WHEN I FIRST MET my teacher, Ajaan Fuang, I had never heard of the Thai Forest Tradition, even though I had been living and working in Thailand for almost two years. This was in the early ‘70s, before knowledge of the tradition had penetrated the consciousness of the university circles in which I worked.
As a result, I had no idea what to expect. As the days passed during that first three-week period, I realized that I was in an entirely new reality. On the one hand, I was drawn to Ajaan Fuang’s extraordinary wisdom and kindness, and especially his clear-sighted perspective on Thai society. It was as if I were meeting him on a direct human level, outside of the usual expectations of my encounters with Thai people, which were filtered through the gap between Thai and Western values. I came to trust him more and more, until I was convinced that he was the teacher I had long been looking for.
On the other hand, I came to sense that he and some of his students, lay and ordained, had psychic powers. For one, he could obviously read my mind and anticipate future events, and although he never talked about his powers, his students would—and it seemed that some of them, at least, had powers of their own.
This was not a little disorienting. I had read the standard list of psychic powers in the Pali canon,
