A True Man of No Rank
March 24, 2021

The monk whose picture is up here by the Buddha image is a monk that Ajaan Fuang’s students would call ‘Venerable Uncle,’ Luang Lung. They called Ajaan Fuang, of course, Than Phaw, which means Venerable Father. They had a lot of respect for Luang Lung. He was not a forest monk. He was a monk in Bangkok. As a novice, he’d met Ajaan Lee and he liked the forest tradition a lot. When he had free time, especially when he was a younger monk, he would go around and visit the forest ajaans.

But he said he had a debt of gratitude to his preceptor, who was the Supreme Patriarch in Bangkok at Wat Makut. When the Supreme Patriarch died, Luang Lung decided to stay on at the monastery, to look after it, as a way of showing his gratitude to his preceptor. He was also the monk who arranged for Ajaan Fuang to come and teach there. That’s how I got to know him.

Luang Lung wasn’t your typical Bangkok monk. There’s a phrase that comes to mind whenever I think about him. It’s a Zen phrase: “a true man of no rank.” He was true in that he was very straightforward sort of person. If he’d make up his mind to do something, he would do it. And he spoke things as he saw them. He got into a lot of trouble for this. One of the reasons his ecclesiastical rank was lower than it would have been otherwise was that he would speak truth to power. And power didn’t like the truth. Yet there were a lot of people who did like it and respected him for it. But they weren’t the ones handing out ranks.

I think he picked up his habit from his parents. Being with Luang Lung was interesting because he was very up-to-date in some things and very pre-modern in others. He’d tell me about his childhood. His father had a lot of magic spells; the old spells of what they call gatha akhom. One of the principles of these gathas or spells is that you have to make a vow and you have to hold by the vow. That’s how the spell had its power. If you broke the vow, then you couldn’t use the spell anymore.

His father had a wide range. One of my favorites was one he used to entertain the kids. Say, they’d be walking from their village to another village at night. There’d be a village fair, say, in that other village, and they’d be going through the rice fields to get there. To give the kids something to do, the father would take the *phaa khamaa, *which is a sash, basically, that farmers wear. He’d take it and would tie it up in a knot, blow on it, and it’d turn into a rabbit. The kids would chase the rabbit as it hopped away, and then as soon as they caught it, it’d turn into cloth again.

After Luang Lung ordained, and his father was getting old, he began to realize that there was nobody to carry on his father’s spells. So, he went and asked his father if he could study them. The father had taught one spell to the entire family. They had a hemophiliac gene, so they needed a spell to stop blood. He had taught every member of the family that one. If you had a cut, you just put your finger on the cut, say the spell, and the blood would stop.

There was one time when Luang Lung was in Bangkok—this was much later in his life—and he was walking down the street to another temple. He happened to cross the road, and someone went through a red light, ran into him and he was sent flipping over the hood of the car to the other side. The last thing he remembered hearing before he fell unconscious was somebody saying, “That one’s not going to last very long.” He woke up in the hospital, and nurses were trying to stop the blood from the wound on his head, but they couldn’t. So, he told them, “Could you please put my finger on the wound?” So, they did. He said the spell to himself and the blood stopped.

But back when he was a young monk, he asked his father if he could learn other spells. The father said, “Okay, you have to take a vow”—the term in Thai, sacca, means truth. You have to make a true vow, a statement of truth, that you will pledge not to do something or to do something. In this case, the pledge the father asked was that Luang Lung not disrobe. Luang Lung was a young monk at the time and he didn’t feel he was up to making that vow. So, the father who had a lot of respect for his spells, said, “Well, in that case, I can’t teach them to you.”

That was a characteristic of the old generations. They really respected the knowledge passed down to them. And they had a very strong sense of truth, that that’s the power from which your power as a person came, your goodness as a person came.

So even though Luang Lung couldn’t take that vow, he was very truthful in how he saw things and how he spoke of things. And in being a person of no rank, not just that he had a lower rank than most of his friends, was he was able to deal with people of all ranks. He would tell me stories of dealing with very poor people, of speaking to the princess, of speaking to the king. He was very direct with everybody, though he knew the proper forms, especially for people in higher positions. But he was also very direct and very truthful. So even though he didn’t get far in terms of the ecclesiastical ranks, still he won the respect of a lot of people.

Toward the end of his life, he was in position to become abbot there at the monastery. And a monk from another monastery decided, no, that Luang Lung was not an appropriate candidate because he was too plain spoken. So, the other monk made himself acting abbot. When he later came to Luang Lung’s funeral, he was taken aback by how many people came. People from all walks of life, when they heard that Luang Lung had passed away, went to his cremation, and the monastery was overflowing with the crowd. So, there are people who respect truthful speakers even though they may not be in a position of power.

It’s good to think about this tradition. We may not believe in the old spells but they have their value of forcing you to be truthful, of seeing something that something should or shouldn’t be done, and making a vow that if it shouldn’t be done, you’re not going to do it. If it should be done, you will—regardless of whether it’s easy or difficult, regardless of whether you like doing it or not.

Luang Lung had a very strong sense of duty in this regard. There’s a position in some monasteries, especially the larger cremation monasteries in Bangkok, where one monk is placed in charge of determining who goes to which invitational meals, who goes to which requests to chant. He’s called the bhattudesaka. When Luang Lung was a younger monk, the monk who had that position really didn’t like Luang Lung—again, because he was too plain spoken. So, there was a period when Luang Lung got no invitations at all. He didn’t complain. This went on for a couple of months. Finally, some of his lay students noticed this and they complained to the abbot. The abbot asked the bhattudesaka for his records of who had been invited where. And he found, sure enough, that Luang Lung’s name didn’t appear in any of the invitations.

So, he did something interesting. He removed that monk from the position and gave it to Luang Lung. And Luang Lung was a very fair person in how he handed out the invitations. As he told me, he wouldn’t himself go on an invitation unless the sponsors specifically asked for him to go. As a result, he kept the position up until he died, which is rare in Bangkok. Usually, the monks who have that position tend to invite themselves to a lot of places, and then the members of the monastery decide that, “Okay, this person has amassed enough wealth from his position. Let’s give this opportunity to somebody else.” But in Luang Lung’s case, that was not the case at all, as he was very fair.

As for the monk who had abused the position, later on in life, as he was approaching death, he got very sick and no one was looking after him. Luang Lung ended up being the monk looking after him, again, out of a sense of duty. As the old monk told somebody else, “Here I am, after all these years, nobody is looking after me, except for the one monk I really hate.” He still hated Luang Lung after all those years. But Luang Lung would look after him out of a sense of duty.

That’s something that’s disappearing a lot in our society—people who act out of a sense of duty. We see so many people around us doing what they can just to further what they see as their own advantage. Those who will do something simply because it ought to be done, it really should be done, are rare. So Luang Lung was becoming a rare person in his lifetime. His type is even rarer now. But, it’s something that we can all choose to do.

In terms of the Vinaya, we have our duties. In terms of our practice, in terms of the four noble truths, we have our duties. And even the things that we do voluntarily—when you look around and see something should be done, and there’s nobody doing it, well, you go ahead and do it. That’s a good trait to have as a practitioner, because your ability to look after your duties outside tends to translate inside.

After all, craving should be abandoned, and it’s not an easy thing to abandon. Stress and suffering should be comprehended to the point of dispassion. But what is stress? It’s our clinging. The things we hold on to dearly. Not just things, but also attitudes, beliefs. We have to look at them, investigate them, to the point where we can let them go. And if you have a strong sense of duty, it’s a lot easier to do this.

So, we look at the example of the people from the past and we regret that some of their virtues are getting less and less common around us. But that should stir us to have a sense that we can keep those virtues ourselves. It’s a trait of a good person—you see somebody else has a good habit, a good capability, and you realize, “They’re human beings, they can do this; I’m a human being, why can’t I?” When you can think in that way, your memories of the past bode well for the future.