When Silent Rain was first compiled, back in 1993, part of the idea of producing such a varied collection of material – talks, poems, travelogues and artwork – was that it would then provide an easy source for smaller offprints over the years. Things, however, rarely turn out as predicted by foresight and thus, up until now, no smaller booklets had been spawned from it.

This present book, Rain on the Nile, is something of a remedy for that, being both an outcome of that original intention as well as an arena for the offering up of some more recent material – to wit, the travelogue of a journey to Egypt made in December of 2006. In truth, without there having been plans to reprint some of the talks from Silent Rain, the Egyptian diary would never have been written.

The idea to select some talks from the book and to create this smaller reprint was originally that of Venerable Tenzin Chogkyi, an American nun practicing in the Tibetan tradition. She had been the recipient of a bequest from a family member and was of a mind to direct some of it to be used to bring parts of Silent Rain back into circulation, the original stock of books having long ago been exhausted. She had found the book very helpful in her own life and wished it to be accessible to others. She thus approached me, in the autumn of 2006, and floated the idea of such an offprint being sponsored by her. I readily agreed and, during the conversation, it was mentioned that I had plans to travel to Egypt with Luang Por Sumedho that December.

This collection of nuns’ talks, which were originally offered to the monastic communities and during meditation retreats for lay people, focus on two main themes. The first is obvious but, remarkably, overlooked by many people: our very existence as a physical presence – how that changes and how it ends. The second theme, the Buddha’s teaching, which he referred to as the Four Noble Truths, begins with what is obvious: ‘Life is stressful’, However, having enumerated the causes of this state of affairs, it quickly moves on to the supremely subtle remedy – what the late Ven. Ajahn Chah referred to as ‘letting go’.

Tudong is a Thai derivative of the Pali word dhutanga translating literally as ‘means of shaking off’; it is used to refer to the austere or ascetic practices allowed by the Buddha for his disciples. These practices are thirteen in number and include, for example: eating only one meal a day, eating all your food together in your alms-bowl, never lying down, only wearing robes made from scraps of thrown-away cloth, taking the shade of a tree as your only shelter. These practices are seen as a ‘means of shaking off’ since austerity of lifestyle, when rightly applied, can be greatly conducive to the development of wisdom and insight – that is, the shaking off of one’s delusions.

The word tudong is also used to refer to those monks who adhere closely to the monastic discipline and whose practice of the Buddha’s teachings is based on meditation and the cultivation of these dhutangas. Both the monastic discipline and the additional constraints of the dhutanga practices are tools used to help contain the mind. This containment is achieved as they prevent or make clear the tendencies of the mind to ‘flow out’; that is, absorb into the likes […]”

Perhaps it is impossible to say where anything really begins, nevertheless, it can be useful to map out a few landmarks here and there. Accordingly, here is a little of the background against and amongst which much of the thread of these travelogues unravels.

In the early 1980s Ajahn Sumedho began to make regular visits to northern California. He was the senior Western disciple of Ajahn Chah, one of the most highly respected Buddhist masters of the Thai forest tradition of Theravāda Buddhism, and he had been invited to come and teach in the US by Jack Kornfield, a former Peace Corps volunteer and psychologist, with whom he had spent some time in Thailand, in the late ’60s, when they were both monks under Ajahn Chah’s tutelage.

Jack had left the monk’s robes after returning to the States in the early ’70s and, with his friends Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein and Jacqueline Schwarz (now Mandell), had embarked upon establishing the Buddhist retreat center in Massachusetts called Insight Meditation Society (IMS). This had met with great success but had also revealed some differences in styles of teaching and practice amongst the founders. These differences, along with the massive interest in Buddhist meditation that was brewing in northern California, led Jack back to his city of origin, San Francisco, to found a parallel center to IMS on the West Coast. When it eventually came into being the new place became known as Spirit Rock Meditation Center.

These annual invitations to California were doubly attractive to Ajahn Sumedho in that, not only being an American and an alumnus of Berkeley University and thus being given a chance to visit his old stomping grounds, they also gave him the opportunity to visit his elderly parents and sister in San Diego. It therefore duly became part of his annual schedule to step out of the many duties he had in the foundation of his new monasteries in England (Cittaviveka in West Sussex and Amaravati in Hertfordshire) and to head to the West Coast for a few weeks to teach and to see family.

Over the next ten years he developed a devoted following of students in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1988 they formed the Sanghapala Foundation, with the mission of creating a branch Monastery of Ajahn Chah’s lineage somewhere in northern California. Dr. Marc Lieberman, Nancy Garfield, Debbie Stamp and […]”

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 […]