A Monastery Grows in North Bend

On a typical weekday morning, two saffron-robed monks walk silently into Pike Place Market, alms bowls in hand to accept gifts of food for their one meal of the day. They touch no money. They have no idea what, if anything, they’ll be offered. And yet in five years of doing this they have not gone hungry a single day.

This is Ajahn Kovilo and Ajahn Nisabho, cofounders of Clear Mountain Monastery, a new Theravada Buddhist forest monastery taking shape on ninety acres of forested land in North Bend, Washington, about forty minutes outside Seattle. Their path to this moment runs through Thailand, India, Myanmar, Goenka meditation halls, and a warm, ongoing partnership with Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Seattle. 

“The first day we went downtown, seven people offered food in thirty minutes,” Ajahn Nisabho says. There have been surprising moments too: On one occasion, just when it looked as if they would be fasting for the day: “A homeless guy came out of an alleyway with a box of protein bars and just said, ‘Here.’ ” 

Ajahn Kovilo recalls a Thai monk friend, Ajahn Gai, gently teasing him when Ajahn Nisabho started going daily to the Market. “He said, ‘I am worried about Ajahn Nisabho going for alms at Pike Place Market.’ I said, ‘Why? There are generous people in America too.’ ‘Because they sell fish,’ ” he deadpanned (cue rim shot).

The skepticism, it turned out, was unfounded. Seattle “is the most secular city in the US,” Ajahn Nisabho says, “and we didn’t know how this monastic venture would play out there.” But far from finding indifference, they found hunger—among the young in particular, which runs against the usual pattern found in most convert Buddhist sanghas, which tend to be filled with baby boomers. Their Saturday gatherings, held at Saint Mark’s Cathedral, now draw around 120 people in person, with roughly 100 more joining online, alongside two or three daily Zoom meditation sittings. “The Buddha taught in the vernacular, and the vernacular of this age is social media,” Ajahn Nisabho says. “We’ve found a way of rippling the teachings out through YouTube and other things, and people are so hungry for community.”

That hunger for community is a gap they’re trying to fill in people’s dharma lives, what Ajahn Nisabho calls “the siloed existence that is the endemic problem of convert Buddhism in the US.” Clear Mountain, in their telling, isn’t only a meditation hall; it’s an attempt to build the social architecture of practice, central to which is social potlucks and interfaith connections. “These last five years have been building up that architecture of faith,” he says. “Everything’s offered freely, and support has really come from inspiration.”

The two monks aren’t alone in this. Ajahn Kovilo mentions a constellation of newer Theravada monastic communities that have sprung up and down the West Coast in recent years—a partial list would include Pacific Hermitage in White Salmon; Passaddhi Vihara in Olympia; Parayana in Port Townsend; Dhammadharini in Penngrove, California; and Karuna Vihara in Santa Cruz; these newer monastic communities adding to the old guard, which includes Sitavana in B.C., Abhayagiri in Ukiah, and Metta Forest Monastery near San Diego. 

“The Buddha taught in the vernacular, and the vernacular of this age is social media,” Ajahn Nisabho says. “We’ve found a way of rippling the teachings out through YouTube and other things, and people are so hungry for community.”

Ajahn Kovilo notes how, during a talk at one of their gatherings, the visiting teacher Ajahn Sona, the abbot of Sitavana Monastery in British Columbia, dubbed the whole region “the New Gandhara”—a nod to the ancient cultural crossroads where Buddhism once flourished—”given all the different Theravada monasteries for bhikkhus and bhikkhunis” now established there. The Buddha said that his sasana was not complete unless the “fourfold assembly” of monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen was established. By the monks’ count, only two places in the world currently host this kind of full convergence of Theravadin monks and nuns in close proximity: Western Australia, and now, the Pacific Northwest.

After three years of searching, the community found its land six months ago: ninety forested acres in North Bend, within an elk migration corridor and close enough proximity to the city—about forty minutes—to sustain the daily alms practice that defines their way of life. “In Asia, the model depends on being close enough to the city for alms round,” Ajahn Nisabho explains, “so it’s not novel—but it is quite novel for forest monasteries in North America,” most of which sit two or more hours outside any city. The community raised $5 million to purchase the property. The long-term vision, he says, includes housing for up to twenty monastics, a dedicated quarter for visiting bhikkhunis, a lay sala for daily chanting and meditation, a beautiful temple open to day visitors, and a forested portion of the land set aside for monks pursuing deeper solitary practice. “We don’t want to lose that side of things,” he adds.

Ajahn Nisabho’s path to monasticism began close to home. He grew up in Spokane, Washington, the son of Buddhist parents who had studied with the likes of Jack Kornfield. At 15, he read Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha—”not actually a terribly Buddhist book in its plot arc,” he says, “but it’s archetypal and delicious”—and found something in it that took root. “The vision of the Buddha just shone gold in my heart,” he recalls. “There are a few moments in your life where you step into a footprint that feels like it was made for you—and that was one of them.”

He kept meditating through college and spent time oriented toward social work—including a gap year in Calcutta alongside a doctor working in the slums—before deciding the deeper container of monastic life was what he needed after a visit to Abhayagiri Monastery in California. “I stepped into the silence,” he says, “and realized I really needed that container to face my suffering.” He went on to Thailand, found a teacher in Ajahn Anan at Wat Maphrao, and ordained there.

Ajahn Kovilo came to Buddhism through ten-day Goenka Vipassana retreats—and the realization, as he puts it, “that my life needed more than just a ten-day retreat twice a year.” Digging deeper, he discovered the rich world of teachings in the Pali canon, and, in 2003, began devouring everything he could find on the early online source Access to Insight, much of it the work of the American-born Thai forest monk Thānissaro Bhikkhu (Ajaan Geoff). When he realized Ajaan Geoff was the abbot of an actual monastery in southern California, he gave away his possessions and hitchhiked north with a tent and a rucksack, planning to stay ten days. He stayed a year and a half. (“My last driver for that hitchhike was named Jesus,” he notes, “which seemed auspicious.”)

He was ordained at Abhayagiri in 2010 by Ajahn Pasanno and Ajahn Amaro, then spent six years moving between Thailand and the US—training at a Pa Auk monastery, learning Thai and some Pali, and later spending four years at the Dharma Realm Buddhist University studying Mahayana traditions. Today, both monks describe themselves as part of a wider network of teachers and elders in the Ajaan Chah lineage; Ajahn Nisabho is at work on a biography of Luang Por Pasanno, and Ajahn Kovilo edited Stillness Flowing, the biography of Ajaan Chah by Ajahn Jayasaro.

Around six years ago, after studying with Ajahn Jayasaro and time spent between Wat Maphrao and Abhayagiri, Ajahn Nisabho felt pulled back to the Northwest. “Seattle seemed like it had rich dharma ground,” he says, “and—strangely—no forest monastery. That struck me as the great missing puzzle piece in people’s dharmic lives.” He and Ajahn Kovilo landed in the city—Nisabho first, then Kovilo part-time and eventually full-time—”and just went on faith.”

None of this would have been possible without Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, which has hosted Clear Mountain’s community gatherings for five years. When Ajahn Kovilo and Ajahn Nisabho first approached the cathedral’s leadership, “we laid out our situation without asking for anything, just saying we wanted to exist in a space of giving if we could.” The response was immediate: A granola bar was offered on the spot, and the simple words, “Yeah, just meet here.” Ajahn Kovilo adds a detail he clearly finds moving: The cathedral is the very place where Luang Por Sumedho, the elder living monastic disciple of Ajaan Chah and early progenitor of the Thai forest tradition in the West, had once served there as an altar boy at age 11—a small thread tying the two traditions together even before the monastery existed.

The relationship has only deepened since. The two communities now hold an annual January lunch, in which Clear Mountain’s community brings a meal to the cathedral staff as a thank-you. And out of ongoing conversation between the two traditions came something more—an interfaith worship service whose name takes inspiration from Thich Nhat Hanh, called “Living Buddha, Living Christ, Living Spirit.”

The Reverend Canon Emily Griffin, who has served as canon vicar of Saint Mark’s since October 2024, traces the service’s origin to a conversation around mid-2023, when Ajahn Nisabho expressed interest in deepening the relationship through shared prayer or worship. A cathedral staff member and a key lay volunteer sat down with the monks to explore what that might look like—and found, perhaps unsurprisingly to anyone familiar with the long history of contemplative exchange between the two traditions, real common ground. “What they discovered,” Griffin says, “was that there were resonances between the perfections of character related to enlightenment in Buddhism and what are called the Fruits of the Spirit in the New Testament.” Around the same time, the cathedral had begun hosting Taizé services—a chant-based, ecumenical style of worship that originated in France—and it became the natural form for the new collaboration to take.

The first service was held in the summer of 2024; the third took place just last week, drawing about 150 people. “What’s beautiful about it is that folks from both traditions walk away feeling their own faith enriched,” Griffin says. “Not only are you appreciating a tradition that’s not your own and valuing the other but you’re seeing your own tradition in greater depth, which is just a gift.”

The exchange runs in both directions. Beyond the Saturday gatherings, Ajahn Nisabho and members of the Clear Mountain community occasionally join Sunday worship at Saint Mark’s, and cathedral members have, in turn, been invited to sit with the monks during meditation. “There’s a wonderful spirit of openness, curiosity, and respect,” Griffin says. “Our relationship has been life-giving and enriching.”

Asked what she felt the monks had brought to her own congregation, Griffin pointed not to doctrine but to a quality of attention. “I think one of the real gifts they bring is the reminder that being fully present is a gift,” she says. “As Episcopalians, we can be a little task-oriented. . . . The emphasis on quality of time and relationship-building has been a real gift to us, and has helped us lean into that—because it’s part of our tradition, too, but in the rush to get things done, we sometimes lose it. The way they embody presence inspires us to do the same.”

Reflecting on my conversation with the ajahns, I was struck by the theme of skillful relationship and community-building that surfaced again and again. “Beautiful friendship is half of the holy life,” Ananda once famously remarked to the Buddha.

“Oh no,” the Buddha replied, “beautiful friendship is the whole of the holy life.”