Buddho — By Wouter Doorn, with a foreword by Ajahn Sumedho

By Wouter Doorn, with a foreword by Ajahn Sumedho

All income from the book goes to the Buddho Foundation.

About the Book

Nowadays, people want everything fast, fast, fast. Even wisdom.

We try to run along the Buddhist path instead of taking it one step at a time. Ahba makes it clear again and again that this is not how it works. Our desire for results is itself one of the greatest obstacles on the path.

Ahba came walking out of the forests in Myanmar as a monk sometime in the 1950s. He became abbot of a monastery in Yangon and taught samatha meditation. One night in 1981, he suddenly disappeared. The next morning, the junta’s jeeps drove onto the monastery grounds to arrest him – a day too late.

Two years later, Herman Schreuder found him in the mountains of northern Thailand. Ahba said afterwards that he had called him: it was time to teach again. That is how his method reached the West, and how Wouter Doorn came upon it in 2005.

What Ahba teaches is very simple: “Repeat buddho out loud and just listen to the sound. Have no other intentions. Try this slowly, slowly, again and again, and you get a clean and clear mind, you get concentration. Concentration is the foundation, and only when it is deep and solid is there room for wisdom to arise.”

Buddho is the account of twenty years with that method – retreat after retreat with Ahba, including four periods ordained as a monk – and of what happens then. Slowly. So slowly that you barely see it yourself. But it happens.

About the Author

Wouter Doorn (1983) is a father, husband, and physician. He wrote this book to preserve the teachings he was given, and to pass them on to anyone wishing to learn.

Want to begin yourself? Our free meditation course takes you through samatha meditation on buddho step by step.