of these witnesses. They were just inventing whatever came.

And in the complete frenzy of post-war anti-German hysteria, you can understand where they are coming from. It would have been the judge’s job to say:

“This is all nonsense! We can’t make head or tail out of it. And therefore, we need to say that!”
 
They didn’t do that. These judges were put in by the new Stalinist government. It was a Stalinist agenda. I couldn’t find any jewish backgrounds in any of those four individuals. I don’t know the chain of command. They did what they did on orders. Nothing of that kind of propagandistic political nature was left to chance.

So you can bet that there were orders coming from Warsaw and from Moscow. What type they were, this is the kind of investigation we have yet to do. Whether in that chain of command jews were sitting, I don’t know. But they are not needed. You can see here the Stalinist will to completely destroy psychologically Germany and to pit Poland against Germany. That is an important point. Hitler had tried until 39, until the very last moment, to win the Poles over for an anti-communist pact against Stalinist Russia. And Stalinist Russia tried to conquer all of Europe. That was the declared concept of world revolution from 1918 onward. It wasn’t a secret. And Hitler tried to make a bulwark, a European fortress against Stalin’s plan to conquer all of Europe. Poland refused and went their way of poking the German eagle to the point where they lashed out. And the rest is history.

Pitting Poland against Germany. Any other normal nation. If you imagine Mexico in a World War that breaks out between Russia, China and the United States, United States loses and then Mexico gets everything that they used to own and more. You name the States of Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, California. Give everything to the Mexicans and drive out every White American. Would America put up with it if they gain strength again? How do you get the Germans to accept that kind of calamity? It worked. What did not work. And I want to make that sure. Even though my parents were expelled, my parental ancestors were expelled from that region. Is that today Germany and Poland are not pitted against each other anymore.

I’ve gone with my father to the our Poles who had expelled him and his family in the 1980s and 90s. German expellees went back to Poland to party with our Poles in the house it used to belong to my grandfather! There’s no frontier, no border between Germany and Poland anymore. If I wanted, the German government not sticking me in prison for other reasons, I could go back and settle where my parental ancestors came from. That story is over. In Europe we don’t kill each other. We don’t kill White people over territorial. That should be the case. Unfortunately, the Russians and the Ukrainians have yet to learn that lesson. That is over. Stalin did not succeed in pitting us against each other we work together.

Now, I am saying these things in order to make you understand where this come from, how it was done, who did it, why they did it! Not in order to, say, give Germany its territories, they can’t even populate their current territory, nor can the Poles. The real biggest challenge for all of us in Europe is population collapse, which is something I will talk about tonight, by the way, and how this ties in to all these issues that I’ve been talking about historically.

So now we are not talking territories here. We’re talking about historical understanding and to make the jews understand and the Zionists, we’re not coming after you. We’re not blaming you for having constructed this narrative in order to whatever. Sure, they took advantage of it, particularly since 1961 when the gravy train was already running with the Eichmann trial big time, and ever since have been profited from that.

But if you look in the first decades of the state of Israel and of the jewish community, particularly in this country, they were not riding the Holocaust train! It wasn’t even called that way back then. The partial identity between Soviet spies in the United States and a religious jewish background was troublesome truth for the jewish community. They kept their head low in the early years of the Cold War and were not rocking the boat.

So this way you can make even the jews see we’re not out for revenge for what you did to us, psychologically. The story came from a different angle. And I think that is because people assume we are spreading these Holocaust “denial theories”, as they call them, in order to get at the jews, in order to say the jews have made this big conspiracy in order to get us and destroy us. Yeah, it’s being used now as such. What happens now with them manipulating us with this and saying in order to prevent anything like that happening again, we must allow and support them to pre-emptively kill everyone that even looks askance at them, which is what’s happening in Gaza and what the conflict with many of these nations in the Middle East with Israel is about. That’s a separate story where we are today.

Historically seen as it started differently and it has taken on its own life. And we need to break that vicious circle we are in, using this presumed genocide, say what happens to the jews as we define genocide by the United Nations and in law, actually it was a genocide. You don’t need gas chambers to commit genocide. If you separate people so that they can’t reproduce, it’s already called genocide. And that’s what the National Socialists did in the camps, separating genders and putting them under living conditions that inevitably had to lead to many of them dying of disease and so forth. So technically speaking, legally speaking, how it is defined today, it was genocide. Now, that law didn’t exist back then. That’s a legal fine print.

So this genocide in its downgraded fashion without homicidal gas chambers, which didn’t exist, but the homicidal gas chambers being the foremost psychological weapon to traumatize the jews, young jews of new generation today and every one of us, we have gone through this education and know how shocking it is to see these bulldozers shoving corpses into mass graves at Bergen-Belsen and being told that’s what the Germans did to the jews. That was Fforce majeure of epidemics breaking out in camps that the Germans had no control over. They didn’t plan that. But you’re not being told that.

And the effect of it is that America for the most part is willing to go along, and Europe, to go along with what the jews and Zionists do in the Middle East. To break that vicious circle, to get a correct understanding, we can learn the correct lessons of history only if we get first the facts straight. And no matter what the facts are, morally speaking, you are never allowed to use past catastrophes of whatever nature to justify or foment current and future catastrophes! And that’s what’s happening. In order to prevent a new “Holocaust”, Israel is committing genocide.

So in order to prevent genocide, they commit genocide! There’s something wrong with this! And to see how we are manipulated with historical accounts being exaggerated and invented, to see it in this old example, the most extreme example, makes us see that happens all the time. What was it October 7, 2023, what happened there. Israel has a law outlawing, as I just mentioned, it was the first one outlawing Holocaust skepticism. And they have now introduced a law outlawing Gaza skepticism in terms of just what happened on the 7th of October. And they are probably in the process of making it a crime to accuse Israel of genocide.

All right, I’m having, as I mentioned, a second presentation tonight. We are talking about demographic collapse and where that leaves us, which options we have and what the various drivers are, which Holocaust propaganda actually is one of them. And I’ll explain that tonight. I hope I’ll get a chance to talk to you and maybe even discuss that with you guys.

If you want to look into this book, if you don’t have it yet, about how this core of the Holocaust, the homicide, gas chamber story, was created. As I mentioned there you can have it.

The encyclopedia also. I still have six copies floating around. Please keep the brochure. It is a short description and summary of Holocaust revisionist arguments with reference of all the books. You can find them all free of charge at holocausthandbooks.com. But you can also buy them from us on these websites and you’ll find links to purchase them.

And if you don’t want to keep it, leave it on the table and we’ll collect it later because this is advertising for our products, for our knowledge, for our insight, and we liked it to get spread.

So thank you for your attention.

[loud applause]
https://katana17.com/

Against Mishima: Sex, Death and Optics in the Dissident Right


“One learns from Confessions of a Mask how Mishima put “Circassians” (white boys) to the sword by the dozen in his dreams.”
Henry Scott Stokes, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima

“Mishima is more a figure of parody than a force of politics.”
Alan Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism 

I read with great interest Guillaume Durocher’s recent Unz Review article on Yukio Mishima’s commentary on the Hagakure, the eighteenth-century guide to Bushido, or Japanese warrior ethics. I rate Durocher’s work very highly, and as someone who once shared his interest in Mishima, and Japanese culture more generally, I expected the piece to be well-informed, insightful and provocative. Much as I was intrigued by Durocher’s piece, I think the Dissident Right would benefit from an alternative view of Mishima, and perhaps also the subject of Japanese culture in the context of European rightist sensibilities, especially when right-wing treatments of Mishima other than Durocher’s (which is suitably measured in the assessment of Mishima’s fiction) tend towards hagiography. In the following essay, I offer not necessarily a rebuttal or rebuke of Durocher, but an alternative lens through which to view the Japanese author, his life, and politics. Since a movement’s choice of heroes can have an impact on its spirit and ethos, the following should be considered an attempt at spiritual ophthalmology, or the bringing of certain perspectives into clearer focus. This clearer focus, I argue, can only lead to the conclusion that Mishima was a profoundly unhealthy and inorganic individual who should be regarded as anathema to European nationalist thought.

My first introduction to Yukio Mishima came several years ago in the form of a recording of a 2011 lecture delivered in London, by the late Jonathan Bowden, at the 10th New Right meeting. Bowden was an exceptional orator, yet to find an equal in the current crop of dissident right leaders. In fact, as we move further and further into patterns of YouTube-based “content producing” I fear that oratory of Bowden’s type may become an increasingly rare art. One of Bowden’s great strengths as a speaker was the ability to take dense topics and biographical overviews and reduce them to an hour or so of dynamic, entertaining, and extremely accessible commentary. Those in the audience, or listening in other forms, found it impossible for their attention to wander. A downside to Bowden’s oratory was that it didn’t translate quite as well onto paper, often following Bowden’s stream of consciousness rather than more logical and structured progression, with the result that one laments that Bowden didn’t focus also on a more formal type of scholarship that would surely have constituted a monumental and lasting bequest to the movement he devoted so much to. As it stands, recovering Bowden’s legacy has for the most part been the task of tracking down lost recordings of his speeches, a task that Counter-Currents have admirably taken the lead in.

Prior to listening to Bowden on Mishima, I had already established an interest in Japanese history and culture. I trained for several years in jiu-jitsu, spent a great deal of time in my early 20s reading the works of D. T. Suzuki and Shunryu Suzuki on Zen Buddhism (the former also had some interesting and sympathetic things to say on National Socialism and anti-Semitism), and Brian Victoria’s 1997 Zen at War remains one of the most interesting works on the history of religion and warfare I’ve yet had the pleasure to read. Somehow, however, Mishima escaped my attention until Bowden’s lecture, which really offered only the most raw and basic of introductions to the man. Bowden presented Mishima as a rightist thinker but never quite explained why. He indicated that Mishima had some relevance for the European right but couldn’t articulate how. The lecture only clumsily situated Mishima within near-contemporary Japanese culture, and Bowden himself evinced equivocation and incomprehension on the reasons why Mishima undertook his now infamous suicidal final action. Who was Mishima? Why was he relevant? In a bid to follow up these loose ends, and trusting Bowden that the effort would be worthwhile, I spent around a year making my way through Mishima’s fiction, biographies, scholarship, and other forms of commentary on Mishima’s life and death. The result of my research was a deluge of notes, many of which will now make their way into this article, and profound disappointment that such a figure should ever have been promoted in our circles.

Explaining how and why Mishima came to be promoted in corners of the European Right requires that one confront what could be termed “the Mishima Myth,” or the vague and propagandized outlines of what constitutes Yukio Mishima’s biography and presumed ideology. The Mishima Myth runs something like this:

Yukio Mishima was a gifted and prolific Japanese author and playwright who became profoundly disillusioned with the political and spiritual trajectory of modern Japan; influenced by Samurai tradition and Western thought, especially the philosophy of Nietzsche, he embarked on a program of radical self-improvement; he took up bodybuilding and formed his own 100-strong private army — the Shield Society; he led this army in an attempted coup at a military base, taking a very senior officer hostage, and demanded that all troops follow him in rejecting the post-war constitution and supporting the return of the Emperor to his pre-war status as deity and supreme leader; finally, rejected and ridiculed by the troops, he took his life via seppuku, ritual disembowelment in the tradition of the Samurai.

Occasionally, for added effect, rightist promoters of Mishima will add that he wrote a 1968 play titled My Friend Hitler, which, despite the provocative title, is politically middling, and has been interpreted as anti-fascist as often as it has been as fascist. Taken together, one supposes that the relevant factors here are that Mishima was an authoritarian, monarchist “Man of Action” who seized control of his own life and attempted to divert his nation away from empty consumerism (cue applause). Thus, in the Mishima Myth, rather than focusing on his actual writings on fascism and politics (which are in any event very few in number), Mishima’s ideology is read from selected chapters of his life, especially his final actions. Mishima becomes a man of the right because he was Mishima, because of what he did. This, so the narrative goes, is why he should be relevant to us.

A critique of the Mishima Myth is therefore necessarily ad hominem, since there is a glaring absence of ideas to argue against and since the myth is merely a composite of slices of edited and heavily sanitized biography. Despite an abundance of English-language biographies, rightist promoters of Mishima rarely engage in serious exploration of Mishima’s life, preferring to focus on hagiographic presentations of selected episodes, especially their interpretation of the dramatic death. This should be the first cause of caution, and it was certainly mine. The primary reason for this evasion, as I was to find out, is profound embarrassment, since Mishima’s life is thin on right-wing politics, or for that matter politics of any description, and rather heavy on homosexual sadomasochism (which is far from the only questionable aspect of Mishima-ism). But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start at the beginning.

Yukio Mishima was born Kimitake Hiraoka on January 14 1925, into an upper middle-class family. One of the first things that struck me about Mishima’s life, and especially his childhood, is that it has attracted swathes of psychoanalysts,[1] the reason being that he is an important and visible example of what these writers perceive to be the link between oppressive and abusive childhoods, latent homosexuality, sadism, masochism, and authoritarian and fascist politics. Indeed, if one makes the argument that Mishima was in fact a fascist, then one begins to consent to some of the central theses of the Frankfurt School. Mishima certainly had a strange and psychologically distorting childhood, and I concur with Sadanobu Ushijima’s conclusion that it resulted in Mishima suffering most of his life from a personality disorder involving “recurrent episodes of depression with severe suicidal preoccupation.”[2]

According to Henry Scott Stokes, in my opinion Mishima’s best biographer as well as being the only Westerner invited to his funeral, almost as soon as Mishima was born his grandmother (Natsuko) “resolved to take personal responsibility for his upbringing and virtually kidnapped the little boy from his mother,” raising the child almost entirely in her sickroom.[3] Natsuko brought up Mishima “as a little girl, not as a boy,” and he was forced to stay inside, was prohibited with playing with most of his environment, and was told to be almost completely silent due to his grandmother’s complaints of constant head pain.[4] After some years, his mother was permitted to take him outside, but only when there was no wind.[5] There is some suggestion that he was beaten, or otherwise severely psychologically abused, with the result that he suffered a sequence of psychosomatic illnesses involving the retention of urine. There is also some suggestion of sexual abuse or “obscene” treatment at the hands of his grandmother’s nurse. Quasi-incestuous closeness in indicated by his later description of his grandmother as a “true-love sweetheart”, and on his death his mother described him as her “lover.”[6] Mishima was generally regarded by those around him as “an unusually delicate child.”[7]

In keeping with scientific studies strongly suggesting that dressing, or otherwise treating, young boys as girls can induce homosexuality,[8] and studies showing that homosexuals are more likely than the sexually normal to be predisposed to “brutal” violence[9] (to say nothing of what anecdotally appears to be a disproportionate preponderance of homosexual serial killers and cannibals), Mishima would later write in his semi-autobiographical Confessions of a Mask (1949) that he had homosexual fantasies from a young age and that many of these were sadistic in nature. At this point I should pause and concede that the British “anti-Fascist” collective operating as Hope Not Hate have described me as perhaps the most “homophobic” “far right commentator” in the Dissident Right, as well as simplifying my perspective as framing “homosexuality and modern conceptions of gender as socially constructed as a symptom of societal decay, and LGBT+ rights as a tool of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine white society. This vein of thinking sometimes even results in open calls for the expulsion or violent eradication of LGBT+ people.”

This may or may not be an entirely accurate representation of my views, but the point I want to make here is that my critique of Mishima isn’t based on his homosexuality qua homosexuality, since the argument could be made by some that a homosexual fascist is still a fascist (though such arguments could be easily problematized and I will later critique his “fascism” in and of itself). Piven remarks that there has long been a “Mishima cult” in France (perhaps Durocher can confirm), adding “though his following outside Japan consists largely of gay populations who champion him.”[10] My argument against the Mishima myth is mainly that if key aspects of his biography, including the death, are linked significantly more to his sexuality than his politics, then this is grounds to reconsider the worth of promoting such a figure, already non-White and with no significant Western cultural impact, within the Dissident Right.

Mishima was “eternally excluded from the lives of ordinary men and women,” and developed early fantasies about taxi drivers, bartenders, but especially soldiers.[11] He was particularly fixated on the idea of dying soldiers and death generally, and “the violent or excruciatingly painful death of a handsome youth was to be a theme of many of his novels.”[12] In childhood, Mishima enjoyed playing dead, and he had eroticized notions of suicide from early adolescence. In his own words, he had a “compulsion toward suicide, that subtle and secret impulse.”[13] His first erotic experience appears to have been masturbating to a print of Guido Reni’s St. Sebastian, which depicts the semi-nude and bleeding saint bound to a tree and impaled with arrows. Mishima would later explain that he “delighted in all forms of capital punishment and all implements of execution so long as they provided a spectacle of outpouring blood.”[14] Stokes comments that “In Mishima’s aesthetic, blood was ultimately erotic.” Mishima fantasized about wounded, dying soldiers, imagining “I would kiss the lips of those who had fallen to the ground and were still moving spasmodically.”[15] He day-dreamed about execution devices studded with daggers, designed to shred the bodies of young men, and had a “fantasy of cannibalism” in which he fed on an athletic youth who had been “stunned, stripped, and pinned naked on a vast plate.”[16] Jerry Piven observes that Mishima’s fiction is replete with “innumerable fantasies of raping and killing beautiful young boys, of scenes of masturbating to images of slain men, of ceaseless loathing for despicable women.”[17]



St. Sebastian by Guido Reni (c. 1625)

In Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima (1994), Roy Starrs comments:

Few writers since the Marquis de Sade himself have made a more public and provocative “performance” of their “perverse” sexuality. … He found himself aroused by pictures not of naked women but of naked men, preferably in torment. Again he finds that homosexual pleasure is inextricably linked, for him, with sadistic pleasure, and he indulges in the most outrageous fantasies of managing a “murder theatre” in which muscular young men are slowly tortured to death for his amusement.[18]

Mishima read both Freud and the works of the Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, and concurred with the latter (also a homosexual and transvestite) that pictures of the dying St. Sebastian were a favorite among homosexuals, with Mishima himself arguing that “the homosexual and sadistic urges are inextricably linked.”[19] Far from the image of the austere Samurai, as he approached middle age the increasingly bipolar Mishima was known to dance in gay bars with a 17-year-old drag queen,[20] and once flew to New York solely for the purpose of finding a White man who would be sexually “rough” with him. His former lovers recall how he “liked to pretend he was committing seppuku,” making them watch, before asking them to stand over him with a sword as if about to behead him. He would pull out a red cloth, that he would pull across his abdomen explaining this was his “blood and guts.”[21] Mishima once described himself as “strangely pathetic.”[22] Durocher may well be correct in his review of Mishima on the Hagakure that “Above all, Mishima would have men live full, worthy, and noble lives,” but readers should by now be aware of why I felt an alternative lens needed to be introduced to our perspective.

A theory thus presents itself that Mishima’s carefully orchestrated death was a piece of homosexual sadomasochist theatre rather than anything political, let alone fascistic or in the tradition of the Samurai. In order to parse this question more fully, it’s necessary to examine Mishima’s politics and spirituality, or what can at least be discerned in that direction.

One of the remarkable things about Mishima is that he seems hardly political at all. His fiction, denounced by early critics of all political hues as full of “evil narcissism” possessing “no reality,” is almost entirely devoid of ideology. (Durocher appropriately mentions how he tried to, and wanted to, like Mishima’s novels but couldn’t.) As such, Mishima is a pale shadow of ultra-nationalist literary contemporaries like Shūmei Ōkawa, Hideo Kobayashi, and Yasuda Yojūrō. Confessions of a Mask, his most autobiographical text and a style of novel (shishosetsu) that Kobayashi especially loathed as ‘popular’, “had nothing to say in it about political events that had influenced his life. … He was regarded as apolitical by his contemporaries.”[23] He was neither politically involved nor possessed of any real depth of feeling on political matters until the 1960s, when he was around 40 and becoming increasingly pessimistic and depressed — mainly because he was ageing and was disgusted and horrified by old age.[24] In his commentary on the Hagakure, Mishima would inflect his own anxieties about ageing and his own predilection for youthful suicide fantasies by telling his readers they should live for the moment and be content with a short life, and one gets the sense of personal inflections again when he informed his readers that “homosexual love goes very well with the Way of the Warrior.”[25] Otomo remarks that Mishima’s relationship to the Hagakure was simply peculiar and largely artificial, pointing to better, more authentic, examples of Bushido ethics and exploits such as Budoshoshinshu and the Kōyō Gunkan, and remarking on the Hagakure:

Ironically enough, the text is evidence of the absence of the code. It is an empty style that can be borrowed by anyone at any time of history and it no longer signifies a core culture of an Oriental entity called Japan. In fact, it has never signified as such except in one man’s nostalgia.[26]

In reality, and despite his self-presentation as the embodiment of the Hagakure, Mishima was strangely un-Japanese, something remarked upon by Stokes (“he was remarkably un-Japanese”)[27], who met him several times, and as evidenced in various aspects of Mishima’s life. Ryoko Otomo observes that, in a departure from the Zen Buddhism of the Samurai, Mishima, “was an affirmed atheist.”[28] What Mishima did in fact see in Zen and the Hagakure, so far as can be determined from his fiction and statements to journalists, was a dark and profound nihilism — something that any Zen master, including D. T. Suzuki who in one of his seminal texts has a chapter titled “Zen is not Nihilistic”, would argue is anathema to authentic Zen conceptions of “the Void.” When he became financially successful, Mishima set about building a large, Western-style, “anti-Zen” house, and Zen masters he associated with later remarked Mishima made “no profound study of philosophy.”[29] Mishima knew nothing of nature, being a decadent urbanite, and was unlike many Japanese in being ignorant of the most basic botany. Once, when accompanying a friend in the countryside, he was shocked and confused at the noise of frogs.[30] He once told reporters that his average day was spent with gym activity followed by lounging around a house regarded by his neighbors, and even its architect, as “gaudy,” “in jeans and an aloha shirt.”

Mishima went through with a hasty marriage of convenience to satisfy his dying mother, fathering two children that, in the style of the worst ghetto-dwellers, he was largely absent from. In fact, in several of his novels, especially Forbidden Colors which is replete with what Stokes calls “morbid sexuality,” he expresses contempt for children, families, and the normal, non-homosexual familial structure that is the backbone and future of all societies and civilizations:

Go to a theater, go to a coffeehouse, go to the zoo, go to an amusement park, go to town, go out to the suburbs even; everywhere the principle of majority rule is lording about in pride. Old couples, middle-aged couples, young couples, lovers, families, children, children, children, children, children and, to top it off, those blasted baby carriages—all of these things in procession, a cheering, advancing tide.

By contrast, as a homosexual, Mishima nurtured fantasies of himself as a member of an elitist minority.

Ideologically, Mishima was clumsy and confused at best. He believed that fascism and Freudian psychology were ideologically related,[31] and believed in resurrecting a Japanese imperialism that would make room for parliamentary democracy.[32] He insisted, meanwhile, that “fascism will be incompatible with the imperial system.” Moreover, he argued that Japanese right-wingers “did not have to have a systematised worldview,” perhaps because he had none himself, and that they “nevertheless have nothing to do with European fascism.”[33] By the early 1960s, Mishima was a writer of decadent romantic fiction so politically weak, and tendentiously left-wing, that he was targeted with death threats by right-wing paramilitaries.[34] Eventually, some time in the late 1960s and despite having no real depth of feeling for Shinto religion, Mishima decided that it would be a good idea if the Emperor was returned to his pre-war status as a deity, prompting Sir John Pilcher, British Ambassador to Japan to declare Mishima’s fantasy of placing himself “in any relationship to the Emperor” as “sheer foolishness.”[35] Mishima, of course, never explored the Emperor’s role in World War II in any depth, and his chief fixation appears solely to have been the decision of the Emperor to accede to Allied demands and “become human.” Although Mishima became increasingly vocal on this issue, and even started taking financial donations from conservative politicians to establish a small paramilitary grouping consisting of lovers and fans, “he never defined his positions clearly,” and was so poor at articulating his ideas to troops during his coup attempt that he was simply laughed at by gathered soldiers.[36] Whether or not Mishima was fully sincere is, of course, another matter, though his suicidal coup attempt came very shortly after literary career declined so rapidly that friends wrote to him “telling him that suicide would be the only solution.”[37] Suicide in Japanese culture is of course also crucial to this discussion and will be explored below.

Mishima’s purported militarism is worthy of some attention. I come from a military family, and have many friends in the military. One of the things that’s always irritated and amused me is the difference between how actual service personnel  discuss themes such as “being a warrior” or combat more generally in comparison to military fantasists. Among the former, there always exists a wry, sober, even bittersweet outlook. Among the latter, one is apt to find much talk of glory and conquest, but little action. Mishima was surely a military fantasist, who even by his own admission had a sexual fetish for the white gloves worn with the Japanese uniform,[38] and lied during his own army medical exam during the war in an effort to avoid military service: “Why had I looked so frank as I lied to the army doctor? Why had I said that I’d been having a slight fever for half a year, that my shoulder was painfully stiff, that I spit blood, and that even last night I had been soaked by a night sweat? … Why had I run so when I was through the barracks gate?”[39]

When the bombs fell during the war, Mishima recalled, “that same me would run for the air-raid shelters faster than anyone.”[40] Stokes suitably comments that “had he served in the army, even for a short while, his view of life in the ranks would have been less romantic, later in life,” but that instead “Mishima stayed home with his family, reading No plays, the dramas of Chikamatsu, the mysterious tales of Kyoka Izumi and Akinari Ueda, even the Kojiki and its ancient myths.”[41] When he eventually formed his own paramilitary organisation, he dressed them in “opéra bouffe uniforms which incited the ridicule of the press,” and Starrs comments: “He was no more a true ‘samurai’ than he was a true policeman or airforce pilot, in whose garb he also had himself photographed. The ‘samurai’ image was simply one of Mishima’s favourite masks — and also one of his most transparent.”[42]

One could add speculations that Mishima’s military fantasies were an extension of his sexual fixations, including a possible attempt to simply gain power over a large number of athletic young men. But this would be laboring an all-too-obvious point. More soberly, one could merely point to the ridiculous notion of a military coup being led by a bipolar, draft-dodging shut-in (Hikikomori) who, when confronted during the action itself, witnessed the beginning and end of his fighting career when he hacked frantically at a handful of unarmed men with an antique sword. The Jewish academic and Japan scholar Alan Tansman might well be a sexual pervert himself, but it’s difficult to disagree with his assertion that “Mishima is more a figure of parody than a force of politics,”[43] and attempts to link Mishima with our worldview only provide further grist for the Jewish mill.

Since Mishima’s writings and actions are politically opaque at best, it is little wonder that most attention from his propagandists has focused on the dramatic and quasi-traditional method of suicide, which is often portrayed as representing the utmost in honor, masculine courage etc. Such accounts, of course, normally omit the fact Mishima rehearsed his suicide for decades in the form of gay sex games, and was essentially a gore fetishist. A broader problem exists, however, in the nature of Western appraisal of seppuku, and suicide in Japanese culture more generally. The most enlightening piece of work I’ve read in this sphere has been that of the late Toyomasa Fuse (1931–2019), Professor Emeritus at York University and probably the world’s leading expert on suicide among the Japanese. In Suicide and Culture in Japan: A Study of Seppuku as an Institutionalized Form of Suicide, Fuse explains that suicide in Japan essentially originates from a servile position within a highly anxious and neurotic society. Needless to say, this is far from healthy and praiseworthy behavior. He describes seppuku as a form of “altruistic suicide” and an expression of “role narcissism,” it being a

Response to a continued need for social recognition resulting from narcissistic preoccupation with the self in respect to status and role. … Many Japanese tend to become over-involved with their social role, which has become cathected by them as the ultimate meaning in life. … Shame and chagrin are so extreme among the Japanese, especially in a perceived threat to loss of social status, that the individual cannot contemplate life henceforth.[44]

There is little question that seppuku had a place among the samurai, but the actual nature of its practice over time was complex and was successively reinterpreted, alternating between a voluntary way of recovering honor, and a form of capital punishment (peasants, meanwhile, were simply boiled alive). It also alternated in form, involving varying types of cut to the belly, and sometimes involving no cut to the abdomen at all — the individual would ceremonially reach for a knife before being quickly beheaded. Starrs observes that while misguided Westerners have “naively accepted” Mishima’s seppuku as being “in the best samurai tradition,”[45] it was simply Mishima’s own variation on a theme — the same theme that witnessed hundreds of servile Japanese slit their bellies in front of the imperial palace at the end of the war because of their embarrassment at failing the Emperor. Again, we must question, at a time when we are trying to break free from high levels of social concern and shaming in Europe, whether it is healthy or helpful to praise practices originating in pathologically shame-centered cultures.

As Fuse notes, the traditional European response to seppuku has been disgust, not solely at the physical act itself but because of the servile psychological and sociological soil from which it originates. Because of the difference in mentalities, there is a complication in how concepts such as honor and bravery translate in this particular instance. Seppuku certainly appears to be easier to undertake for a Japanese than for a European. Mishima himself, to give the devil his due, didn’t equivocate in his pursuit of the most brutal methodology. His own wound was found to be five inches across and, in places, two inches deep.[46] Those knowledegable enough in older times would make a cut so as to cut a renal or aortic vein, leading to such catastrophic blood loss that death would be almost instantaneous. Mishima doesn’t appear to have had such knowledge, spilling his intestines out in agony while three successive attempts (by a subordinate and rumored lover) were made to behead him, one opening up a massive wound on his back instead.

Conclusion

The facts surveyed here surely point out the inadequacies of the Mishima Myth as presented in corners of the European Right. I listened again to Bowden’s lecture just yesterday, and laughed out loud at Bowden’s brief gloss of Mishima’s catastrophic childhood (“he was a slightly effeminate child”). Unfortunately, because Bowden spoke more often than he compiled serious research, it’s impossible to determine if Bowden was a conscious promoter of Mishima propaganda, or an earnest but ill-informed believer in the Mishima Myth. I simply don’t know the extent of Bowden’s reading in the matter. Like Durocher, I’ve also watched Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, though I found it to be a cheesy, dated, and rather manipulative hagiography rather than a masterpiece. Durocher comments “You’re either the kind of boy who is challenged, energized, and inspired by this sort of film, or perhaps you’re not a boy,” which I can only regard as laden with irony given that the film’s subject was raised as a girl and once remarked, on being expected to act like a boy: “the reluctant masquerade had begun.”[47] Schrader’s documentary is also highly sanitized; according to Stokes this is due to the tight control that Mishima’s widow and extended family had over the production, and their concern about potential for embarrassment.[48] One small scene showing Mishima in a gay bar was enough for the family to block distribution in Japan, and they even invested money in paying Takeshi Muramatsu to write a 500-page biography, the central proposition of which was to try to convince the Japanese public that Mishima was heterosexual and had merely spent his life, to quote Stokes, “posing as a sodomite.” Rather predictably, the text failed to convince anyone, though it probably salved the family’s pride a little to know that it was out there.

We come back to the central questions of how and why Yukio Mishima should be relevant to us. No answers can be found in the life, politics and actions of a figure not only non-European and profoundly un-fascistic, but who was also strangely un-Japanese. I contend that there is simply nothing genuine to learn from him, and few people who have written in support of Mishima can point to anything tangible beyond the amorphous outlines of the Mishima Myth and a film heavy on style and low on authenticity. There is no single piece of text, no treatise, and no piece of authenticity beyond a final, radically un-European and sadomasochistically-inspired act of self-destruction and death-embracing nihilism. Mishima’s monarchism was servile and parodic, his militarism homoerotic, disingenuous and ludicrous, and his death-as-political-statement was psychosexual and ultimately lacking in logic. Otomo is probably correct in viewing the coup attempt more as a sexually inspired method of “politicising art rather than expressing a belief in ultra-nationalism.”[49]

The question thus arises as to whether associating ourselves with such a figure, surely a clownish homoerotic wignat in today’s vernacular, brings more positives or negatives, both within the Dissident Right and within broader considerations of “optics” or public image. In particular, we should question whether we want to place our politics in a nexus that involves, to borrow the terminology of the Japan scholar Susan Napier, “the interrelationship between homosexuality, politics, and the peculiar form of violence-prone psychosexual nihilism from which Mishima suffered.”[50] I’d argue in the negative.

Members of the Dissident Right with an interest in Japanese culture are encouraged to take up one or more of the martial arts, to look into aspects of Zen, or to review the works of some of the other twentieth-century Japanese authors mentioned here. Such endeavors will bear better fruit. Above all, however, there is no comparison with spending time researching the lives of one’s own co-ethnic heroes and one’s own culture. As Europeans, we are so spoiled for choice we needn’t waste time with the rejected, outcast, and badly damaged members of other groups.

[1] See, for example, Abel, T. (1978). Yukio Mishima: A psychoanalytic interpretation. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 6(3), 403–424; Piven, J. (2001). Mimetic Sadism in the Fiction of Yukio Mishima. Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 8, 69-89; McPherson, D.E. (1986). A Personal Myth—Yukio Mishima: The Samurai Narcissus. Psychoanalytical Review, 73C(3):361-378; Jerry Piven (2001). Phallic Narcissism, Anal Sadism, And Oral Discord: The Case Of Yukio Mishima, Part I. The Psychoanalytic Review: Vol. 88, No. 6, pp. 771-791; Piven, J. S. (2004). The madness and perversion of Yukio Mishima. Praeger Publishers/Greenwood Publishing Group; Cornyetz, N., & Vincent, J. K. (Eds.). (2010). Perversion and modern Japan: psychoanalysis, literature, culture. Routledge.

[2] Ushijima, S. (1987), The Narcissism and Death of Yukio Mishima –From the Object Relational Point of View–. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 41: 619-628.

[3] H. S. Stokes The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (Cooper Square Publishers; 1st Cooper Square Press Ed edition, 2000), 40.

[4] Ibid., 41.

[5] Ibid., 47.

[6] Ibid., 47.

[7] Ibid., 42.

[8] John Money, Anthony J. Russo, Homosexual Outcome of Discordant Gender Identity/Role in Childhood: Longitudinal Follow-Up, Journal of Pediatric Psychology, Volume 4, Issue 1, March 1979, Pages 29–41.

[9] Mize, Krystal & Shackelford, Todd K., Intimate Partner Homicide Methods in Heterosexual, Gay, and Lesbian Relationships Violence and Victims, 23:1.

[10] J. Piven The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima (Westport: Prager, 2004), 2.

[11] Stokes, 43, 44.

[12] Ibid., 44.

[13] Ibid., 58.

[14] Ibid., 61.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] J. Piven The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima (Westport: Prager, 2004), 3.

[18] R. Starrs Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 35.

[19] R. Starrs (2009) A Devil of a Job, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 14:3, 85-99, 85 & 87.

[20] Stokes, 103 & 136.

[21] Starrs, A Devil of a Job, 89.

[22] Stokes, 91.

[23] Ibid., 95.

[24] Ibid., 95 & 102.

[25] Ibid., 266.

[26] Ryoko Otomo, The Way of the Samurai: Ghost Dog, Mishima, and Modernity’s Other, Japanese Studies 21 (1), 31-43, 41.

[27] Stokes., 5.

[28] Otomo, 40.

[29] Stokes, 278.

[30] Ibid., 110.

[31] Starrs, Deadly Dialectics, 24.

[32] Otomo, 39.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Stokes., 295.

[35] Ibid., 277.

[36] Ibid., 273.

[37] Ibid., 281.

[38] Ibid., 57.

[39] Ibid., 81.

[40] Ibid., 76.

[41] Ibid., 81.

[42] Starrs, Deadly Dialectics, 7.

[43] Tansman, A. (2009). The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism. University of California Press, 257.

[44] Fusé, T. Suicide and Culture in Japan: A Study of Seppuku as an Institutionalized Form of Suicide Social Psychiatry (1980) 15: 57, 61.

[45] Starrs, Deadly Dialectics, 6.

[46] Stokes, 34.

[47]Ibid., 48.

[48] Ibid., 267.

[49] Otomo, 40.

[50] Napier, S. (1995). Reviewed Work: Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima by Roy Starrs  Monumenta Nipponica, 50(1), 128-130.

Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/

An Introduction to the Life and Teachings of Ajahn Chah

 One evening in Northeast Thailand...

Night is falling swiftly. The forest reverberates with the undulating buzz of countless crickets and the eerie rising wail of tropical cicadas. A few stars poke dimly through the treetops. Amid the gathering darkness there is a pool of warm light, thrown from a pair of kerosene lanterns illuminating the open area below a hut raised up on stilts. Beneath their glow, a couple of dozen people are gathered around a small, solidly-built monk who is seated cross-legged on a wicker bench. The air is filled with a vibrant peace. Venerable Ajahn Chah is teaching.

In some ways the group gathered here is a motley crew. Close beside Ajahn Chah (or Luang Por, Venerable Father, as he is affectionately known to his students) is a cluster of bhikkhus (monks) and novices; most of them are Thai or Lao, but there are a few pale-skinned figures among them – a Canadian, two Americans, a young Australian and an Englishman. In front of the Ajahn sits a well-groomed middle-aged couple, he in a stiff suit and she coiffed and gold-bedecked – he’s a member of parliament from a distant province, they’re taking the opportunity while he’s in the area on official business to come and pay their respects and make some offerings to the monastery.

A little behind them and to both sides is scattered a sizeable group of local villagers. Their shirts and blouses are worn thin and the skin of their lean limbs is sun-darkened, wrinkled – baked like the poor earth of the region. As a child Luang Por played with a few of those here, catching frogs and climbing trees – others he helped and was helped by in the years before he was a bhikkhu, as they planted out their annual round of rice seedlings and then harvested the fields together at the end of the monsoon.

To one side, near the back, is a professor from Freiburg who has come to Thailand with a friend from her local Dharma group to study Buddhism; an American nun has come over with her from the women’s section of the monastery to guide her through the forest paths and to translate. Beside them sit three or four other nuns, elder sisters from the nuns’ section who have decided to take the opportunity to come over as well, to ask advice from Luang Por about an issue in the women’s community and request that he visit their side of the forest and give a Dhamma talk to their whole group – it’s been several days now since he last paid them a visit. They’ve been there for a couple of hours already, so they pay their respects and take their leave, along with the other visitors from the nuns’ section – they need to be back before dark and they’re already a little late.

Also near the back, almost at the edge of the pool of light, sits a stern-faced man in his thirties. He is half turned to one side, as if his presence there is uncomfortable, tentative. He is a local hard man, a nak leng. Deeply disdainful of all things supposedly religious, he nevertheless has a grudging respect for Luang Por, probably stemming as much from the monk’s reputation for toughness and his powers of endurance as from the recognition that, as religious people go, he might be the real thing – ‘but he’s probably the only one worth bowing to in the whole province.’

He’s angry and upset, sick at heart. A week ago his beloved kid brother, who ran with his gang and with whom he’d been through a thousand scrapes together, went down with cerebral malaria and was dead within days. Since then he has felt as if his heart had a spear through it and that everything in the world had lost its flavour. ‘If he had been killed in a knife fight, at least I could take revenge – what am I going to do: track down the mosquito that bit him and kill it?’ ‘Why not go see Luang Por Chah?’ a friend said. So here he is.

Luang Por smiles broadly as he makes a point, holding up a glass to illustrate his analogy. He has noticed the stark young figure in the shadows. Soon he has somehow managed to coax him to the front, as if he was reeling in a tough and wily fish; next thing the hard man has his head in Luang Por’s hands and is weeping like a baby; next he is somehow laughing at his own arrogance and self-obsession – he realizes that he’s not the first or only person ever to have lost a dear one – the tears of rage and grief have turned to tears of relief.

All this happens with twenty total strangers around, yet the atmosphere is one of safety and trust. For although those assembled come from all walks of life and from all round the planet, they are all united at this one moment and place as saha-dhammika ‘fellow Dhamma-farers’ or, to use another expression from the Buddhist vernacular, they are all ‘brothers and sisters in old age, sickness and death’ and thus belong to a single family.

This kind of scenario was played out countless times during the thirty years that Ajahn Chah spent teaching. It is significant that both in longer expositions on formal occasions and in such impromptu dialogues, the flow of teaching, and those to whom it was directed in particular, were highly spontaneous and unpredictable. In many ways, when Ajahn Chah was teaching he was like a master musician, both leading the flow of harmonious sound and producing it entirely in response to the natures and moods of the people he was with; integrating their words, feelings and questions in the crucible of his heart, and letting the responses flow forth freely.

In any kind of crowd gathered around him, he might use the example of the right and wrong ways to peel a mango one moment, then be describing the nature of Ultimate Reality the next – with identical matter-of-fact familiarity. In one moment he might be gruff and cold to the inflated, then charming and gentle to the shy; he might crack a joke with an old friend from the village and, with the next turn, look a corrupt police colonel in the eye and speak sincerely of the central importance of honesty on the Path. Within a few minutes he might scold a bhikkhu for being sloppily dressed, then let his own robe slip off his shoulder and allow his rotund belly to show forth.

A clever question from an academic type, seeking highminded philosophical discussion in order to display his own acumen, might easily find Luang Por’s hand moving to remove his false teeth and then pass them to his attendant bhikkhu to be cleaned up a little. His interlocutor would then have to pass the test of the great master responding to his profound question through broad lips folded in over his gums, before his clean set of teeth was installed…

Ajahn Chah most often gave teachings at such spontaneous gatherings, but he was also very generous with his wisdom on more formal occasions, such as after the recitation of the bhikkhus’ rules, or to the whole assembly of laity and monastics on the weekly lunar observance night. However, whether his teachings were of the former or the latter kind, Ajahn Chah never planned anything. Not one syllable of anything he taught was ever plotted out before he started speaking. He felt that this was an extremely important principle, as the job of the teacher was to get out of the way and let the Dhamma arise according to the needs of the moment – ‘If it’s not alive to the present, it’s not Dhamma,’ he would say.

Once he invited the young Ajahn Sumedho (his first Western student) to give a talk to the assembly at the main monastery, Wat Pah Pong. This was a traumatic test – not only to have to speak to a couple of hundred people who were used to Ajahn Chah’s high standard of wit and wisdom, but also to have to do it in Thai, a language Ajahn Sumedho had only started learning three or four years before. His mind teemed with ideas and fears. He had been reading about the Six Realms of Buddhist cosmology and their correlation to psychological states (anger and the hell realms, sensual bliss and the heavenly realms, etc.) He decided that this would be a good theme, and he thought through all his ideas and the right phrases for them.

On the big night he gave what he (Ajahn Sumedho) felt was a pretty good exposition, and the next day many members of the Sangha came up and said how much they had appreciated his words. He felt relieved and quite pleased with himself. Some time later, in a quiet moment, Ajahn Chah caught his attention, fixed him with a direct look and gently said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’

This style of teaching was not unique to Ajahn Chah, but is that espoused throughout what is known as the Thai Forest Tradition, and perhaps it would be helpful at this point to describe the character and origins of this lineage, to give a little more sense of the context from which Ajahn Chah’s wisdom sprang.

The Forest Tradition

In a way the forest meditation tradition pre-dates even the Buddha. Before his time, in India and the Himalayan region, it was not uncommon for those who sought spiritual liberation to leave the life of the town and village and resort to the mountains and forest wildernesses. As a gesture of leaving worldly values behind this made perfect sense: the forest was a wild, natural place, and the only people who were to be found there were criminals, the insane, outcasts and renunciant religious seekers. It was a sphere outside the influence of materialistic cultural norms, and thus ideal for cultivating the aspects of the spirit that transcended them.

When the Bodhisatta left the life of the palace at the age of 29, it was to move into the forest and train in the yogic disciplines that were available in his time. The story of how he became dissatisfied with the teachings of his first instructors and left them to find his own way is well-known. He succeeded, discovering that primal chord of Truth he named ‘the Middle Way’ under the shade of the bodhi tree, beside the River Nerañjara, at what is now Bodh-Gaya, in Bihar State, India.

It is frequently stated that the Buddha was born in a forest, was enlightened in a forest, lived and taught his whole life in a forest and finally passed away in a forest. When choice was possible it was the environment he opted to live in since, as he would say: ‘Tathāgatas delight in secluded places.’ The lineage now known as the Thai Forest Tradition tries to live in the spirit of the way espoused by the Buddha himself, and to practise according to the same standards he encouraged during his lifetime. It is a branch of the Southern School of Buddhism, more commonly referred to as ‘Theravāda.’

As far as the sketchy historical accounts can tell us, a few months after the Buddha’s final passing away a great council of elders was held to establish and formalize the Teachings (the discourses and the monastic rules) in a standardized form of the vernacular called ‘Pālibhasa’ – ‘the language of the texts.’ The Dhamma teachings formulated in this way over the next hundred years form the core of the Pāli Canon, the common basis of a range of subsequent Buddhist schools. A hundred years later there was a second council to go over all the teachings again, in an attempt to keep everyone in agreement.

However, as it transpired, it was at this time that the first major split in the Sangha occurred. The majority of the Sangha wanted to change some of the rules, including allowing the monastics to use money. A smaller group was cautious about these proposed changes. Instead they felt, ‘Well, whether it makes sense or not, we want to do things the way the Buddha and his original disciples did.’ The members of the small group were known as the Sthaviras (in Sanskrit) or Theras (in Pāli), meaning ‘Elders.’ After about another 130 years they gave rise to the Theravāda school. ‘Theravāda’ literally means ‘the Way of the Elders,’ and that has been their abiding theme ever since. The ethos of the tradition can be characterized as something like, ‘For better or for worse, that’s the way the Buddha established it, so that is the way we’ll do it.’ It has thus always had a particularly conservative quality to it.

As with all religious traditions and human institutions, over time a number of branches sprouted from the Buddha’s rootstock. It is said that by about 250 years after the Buddha’s time, during the reign of the Emperor Asoka, there were up to eighteen schools and lineages in India, maybe more, with diverging views of the Buddha-sāsana, the Buddha’s dispensation. One lineage became established in Sri Lanka, at some remove from the cultural ferment of India, where a Brahminical revival – and religious influences from West and East – added to the stirrings of new forms of Buddhist thought. This lineage developed in its own way, with less varied input and stimulation. It formulated its commentaries and interpretations of the Pāli scriptures with a view not to developing new forms to meet the challenge of other faiths, but to adding details to the Pāli texts. Some of these were of the nature of fables, to catch the hearts of ordinary folk; others were more philosophical and metaphysical, with a scholarly appeal.

Out of all this, Theravāda Buddhism crystallized. And despite wars, famines and other cultural upheavals on the Indian sub-continent, the Theravādans have survived to the present day, largely because they had originally become well-established on the island of Sri Lanka, a safer haven than many others. Other Buddhist schools operated there too, but Theravāda Buddhism was continually restored and maintained as the island’s main religion.

The lineage eventually spread throughout South-east Asia as at different times missionaries were invited from Sri Lanka and India; they went out to Burma and later on to Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos, and latterly from those countries to the West. Throughout this geographical dispersion of the Theravāda tradition, the theme of continually looking back to the standards of the Pāli Canon has been maintained. When the lineage has been established in new countries, there has always been a strong sense of respectfulness and reverence for the original teachings, and also a respect for the style of life as embodied by the Buddha and the original Sangha, the forest-dwelling monastics of the earliest times.

This is the model that was employed then and has since been carried on, although obviously, during so many centuries, there have been lots of ups and downs. Sometimes the religion would die down in Sri Lanka and then some monks would come from Thailand to revive it again. Then it would fade out in Thailand, and some monks from Burma would boost it up. So its followers supported each other over the centuries, and the religion has thus managed to keep itself afloat and still largely in its original form.

Another aspect of these cycles, along with degeneration, was the problem of success. Often, when the religion became well-developed, the monasteries would grow rich, and the whole system would become obese and corrupted and begin to collapse under its own weight. Then a splinter group would say, ‘Let’s get back to basics!’ go off into the forest, and again return to those original standards of keeping the monastic rules, practising meditation and studying the original teachings.

It’s significant to note that this cycle of progress, overinflation, corruption and reform has taken place many times over the ages in many other Buddhist countries as well. It is striking how the lives and practices of such luminaries as Ven. Patrul Rimpoche in Tibet and Ven. Master Hsu Yun in China (both of the late 19th and early 20th centuries) are totally in accord with the spirit of the Forest Tradition. Both these great masters chose to live lives of great simplicity, kept the monastic discipline very strictly and were accomplished meditators and highly gifted teachers. They largely avoided the burdens of rank and official responsibility, but inevitably rose to positions of great influence through the sheer power of their wisdom and virtue. This is exactly the pattern of life exemplified by the great forest Ajahns of Thailand.

By the mid-19th century, Buddhism in Thailand had a rich variety of regional traditions and practices, but the general field of spiritual life had become somewhat corrupt, with lax monastic discipline and Dhamma teachings mixed up with confused vestiges of tantra and animism, plus the fact that hardly anyone practised meditation any more. In addition to this, and perhaps most significantly, the orthodox position, held by scholars and not just by lax, unlearned or confused monks, was that it was not possible to realize Nibbāna in this age, nor, indeed, even to attain jhāna (meditative absorption). This was something that the revivers of the Forest Tradition refused to accept. It was also one of the reasons why they were deemed mavericks and trouble-makers by the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the time, and lies behind the obvious disdain many of them (Ajahn Chah included) had for the majority of study monks of their own Theravāda lineage – as well as their refrain that ‘you don’t get wisdom from books.’

It is necessary to spell this point out, or it will be puzzling that Ajahn Chah should have been as negative about study as he was – especially as Theravāda is supposed to have great reverence for the word of the Buddha. It is a crucial point that delineates Thai Forest monastics: the determination to focus on life-style, and personal experience, as against books (especially the Commentaries). One might find such sentiments presumptuous or arrogant, or as seeming to express the jealousy of an unlearned mind for its betters, unless it is understood that the interpretations of scholars were leading Buddhism into a black hole. In short, it was just the kind of situation that made the spiritual landscape ripe for renewal, and it was out of this fertile ground that the revival of the Forest Tradition emerged.

The Thai Forest Tradition would not exist as it does today were it not for the influence of one particular great master. This was the Venerable Ajahn Mun Bhuridatta. He was born in the 1870’s in Ubon Province, where Thailand meets with Laos and Cambodia. It was then, and still is, one of the poorer parts of the country, but it is also one where the harshness of the land and the good-humoured character of the people have led to a depth of spirituality rare in the world.

Ajahn Mun was a youth with a lively mind – he excelled at the local art of mor lam, spontaneously versified folk-song, and also felt strongly drawn to spiritual practice. Soon after his ordination as a bhikkhu he sought out Ven. Ajahn Sao, one of the rare local forest monks, and asked him to teach him meditation; he also had recognized that a rigorous adherence to the monastic discipline would be crucial to his spiritual progress. He became Ajahn Sao’s student and threw himself into the practice with great vigour.

While both of these elements, i.e. meditation and strict discipline, might seem unremarkable from the vantage point of the present day, at that time monastic discipline had grown remarkably slipshod throughout the region, and meditation was looked upon with great suspicion – probably only those who were interested in the dark arts would be foolish enough to go near it, and it was thought likely to drive one insane or cause possession by spirits.

In time Ajahn Mun successfully explained and demonstrated the usefulness of meditation to many people, and also became an example of a much higher standard of conduct for the monastic community. Furthermore, despite living in the remote provinces, he became the most highly regarded spiritual teacher in his country. Almost all the most accomplished and revered meditation masters of the 20th century in Thailand were either his direct disciples or were deeply influenced by him. Ajahn Chah was among them.

Ajahn Chah

Ajahn Chah was born into a large and comfortable family in a village in North-east Thailand. On his own initiative, at the tender age of nine, he opted to move out of the family home and went to live in the local monastery. He was ordained as a novice and, still feeling the call of the religious life, on reaching the age of twenty took higher ordination. As a young bhikkhu he studied some basic Dhamma, the Discipline and other scriptures.

Later, dissatisfied with the slack standard of conduct in his village temple and yearning for guidance in meditation, he left these relatively secure confines and undertook the life of a wandering – or tudong  – bhikkhu. He sought out several of the local meditation masters and practised under their guidance. He wandered for a number of years in the style of an ascetic bhikkhu, sleeping in forests, caves and cremation grounds, and spent a short but enlightening period with Ajahn Mun himself. Here is a description of that most significant of encounters, from the as yet unpublished biography of Luang Por Chah, Uppalamani – a play on words meaning both ‘The Jewel of Ubon Province’ and ‘The Jewel in the Lotus’ – written by Phra Ong Neung.

AT THE END OF THE RETREAT, Ajahn Chah, together with three other monks and novices and two laymen, set off on the long walk back to the Isahn (Northeast Thailand). They broke the journey at Bahn Gor, and after a few days rest began a 250-kilometre hike northwards. By the tenth day they had reached the elegant white stūpa of Taht Panom, an ancient pilgrimage spot on the banks of the Mekong, and paid homage to the Buddha’s relics enshrined there. They continued their walk in stages, by now finding forest monasteries along the way in which to spend the night. Even so it was an arduous trek, and the novice and a layman asked to turn back. The group consisted of just three monks and a layman when they finally arrived at Wat Peu Nong Nahny, the home of the Venerable Ajahn Mun.

As they walked into the monastery, Ajahn Chah was immediately struck by its tranquil and secluded atmosphere. The central area, in which stood a small meeting hall, was immaculately swept, and the few monks they caught sight of were attending to their daily chores silently, with a measured and composed gracefulness. There was something about the monastery that was like no other he had been in before – the silence was strangely charged and vibrant. Ajahn Chah and his companions were received politely, and after being advised where to put up theirglots(large umbrellas from which a mosquito net is hung) they took a welcome bath to wash off the grime of the road.In the evening the three young monks, their double-layered outer robes folded neatly over their left shoulders and their minds fluctuating between keen anticipation and cold fear, made their way to the wooden sālā (meeting hall) to pay their respects to Ajahn Mun. Crawling on his knees towards the great master, flanked on both sides by the resident monks, Ajahn Chah approached a slight and aged figure with an indomitable diamond-like presence. It is easy to imagine Ajahn Mun’s bottomless eyes and his deeply penetrating gaze boring into Ajahn Chah as he bowed three times and sat down at a suitable distance. Most of the monks were sitting with eyes closed in meditation; one sat slightly behind Ajahn Mun, slowly fanning away the evening’s mosquitoes.

As Ajahn Chah glanced up he would have noticed how prominently Ajahn Mun’s collarbone jutted through the pale skin above his robe, and how his thin mouth stained red with betel juice formed such an arresting contrast to the strange luminosity of his presence. As is the time-honoured custom among Buddhist monks, Ajahn Mun first asked the visitors how long they had been in the robes, in which monasteries they had practised and the details of their journey. Did they have any doubts about the practice? Ajahn Chah swallowed. Yes, he did. He had been studying Vinaya texts with great enthusiasm, but had become discouraged. The Discipline seemed too detailed to be practical; it didn’t seem possible to keep every single rule; what should one’s standard be?

Ajahn Mun advised Ajahn Chah to take the ‘Two Guardians of the World,’ hiri (a sense of shame) and ottappa (intelligent fear of consequences) as his basic principle. In the presence of those two virtues, he said, everything else would follow. He then began to discourse on the threefold training of sīla, samādhi and paññā, the Four Roads to Success and the Five Spiritual Powers, eyes half closed, his voice becoming stronger and faster as he proceeded, as if he was moving into a higher and higher gear. With absolute authority he described ‘the way things truly are’ and the path to liberation. Ajahn Chah and his companions sat completely enraptured. Ajahn Chah later said that although he had spent a exhausting day on the road, hearing Ajahn Mun’s Dhamma talk made all his weariness disappear, his mind became peaceful and clear, and he felt as if he was floating in the air above his seat. It was late at night before Ajahn Mun called the meeting to an end, and Ajahn Chah returned to his glot, aglow.

On the second night Ajahn Mun gave more teachings, and Ajahn Chah felt that he had come to the end of his doubts about the practice that lay ahead. He felt a joy and rapture in the Dhamma that he had never known before. Now what remained was for him to put his knowledge into practice. Indeed, one of the teachings that had inspired him the most on those two evenings was this injunction to make himself sītibhūto i.e. a witness to the truth. But the most clarifying explanation, one that gave him the necessary context or basis for practice that he had been hitherto lacking, was of a distinction between the mind itself and the transient states of mind which arose and passed away within it.

‘Tan Ajahn Mun said they’re merely states. Through not understanding that point we take them to be real, to be the mind itself. In fact they’re all just transient states. As soon as he said that, things suddenly became clear. Suppose there’s happiness present in the mind; it’s a different thing to the mind itself, it’s on a different level. If you see that then you can stop, you can put things down. When conventional realities are seen for what they are, then it’s ultimate truth. Most people lump everything together as the mind itself, but actually there are states of mind together with the knowing of them. If you understand that point, then there’s not a lot to do.’

On the third day Ajahn Chah paid his respects to Luang Boo Mun and led his small group off into the lonely forests of Poopahn once more. He left Nong Peu behind him, never to return again, but with his heart full of an inspiration that would stay with him for the rest of his life.

In 1954, after many years of travel and practice, he was invited to settle in a dense forest near the village of his birth, Bahn Gor. This grove was uninhabited, known as a place of cobras, tigers and ghosts, and thus as he said, the perfect location for a forest bhikkhu. Around Ajahn Chah a large monastery formed as more and more bhikkhus, nuns and laypeople came to hear his teachings and stay on to practise with him. Now there are disciples living, practising meditation and teaching in more than 300 mountain and forest branch monasteries throughout Thailand and the West.

Although Ajahn Chah passed away in 1992, the training which he established is still carried on at Wat Pah Pong and its branches. There is usually group meditation twice a day and sometimes a talk by the senior teacher, but the heart of the meditation is the way of life. The monastics do manual work, dye and sew their own robes, make most of their own requisites and keep the monastery buildings and grounds in immaculate shape. They live extremely simply, following the ascetic precepts of eating once a day from the alms bowl and limiting their possessions and robes. Scattered throughout the forest are individual huts where bhikkhus and nuns live and meditate in solitude, and where they practise walking meditation on cleared paths under the trees.

In some of the monasteries in the West, and a few in Thailand, the physical location of the centre may dictate some small variations to this style: for instance, the monastery in Switzerland is situated in an old wooden hotel building at the edge of a mountain village. However, regardless of such differences, exactly the same spirit of simplicity, quietude and scrupulosity sets the abiding tone. Discipline is maintained strictly, enabling one to lead a simple and pure life in a harmoniously regulated community where virtue, meditation and understanding may be skilfully and continuously cultivated.

Along with monastic life as it is lived within the bounds of fixed locations, the practice of tudong – wandering on foot through the countryside on pilgrimage or in search of quiet places for solitary retreat – is still considered a central part of spiritual training. Though the forests have been disappearing rapidly throughout Thailand, and the tigers and other wild creatures so often encountered during such tudong journeys in the past have been depleted almost to the point of extinction, it has still been possible for this way of life and practice to continue.

Indeed, not only has this practice been maintained by Ajahn Chah, his disciples and many other forest monastics in Thailand; it has also been sustained by his monks and nuns in many Western countries and in India. In all these situations the strict standards of conduct are still maintained: living only on alms-food freely offered by local people, eating only between dawn and noon, not carrying or using money, sleeping wherever shelter can be found. Wisdom is a way of living and being, and Ajahn Chah endeavoured to preserve the simple monastic life-style in all its dimensions, so that people may study and practise Dhamma in the present day.

Ajahn Chah’s Teaching of Westerners

There is a widely circulated and well-attested tale that shortly before the newly-ordained Ajahn Sumedho arrived to request training under Ajahn Chah’s guidance in 1967, Ajahn Chah initiated the construction of a new kuṭī (meditation cabin) in the forest. As the timbers that formed the corner posts were being put into place, one of the villagers who was helping with the construction asked, ‘Eh, Luang Por, how come we are building this so tall? The roof is much higher than it needs to be.’ He was puzzled because such structures are usually designed to be just enough space for one person to live in comfortably: customarily about eight feet by ten feet, with a roof peak at around seven feet. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not being wasteful,’ Ajahn Chah replied. ‘There will be some farang (Western) monks coming here one day, they are a lot bigger than we are.’

In the years that followed the arrival of this first student from the West, a gentle but constant stream of them continued to enter through the gates of Ajahn Chah’s monasteries. From the very beginning he chose not to give any special treatment to the foreigners, but to let them adapt to the climate, food and culture as best they could, and to use any discomfort that they might feel as food for the development of wisdom and patient endurance, two of the qualities that he recognized as central to any spiritual progress.

Despite the primary consideration of keeping all the monastic community to a single harmonious standard, and not making the Westerners special in any way, in 1975 circumstances arose whereby Wat Pah Nanachat (the International Forest Monastery) was established near Wat Pah Pong as a place for Westerners to practise. Ajahn Sumedho and a small group of other Western bhikkhus were looking for a place to fire their alms bowls, and the forest near Bung Wai village was suggested. It was within walking distance of Wat Pah Pong and had plenty of bamboo for firewood, and there were faithful villagers who were long-standing disciples of Ajahn Chah and would be willing to help out. Ajahn Chah sent them off with a smile and said there wasn’t really any rush to come back.

Within a few days the villagers had built a thatched roof shelter for the group to have their meals and gather for meditation, and to protect them if it happened to rain. A month or so later the villagers were keen to begin constructing accommodation and have the monks settle there. The plan received approval from Ajahn Chah, and thus this special training monastery for the growing numbers of Westerners interested in undertaking monastic practice began.

It wasn’t long after this, in 1976, that Ajahn Sumedho was invited by a group in London to come and establish a Theravādan monastery in England. Ajahn Chah came over the following year and left Ajahn Sumedho and a small group of other monastics to reside at the Hampstead Buddhist Vihāra, a house on a busy street in North London. Within a few years they had moved to the country and several other branch monasteries had been established.

Since then many of Ajahn Chah’s senior Western disciples have been engaged in the work of establishing monasteries and spreading the Dhamma on several different continents. Other monasteries have grown up in Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Italy, Canada and the USA. Ajahn Chah himself travelled twice to Europe and North America, in 1977 and 1979, and wholeheartedly supported these new foundations. He once said that Buddhism in Thailand was like an old tree that had once been vigorous and abundant; now it was so aged that it could only produce a few fruits, and they were small and bitter. Buddhism in the West he likened in contrast to a young sapling, full of youthful energy and the potential for growth, but needing proper care and support for its development.

In the same light, on his visit to the USA in 1979 he commented, ‘Britain is a good place for Buddhism to get established in the West but it too is an old culture. The USA, however, has the energy and flexibility of a young country – everything is new here – it is here that the Dhamma can really flourish.’ When speaking to a group of young Americans who had just opened up a Buddhist meditation centre, he also added the caveat, ‘You will succeed in truly spreading the Buddha-Dhamma here only if you are not afraid to challenge the desires and opinions of your students (literally ‘to stab their hearts’). If you do this, you will succeed; if you do not, if you change the Teachings and the practice to fit the existing habits and opinions of people out of a misguided sense of wanting to please them, you will have failed in your duty to serve in the best way possible.’

The Essentials: View, Teaching and Practice

Before describing the emphasis of Ajahn Chah’s teachings, it might be helpful, particularly for those unfamiliar with Theravāda Buddhism in general or with the Thai Forest Tradition in particular, to outline first some of the key terms, attitudes and concepts that they use. Ajahn Chah’s teachings and teaching style are set in the context of this tradition, and it is helpful to have a feeling for these fundamental roots in order to have a clearer sense of how Ajahn Chah was able to apply and illustrate it.

The Four Noble Truths

Although there are numerous volumes of the Buddha’s discourses in many traditions, it is also said that the entirety of his Teaching was contained in his very first exposition, called Setting in Motion the Wheel of Truth (SN 56.11), which he gave to five monastic companions in the deer park near Varanasi shortly after his enlightenment. In this brief discourse (it takes only twenty minutes to recite), he expounded the nature of the Middle Way and the Four Noble Truths. This teaching is common to all Buddhist traditions, and just as an acorn contains within it the genetic coding for what eventually takes shape as a vast oak, so too all the myriad Buddhist teachings can be said to derive from this essential matrix of insight.

The Four Noble Truths are formulated like a medical diagnosis in the ayurvedic tradition: The symptoms of the disease, the cause, the prognosis and the cure.

The Buddha always drew on structures and forms that were familiar to people in his time, and in this instance this is how he laid out the picture.

The First Truth (the ‘symptom’) is that there is dukkha – we experience incompleteness, dissatisfaction or suffering. There might be moments or even long periods when we experience happiness of a coarse or even a transcendent nature, but there are other times when the heart feels discontent. This can vary from extreme anguish at one end of the spectrum, to the faintest sense that some blissful feeling we are experiencing will not last – all of this comes under the heading of ‘dukkha.’

Sometimes people read this First Truth and misinterpret it as an absolute statement, that ‘Reality in every dimension is dukkha.’ The statement is taken as an value judgement of all and everything, but that’s not what is meant here. If it were, that would mean that there was no hope of liberation for anyone, and to realize the truth of the way things are, the Dhamma, would not result in the abiding peace and happiness which according to the Buddha’s insight it produces. What is most significant, therefore, is that these are noble truths, not absolute truths. They are noble in the sense that although they are relative truths, when they are understood they lead us to a realization of the Absolute or the Ultimate.

The Second Noble Truth is that the cause of this dukkha is self-centred craving, taṇhā in Pāli (trshna in Sanskrit), which literally means ‘thirst.’ This craving, this grasping, is the cause of dukkha. This may be craving for sense-pleasure, craving to become something, craving to be identified as something; or it may be craving not to be, the desire to disappear, to be annihilated, to get rid of. There are many subtle dimensions of this.

The Third Truth is that of dukkha-nirodha – this is the prognosis. Nirodha means ‘cessation.’ This means that this experience of dukkha, of incompleteness, can fade away, can be transcended. It can end. In other words, dukkha is not an absolute reality. It’s just a temporary experience from which the heart can be liberated.

The Fourth Noble Truth is that of the Path, how we move from the Second Truth to the Third, from the causation of dukkha to its ending. The cure is the Eightfold Path, which can be summarized as virtue, concentration and wisdom.

The Law of Kamma

One of the crucial underpinnings of the Buddhist worldview is that of the inviolability of the law of cause and effect: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This is seen as applying not only to the realm of physical reality, but also, and more importantly, to the psychological and social realms.

The Buddha’s insight into the nature of reality led him to see that this is a moral universe. Good actions reap pleasant results, harmful acts reap painful results – that’s the way nature works. The results may come soon after the act or at some very remote future time, but an effect which echoes the cause, weak or strong, will necessarily follow. In the Pāli language this dyad of ‘action and its result’ is called kamma-vipāka and can be regarded as close in meaning to the more familiar Sanskrit word karma.

The Buddha also made it clear that the key element of kamma is intention – as said in the opening words of the Dhammapada, the most famous and well-loved of all Theravādan scriptures:

Mind is the forerunner of all things: think and act with a corrupt heart, and sorrow will follow one as surely as the cart follows the ox that pulls it.

Mind is the forerunner of all things: think and act with a pure heart, and happiness will follow one as surely as one’s never-departing shadow. ( Dhp 1-2 )

This understanding, learned at an early age and taken for granted in much of Asia, resonates throughout most Dhamma teachings in one form or another. However, even though it is something of an article of faith in the Buddhist world, it is also a law which one comes to recognize through experience, rather than accepting it blindly on the assurance of a teacher or because there is some cultural imperative to abide by it.

When Ajahn Chah encountered Westerners who said that they didn’t believe in kamma as he described it, rather than criticizing them or dismissing them as having ‘wrong view’ or feeling that he had to make them see things his way, he was interested that someone could look at things in such a different manner – he would ask them to describe how they saw things working, and then take the conversation from there.

Everything is Uncertain

Another of the central oft-repeated teachings, is that of the Three Characteristics of Existence. From the second discourse that the Buddha gave (the Anattālakkana Sutta, Mv 1.6, SN 22.59), and on through the rest of his teaching career, he outlined the fact that all phenomena, internal or external, mental or physical, have three invariable qualities: anicca-dukkha-anattā – impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and ‘not-self.’ Everything is constantly changing, nothing can be permanently satisfying or dependable, and nothing can truly be said to be ours, or absolutely who and what we are. And when these three qualities have been seen and known through direct experience, insight can truly be said to have dawned.

Anicca is the first member of the insight-forming triad, and Ajahn Chah stressed its contemplation constantly over the years as being the primary gateway to wisdom. As he says in one of his talks, ‘Still, Flowing Water’ – ‘What we call “uncertainty” here is the Buddha. The Buddha is the Dhamma. The Dhamma is the characteristic of uncertainty. Whoever sees the uncertainty of things sees the unchanging reality of them. That’s what the Dhamma is like. And that is the Buddha. If you see the Dhamma, you see the Buddha, seeing the Buddha you see the Dhamma. If you know anicca, uncertainty, you will let go of things and not grasp onto them.’

It is a characteristic of Ajahn Chah’s teaching that he habitually used the less familiar rendition of ‘uncertainty’ (my naer in Thai) for anicca. Where ‘impermanence’ can have a more abstract or technical tone to it, ‘uncertainty’ better describes the feeling in the heart when that quality of change is encountered.

Choice of Expression: ‘Yes’ or ‘No’

One of the most striking characteristics of the Theravāda teachings is that the Truth and the way leading to it are often indicated by talking about what they are not rather than what they are. In Christian theological language this is called an ‘apophatic method’ – talking about what God is not – as contrasted with a ‘kataphatic method’ – talking about what God is.

This apophatic style of approach, also known as the via negativa, was used by a number of eminent Christians over the centuries; one who immediately springs to mind is the famous mystic and theologian St John of the Cross. As an example of this style, in his Ascent of Mount Carmel, his description of the most direct spiritual method (i.e. straight up the mountain) runs something like: ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and even on the Mountain, nothing.’

The Pāli Canon possesses much of the same via negativa flavour, and because of this readers have often mistaken its view on life as nihilistic – nothing could be further from the truth, but it’s easy to see how the mistake could be made, particularly if one comes from a culture committed to lifeaffirming expressions.

The story has it that shortly after the Buddha’s enlightenment he was walking along a road through the Magadhan countryside, on his way to meet up with the five companions with whom he had practised austerities before going off alone to seek the Truth in his own way. Along the road another ascetic wanderer, Upaka by name, saw the Buddha approaching and was greatly struck by his appearance. Not only was he a warrior-noble prince, with the regal bearing that came from that upbringing; he was also apparently well over six feet tall, extraordinarily handsome, was dressed in the rag robes of the ascetic wanderers and shone with a dazzling radiance. Upaka was impressed:

‘Who are you, friend? Your face is so clear and bright, your manner is awesome and serene. Surely you must have discovered some great truth – who is your teacher, friend, and what is it that you have discovered?’

The newly-awakened Buddha replied: ‘I am an Alltranscender, an All-knower. I have no teacher. In all the world I alone am fully enlightened. There is none who taught me this – I came to it through my own efforts.’

‘Do you mean to say that you claim to have won victory over birth and death?’

‘Indeed, friend, I am a Victorious One; and now, in this world of the spiritually blind, I go to Varanasi to beat the drum of Deathlessness.’

‘Well, good for you, friend,’ said Upaka and, shaking his head as he went, he left by a different path. ( MV 1.6 )

The Buddha realized from this encounter that mere declaration of the truth did not necessarily arouse faith, and might not be effective in communicating it to others either, so by the time he reached the Deer Park outside Varanasi and had met up with his former companions, he had adopted a much more analytical method (vibhajjāvada in Pāli) and thus composed the formula of the Four Noble Truths. This reflected the shift of expression from: ‘I have realized Perfection,’ to ‘Let’s investigate why anyone experiences imperfection…’

In the Buddha’s second discourse (again, the Anattalakkhana Sutta), which was also given in the Deer Park at Varanasi and was the teaching which caused all the five companions to realize enlightenment, this via negativa method is most clearly displayed. This is not the place to go into the sutta in detail, but in summary, the Buddha uses the search for the self (attā in Pāli, ātman in Skt) as his theme, and by using an analytical method he demonstrates that a ‘self ’ cannot be found in relation to any of the factors of body or mind.

Having demonstrated this, he then states that, ‘the wise noble disciple becomes dispassionate towards the body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness.’ Thus the heart is liberated. Once we let go of what we’re not, the nature of what is real becomes apparent. And as that reality is beyond description, it is most appropriate, and least misleading, to leave it undescribed – this is the essence of the ‘way of negation.’

The lion’s share of the Buddha’s teaching, particularly in the Theravāda tradition, thus addresses the nature of the Path and how best to follow it, rather than waxing lyrically about the goal. For the most part this was also true of Ajahn Chah’s style. He avoided talking about levels of attainment and levels of meditative absorption as much as possible, both to counteract spiritual materialism (the gaining mind, competitiveness and jealousy) and to keep people’s eyes where they were most needed: on the Path.

Having said that, Ajahn Chah was also notable for the readiness and directness with which he would speak about ultimate reality, should the occasion demand it, and regardless of whether those gathered were young or old, lay people or monastics. If, however, he thought that a person’s understanding was not yet ripe (similarly, regardless of ordination status), yet that person insisted on asking about transcendent qualities, he might well respond, as he once did when asked if there was something outside the conventional body-mind (the five khandhas): ‘It isn’t anything and we don’t call it anything – that’s all there is to it! Be finished with all of it,’ (literally: ‘If there is anything there, then just throw it to the dogs!’)

Emphasis on Right View and Virtue

When asked what he considered to be the most essential elements of the teaching, Ajahn Chah frequently responded that his experience had shown him that all spiritual progress depended upon Right View and on purity of conduct. Of Right View the Buddha once said: ‘There is no factor for the arousing of wholesome states so helpful as Right View’ ( AN 1.16.2 ).

To establish Right View means, firstly, having a trustworthy map of the terrain of the mind and the world – particularly with respect to an appreciation of the law of kamma – and, secondly, seeing experience in the light of the Four Noble Truths and thus turning that flow of perceptions, thoughts and moods into fuel for insight. The four points become the quarters of the compass by which we orient our understanding and thus guide our actions and intentions.

Ajahn Chah saw sīla (virtue) as the great protector of the heart, and encouraged a sincere commitment to the Precepts by all those who were serious about their search for happiness and a skilfully lived life, whether these were the Five Precepts of the householder or the Eight, Ten or 227 Precepts of the various levels of the monastic community. Virtuous action and speech, sīla, brings the heart directly into accord with Dhamma and thus becomes the foundation for concentration, insight and, finally, liberation.

In many ways sīla is the external corollary to the internal quality of Right View, and there is a reciprocal relationship between them. If we understand causality and see the relationship between craving and dukkha, then our actions are certainly more likely to be harmonious and restrained; similarly, if our actions and speech are respectful, honest and non-violent, we create the causes of peace within us, it will be much easier for us to see the laws governing the mind and its workings and Right View will develop more easily.

One particular outcome of this relationship, of which Ajahn Chah spoke regularly, is the intrinsic emptiness of all conventions (e.g. money, monasticism, social customs), but the simultaneous need to respect them fully. This might sound somewhat paradoxical, but he saw the Middle Way as synonymous with the resolution of this kind of conundrum. If we cling to conventions we become burdened and limited by them, but if we try to defy them or negate them we find ourselves lost, conflicted and bewildered. He saw that with the right attitude, both aspects could be respected, and in a way that was natural and freeing rather than forced or compromised.

It was probably due to his own profound insights in this area that he was able to be both extraordinarily orthodox and austere as a Buddhist monk, yet utterly relaxed and unfettered by any of the rules he observed. To many who met him he seemed the happiest man in the world – perhaps an ironic fact for a man who had never had sex in his life, had no money, never listened to music, was regularly available to people eighteen to twenty hours a day, slept on a thin grass mat, had a diabetic condition and had had various forms of malaria, and who was delighted by the fact that Wat Pah Pong had a reputation for having the worst food in the world.

Methods of Training

There were a multitude of different dimensions to the way that Ajahn Chah trained his students. Instruction was certainly given verbally in many of the ways already described, but most of the learning process occurred through what might best be described as situational teaching. Ajahn Chah realized that for the heart to truly learn any aspect of the teaching and be transformed by it, the lesson had to be absorbed experientially, not intellectually alone. Thus he employed the 10,000 events and aspects of the monastic routine, communal living and the tudong life as ways to teach and train his disciples. Community work projects, learning to recite the rules, helping with the daily chores, random changes in the schedule – all these and more were used as a forum in which to investigate the arising of dukkha and the way leading to its cessation.

He encouraged the attitude of being ready to learn from everything. He would emphasize over and over that we are our own teachers: if we are wise, every personal problem, event and aspect of nature will instruct us; if we are foolish, not even having the Buddha before us explaining everything would make any real impression.

This insight was also borne out in the way he related to people’s questions – he responded more to where people were coming from, rather than answering their questions in their own terms. Often, when asked something, he would appear to receive questions, gently take them to pieces, and then hand the bits back to the inquirers, who would then see for themselves how they were put together. To their surprise, he had guided them in such a way that they had answered their own questions. When asked how it was that he could do this so often, he replied, ‘If the person did not already know the answer they could not have posed the question in the first place.’

Other key attitudes that he encouraged were the need to cultivate a profound sense of urgency in meditation practice, and (again paradoxically), to use the training environment to develop patient endurance. This latter quality is not one that has received a great deal of attention in recent times, particularly in spiritual circles in the ‘quick fix’ culture of the West, but in the forest life it is seen as almost synonymous with spiritual training. When the Buddha was giving his very first instructions on monastic discipline, to a spontaneous gathering of 1,250 of his enlightened disciples at the Bamboo Grove, his first words were: ‘Patient endurance is the supreme practice for freeing the heart from unwholesome states.’ ( Dhp 183–85, DN 14.3.28 )

So when someone came to Ajahn Chah with a tale of woe, of how her husband was drinking and the rice crop looked bad this year, his first response would often be, ‘Can you endure it?’ This was said not as some kind of macho challenge, but more as a way of pointing to the fact that the way beyond suffering is not to run away from it, wallow in it or even grit one’s teeth and get through on will alone – no, the encouragement of patient endurance is to hold steady in the midst of difficulty, to truly apprehend and digest the experience of dukkha, to understand its causes and let them go.

Teaching the Laity and Monastics

There were certainly many occasions when Ajahn Chah’s teachings were as applicable to lay people as to monastics, but there were also many instances when they were not. Such a distinction was not made because certain teachings were ‘secret’ or higher in some respect, but rather through the need to speak in ways that would be appropriate and useful to particular audiences. Lay practitioners would naturally have a different range of concerns and influences on their daily life – e.g. trying to find time for formal meditation practice, maintaining an income, living with a spouse – from monastics. Also, most particularly, the lay community would not have undertaken the vows of the renunciate life. An average lay student of Ajahn Chah would commit to a standard of keeping the Five Precepts, whereas the monastics would be keeping the Eight, Ten or 227 Precepts of the various levels of ordination.

When teaching monastics alone, the focus would be much more specifically on using the renunciant way of life as the key methodology of training; the instruction would therefore be concerned with the hurdles, pitfalls and glories that way of life might bring. Since the average age of the monks’ community in a monastery in Thailand is usually around 25 to 30, and the precepts around celibacy are kept extremely strictly, there was also a natural need for Ajahn Chah to guide skilfully the restless and sexual energy that his monks would often experience. When well-directed, individuals would be able to contain and employ that energy, and transform it to help develop concentration and insight.

The tone of some of his talks to monastics would also in certain instances be seen to be considerably fiercer than in those given to the lay community. This manner of expression represents something of the ‘take no prisoners’ style which is characteristic of many teachers of the Thai Forest Tradition. It is a way of speaking that is intended to rouse the warrior heart, that attitude towards spiritual practice that enables one to be ready to endure all hardships and be wise, patient and faithful, regardless of how difficult things become.

Occasionally such a manner could come across as overly forceful or combative in tone; however, those listening to these teachings would bear in mind that the spirit behind such language was always the endeavour to encourage them, to gladden the heart and provide supportive strength when dealing with the multifarious challenges of freeing the heart from all greed, hatred and delusion. As Ajahn Chah once said, ‘All those who seriously engage in spiritual practice should expect to experience a great deal of friction and difficulty.’ The heart is being trained to go against the intense current of self-centred habits, so it’s quite natural for it to be buffeted around somewhat.

As a final note on this aspect of Ajahn Chah’s teachings, particularly with respect to those one might term ‘higher’ or ‘transcendent,’ it is significant that he held nothing back as being especially for monastics. If he felt that any group of people was ready for the highest levels of teaching, he would impart them freely and openly. For example, in one of his talks to a group of lay people he stated, ‘People these days study away, looking for good and evil. But that which is beyond good and evil they know nothing of,’ and then proceeded to give extensive descriptions of how to transcend that dualism. Like the Buddha, he knew nothing of the ‘teacher’s closed fist,’ and made his choices of what to teach solely on the basis of what would be useful to his listeners, not on their number of precepts or their religious affiliation or lack of one.

Counteracting Superstition

One of the characteristics for which Ajahn Chah was most well-known was his keenness to dispel superstition in relation to Buddhist practice in Thailand. He strongly criticized the magic charms, amulets and fortune-telling that pervade so much of that society. He rarely spoke about past or future lives, other realms, visions or psychic experiences. Anyone who came to him asking for a tip about the next winning lottery number (a very common reason why some people go to visit famous Ajahns) would generally get very short shrift.

He saw that the Dhamma itself was the most priceless jewel which could provide genuine protection and security in life, and yet it was continually overlooked for the sake of the promise of minor improvements to saṃsāra. Over and over he emphasized the usefulness and practicality of Buddhist practice, counteracting the common belief that Dhamma was too high or abstruse for the common person, out of a genuine feeling of kindness for others. His criticisms were not aimed just to break down childish dependencies on good luck and magical charms; rather he wanted people to invest in something that would truly serve them.

In the light of this life-long effort, an ironic twist of circumstance accompanied his funeral in 1993. He passed away on the 16th of January, 1992 and his funeral was held exactly a year later. The memorial stūpa had 16 pillars, was 32 meters high, and had foundations 16 meters deep – consequently, a huge number of people in Ubon Province bought lottery tickets with ones and sixes together. The next day the headlines in the local paper proclaimed: LUANG POR CHAH’S LAST GIFT TO HIS DISCIPLES – the 16s had cleaned up and a couple of local bookmakers had even been bankrupted.

Humour

That last story brings us to a final quality of Ajahn Chah’s teaching style. He was an amazingly quick-witted man and a natural performer. Although he could be either very cool and forbidding or sensitive and gentle in his way of expression, he also used a high degree of humour in his teaching. He had a way of employing wit to work his way into the hearts of his listeners, not just to amuse, but to help convey truths that would otherwise not be received so easily. His wit and skilful eye for the tragi-comic absurdities of life enabled people to see situations in such a way that they could laugh at themselves and be guided to a wiser outlook.

This might be in matters of conduct, such as a famous display he once gave of the many wrong ways to carry a monk’s bag: slung over the back, looped round the neck, grabbed in the fist, scraped along the ground… Or it might be in terms of some painful personal struggle. One time a young bhikkhu came to him very downcast. He had seen the sorrows of the world and the horror of beings’ entrapment in birth and death, and had decided that, ‘I’ll never be able to laugh again – it’s all so sad and painful.’ Within 45 minutes, via a graphic tale about a youthful squirrel repeatedly attempting and falling short in its efforts to learn tree-climbing, the monk was rolling on the floor clutching his sides, tears pouring down his face as he was convulsed with the laughter that had never been going to return.

Last Years

During the rains retreat of 1981 Ajahn Chah fell seriously ill with what was apparently some form of stroke. His health had been shaky for the last few years, with dizzy spells and diabetic problems, and now it went down with a crash. Over the next few months he received various kinds of treatment, including a couple of operations, but nothing helped. The slide continued, until by the middle of the following year he was paralyzed but for some slight movement in one hand, and he had lost the power of speech. He could still blink his eyes.

He remained in this state for the next ten years, his few areas of control diminishing slowly, until by the end all voluntary movement was lost to him. During this time it was often said that he was still teaching his students: hadn’t he reiterated endlessly that the body is of the nature to sicken and decay, and that it is not under one’s personal control? Well, here was a prime object lesson in exactly that – neither a great master nor even the Buddha himself could escape the inexorable laws of nature. The task, as always, was to find peace and freedom by not identifying with the changing forms.

During this time, despite his severe limitations, on occasion he still managed to teach in ways other than just by being an example of the uncertain processes of life and giving opportunities for his monks and novices to offer their support through nursing care. The bhikkhus used to work in shifts, three or four at a time, to look after Ajahn Chah’s physical needs, as he required 24-hours a day attention.

On one particular shift two monks got into an argument, quite forgetting (as often happens around paralyzed or comatose people) that the other occupant of the room might be fully cognizant of what is going on. Had Ajahn Chah been fully active, it would have been unthinkable that they would have got into such a spat in front of him. As the words got more heated, an agitated movement began in the bed across the room. Suddenly Ajahn Chah coughed violently, and according to reports, sent a sizeable gob of phlegm shooting across the intervening space, passing between the two protagonists and smacking into the wall right beside them. The teaching was duly received and the argument came to an embarrassed and abrupt conclusion.

During the course of his illness the life of the monasteries continued much as before; the Master’s being both there yet not there served in a strange way to help the community adapt to communal decision-making and to the concept of life without their beloved teacher at the centre of everything. After such a great elder passes away, it is not uncommon for things to dissipate rapidly and for all his students to go their own way, the teacher’s legacy vanishing within a generation or two. It is perhaps a testimony to how well Ajahn Chah trained people to be self-reliant that whereas when he fell sick there were about 75 branch monasteries, they had increased to well over 100 by the time of his demise, and have now grown to more than 300 in Thailand and around the world.

After he passed away in 1992, his monastic community set about arranging his funeral. In keeping with the spirit of his life and teachings, this event was to be not just a ceremony, but also a time for hearing and practising Dhamma. It was held over ten days with several periods of group meditation and instructional talks each day, these being given by many of the most accomplished Dhamma teachers in the country.

About 6,000 monks, 1,000 nuns and just over 10,000 lay people camped in the forest for the entire session. Besides these, an estimated 1,000,000 people came through the monastery during the course of the practice period; 400,000, including the king and queen and the prime minister of Thailand, came on the day of the cremation itself.

In the spirit of the standards Ajahn Chah espoused during his whole teaching career, throughout this whole occasion not one penny was charged for anything: food was supplied for everyone through forty-two free food kitchens, run and stocked by many of the branch monasteries; over £160,000 worth of free Dhamma books were passed out; bottled water was provided by the ton through a local firm, and the local bus company and other nearby lorry owners ferried out the thousands of monks each morning to go on alms round through the villages and towns of the area. It was a grand festival of generosity and a fitting way to bid farewell to the great man.

Ajhan Amaro