Forest Path
Wat Pah Nanachat‘Forest Path’ was first printed in 1999 and originally planned as the
first edition of a Wat Pah Nanachat newsletter. Over-enthusiasm
and considerable proliferation resulted in a one-off book publication
which more or less coincided with the monastery’s twenty-fifth
anniversary. Since then we have been surprised by the number of
requests to reprint this collection of little essays, talks and anecdotes
about life in Wat Pah Nanachat as it was at that time. Apart
from the formal Dhamma talks the book contains, we were hesitant
at first to reprint its other contents, the ‘old stories’ and personal
accounts by then younger authors. But it was those other parts
which in fact added much of the book’s authentic flavour and made
so many people find it beneficial and joyful to read.
Hence it appears that our hesitation over reprinting this book
was due to a concern that the snapshots of life in the monastery
offered by those individuals at that time had become dated. In fact,
though, on recently going through the various contributions again,
we found that many of those snapshots could still be written today
– there would be a new cast of players, but the atmosphere experienced
then, and communicated so vividly in the old ‘outdated’
accounts, is still very similar.
So we are happy to realize that when we take the wholehearted
present-day Dhamma approach of genuinely experiencing what is