No.282 - Ajaan Fuang Jotiko (1915 ~ May 14, 1986)

Ajaan Fuang Jotiko (1915 ~ May 14, 1986)

Ajaan Fuang was born in 1915 into a poor farming family in the province of Chanthaburi. Orphaned at the age of eleven, he was raised in a series of monasteries. With only a little bit of education and no connections to climb up the social ladder in Thai society, he began to realize in his teens that his life didn’t look all that promising.

So he looked to the Dhamma. “This,” he said, “is the only way my life is going to have any meaning, is going to go anywhere at all.” He realized that this was his only hope for any kind of happiness: to build up the goodness that Dhamma practice can provide.

As he said, “I must not have much merit, so I’ve got to make as much as I can.” That was his original impulse to practice the Dhamma, realizing that he didn’t have much to come from, but what he did have was enough (See note #1) to practice the Dhamma.

Henceforth, he threw himself into it with single-mindedness in the hope that he could make something of himself through the practice: he willingly put in long hours in the practice, willingly endured a lot of hardships, because that was the only way to make progress.

Other than a brief sojourn with Phra Ajaan Mun, Ajaan Fuang was under Ajaan Lee’s guidance and spent all the Rains Retreats with him till his death in 1961 with few exceptions. Notably, during World War II, he spent a five-year period meditating alone in the forests of northern Thailand.

Despite the steady deterioration of Ajaan Fuang’s health in his later years culminating in full-blown psoriasis that was untreatable, he maintained an exhausting teaching schedule where he instructed people on an individual basis- even during his worst attacks of psoriasis.

On the morning of May 14, 1986, during a visit to a student who had set up a meditation center in Hong Kong, Ajaan Fuang suffered a heart attack during meditation and was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.

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#1. A point that Phra Ajaan Mun frequently made to encourage the monks who came from the peasant-class and thought that they did not have what it takes to really do the practice:

"We are already endowed with body and mind. Our body we have received from our parents; our mind is already with us, so we have everything we need in full measure.

If we want to make the body and mind virtuous, we should go right ahead and do it. We don't have to think that virtue lies here or there, at this or that time. Virtue already lies right here with us.

Akaliko: If we maintain it at all times, we will reap its rewards at all times."

From "The Ever-present Truth", by Phra Ajaan Mun Bhuridatta Mahathera

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/thai/mun/everpresent.html