Three Teachings by Buddhadasa

In 1965, a lecture by the Thai forest monk and scholar Buddhadasa (1906–1993) at the Buddhist Association of Thailand provoked an uproar. He had suggested that the abhidhamma—a body of canonical doctrine central to the scholastic training of the monastics in attendance—was not the Buddha’s own teaching but a later composition. The claim, for many in the room, was heretical. It was also characteristic: Throughout his life, Buddhadasa challenged institutional Buddhism in ways that made him one of the most polarizing figures in 20th-century Thailand.

Born Ngueam Phanit in 1906 in southern Thailand, Buddhadasa moved to Bangkok to join the Maha Nikaya—Thailand’s largest Theravada order—at the age of 20. However, he grew dissatisfied with the hierarchical and ritual-focused monastic culture. In 1932, he returned south to found Suan Mokkh, the Garden of Liberation, a forest monastery devoted to meditation practice. 

The following year, Buddhadasa launched Buddhism, a quarterly journal that made his reformist interpretations available to a broad readership. For example, rather than treating nibbana (Pali; Skt.: nirvana) as a distant goal reserved for advanced monastics, he argued that it was immediately available to anyone, naturally present in the cooling of reactive emotions. He questioned traditional accounts of cosmology and rebirth on similar grounds: If a teaching couldn’t address suffering here and now, its value was limited.

Across Thailand, Theravada and Mahayana were generally understood as distinct and unequal.  Buddhadasa, however, taught doctrines drawn from both traditions. His emphasis on chit wang, or “empty mind,” proved especially contentious because of its association with East Asian meditation schools. (The debate grew heated enough that one of his students eventually mapped the competing positions in a booklet titled What is Right? What is Wrong?) For Buddhadasa, such disputes missed the point: Ultimately, spiritual insight transcends all religious categories. 

Buddhadasa observed coups, economic crises, military nationalism, and the intensifying pressures of the Cold War. He engaged these conditions directly, meeting with intellectuals from across the political spectrum. Beginning in the 1960s, he promoted Dhammic Socialism—a vision of society organized around moral restraint and shared ethical principles rather than ideological competition. 

Late in life, Buddhadasa turned his attention to supporting women’s Buddhist practice. Bhikkhuni ordination has been officially forbidden in Thailand since the 1928 Sangha Act. Rather than directly challenging that law, Buddhadasa proposed Dhammamata, or Dhamma Mothers, a new form of committed religious life for women that resonated with Thai cultural reverence for motherhood. 

In 1990, on Buddhadasa’s 84th birthday, scholars and practitioners from around the world contributed to Radical Conservatism, a commemorative volume whose title captures the central paradox of his career: a highly disciplined monk who rooted his teachings in the dharma yet arrived at positions that appeared radical to the Thai Buddhist establishment.

Buddhadasa died in 1993, and his passing was mourned across Thailand. Today, his writings remain widely available, and his legacy at Suan Mokkh continues. The three teachings below (translated from Thai)—on nibbana, the freed mind, and birth—illustrate the interpretations that defined his career and unsettled many of his contemporaries.  

Teaching 1: Nibbana 

In Thailand, nibbana had come to mean the liberation experienced at death, remote from everyday life. In the pamphlet Nibbana for Everyone, Buddhadasa teaches that nibbana is better understood as coolness: the natural, temporary subsiding of reactive emotions available to anyone, in any moment.

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“Nibbana has nothing in the least to do with death. ‘Nibbana’ means coolness. It meant coolness back when it was just an ordinary word that people used in their homes, and when used as dhamma language, in a religious context, it still means coolness. In dhamma language, it refers to the cooling or going out of the fires of defilement (‘kilesas,’ reactive emotions), while in ordinary people’s usage, it means the cooling of physical fires.

Any reactive emotion that arises, ceases when its causes and conditions are finished. Although it may be a temporary quenching, merely a temporary coolness, it is still nibbana, even if only momentarily. Thus, there’s a temporary nibbana for those who can’t yet avoid some defilements. It is this temporary nibbana that sustains the lives of beings who continue hanging on to defilement. Anyone can see that if the egoistic emotions existed night and day without any pause or rest, no life could endure it. If such life didn’t die, it would go crazy and then die in the end. You ought to consider carefully the fact that life can survive only because there are periods when the defilements don’t roast it. These periods outnumber the times when the defilements blaze.

These periodic ‘nibbānas’ sustain life for all of us, without excepting even animals, which have their levels of nibbana too. We are able to survive because this kind of nibbana nurtures us, until it becomes the most ordinary habit of life and of mind. Whenever there is freedom from defilement, then there is the value and meaning of nibbana. This must occur fairly often for living things to survive. That we have some time to relax both bodily and mentally provides us with the freshness and vitality needed to live.”

Teaching 2: Freed Mind  

In the passage below, Buddhadasa addresses a common misreading of chit wang—the assumption that a void or empty mind is one emptied of all thought and feeling, like a stone. The luminous mind, he argues, is not blank; it thinks and feels but without conceptions of “me” and “mine.”

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“We need to understand that the ‘normal’ mind—the mind when there’s nothing interfering with it, when it’s without the nivaranas (the hindrances), without the kilesas (the defilements)—is ‘luminous.’ At such times, it could be called the ‘original mind,’ as it was in the womb.

The luminous, original mind still thinks and feels, too, but without the defilements. It’s naturally clean and unblemished and can think and feel in the way that is natural to it.

So the free or void mind can arise in different ways: void because of samadhi, void through vipassana, or void because it’s returned to its original state quite naturally. However, it needs to be said that the samadhi mind—the void mind fixed on an object of samadhi—still feels, so it’s not that there isn’t any thinking. At that time, there will still be feeling, so there will be some form of thinking too. The mind that is void through the power of vipassana considers, investigates, penetrates, and intuits into the reality of things, so it isn’t ‘void’ in the way that a stone, for instance, would be. The luminous, original mind still thinks and feels, too, but without the defilements. It’s naturally clean and unblemished and can think and feel in the way that is natural to it. The Pali word for ‘mind’ means ‘think,’ so if the mind can’t think, then it isn’t really a mind at all. Thus, ‘void’ here doesn’t mean that there’s no thought or feeling. It means void, or free of the sort of feeling and thinking that causes trouble, that brings upset. After all, who likes trouble and strife? The troubled mind can be compared to a fire, in that it’s hot in the way of being tense and unbalanced. Now, who likes that? Who likes stress and tension, trouble and strife, unhappiness, and depression? Nobody at all! That stress, trouble, and depression is a ‘me’ and ‘mine’ affair, and when ‘me’ and ‘mine’ are gone, then there is the ‘normal’ mind,  mind without stress, without depression. This mind we call ‘void,’ but it’s not void in the same way that a stone would be. The normal mind is contented, cool, a useful mind, and, better still, it’s able to understand everything deeply.”   

Teaching 3: Birth 

The Pali scriptures describe four types of birth, the last of which—opapatika, spontaneous birth without conception or gestation—is typically understood as the arising of gods, hungry ghosts, and hell-beings between lives. Buddhadasa sets the cosmological meaning aside. For him, opapatika describes something occurring here and now: The mind is reborn in every moment, taking on new identities that reflect its way of perceiving the world. 

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“A fourth kind of birth is called ‘opapatika,’ which is a kind of ‘hidden birth,’ one that doesn’t need the help of a father or mother, and refers to one arisen in an already full-grown, mature condition without having had to grow up from childhood. This is known as opapatika (spontaneously arisen). There are two explanations for this word. Most commonly it’s taken to mean the birth of a supernatural being, like an angel, a god, or a peta (hungry ghost), a hell-being, or whatever. Leaving this world, one goes to be born as a god, or whatever, without having to dwell in the mother’s womb beforehand, without having to be born and go through the maturing process.

However, here we don’t explain it like that. We take it to mean birth in the mental sense, that is, there is thinking, concocting whatever way which gives rise to a ‘mental birth.’

In this understanding there’s no need for death to intervene, no need for anyone to die and then be born. Further, if the thinking is base, low thinking, for instance one is thinking like a bandit, then one is mentally ‘born’ as a bandit right there and then, while still in the same human body. So think like a robber and be born as one; think like a god and be born as a god yet while still in a human body. To achieve birth as a Brahma god, develop the mind of a Brahma, that is, concentrate it in samadhi and be immediately born as a Brahma god, and all without having had to bother with death. If mind is samadhi, then one has already been born as a Brahma.

Which of these understandings would be useful? Think about it: that in which one needs to die first and then get born as a god, a hell-being, a Brahma, or something or other in another very distant world, or the instant, mental kind of birth, where one thinks in a certain manner and however one thinks, one is born accordingly, right there and then.

The second option is frightening because it happens easily and often, yet it’s the better choice in that it’s controllable. We can restrain mind, that is, not let it think in such a way that it takes a low birth as a bad person, a robber, or anything like that. Rather, have it think in an elevated manner and be born as a good person, a wise person, or a noble one. This kind of birth is important.”