Phra Peter Pannapadipo - Little Angels: The Real Life Stories of Thai Novice Monks

Peter Robinson became a Buddhist monk at the age of forty-five. As Phra Peter Pannapadipo, he founded the Students Education Trust a charity to help impoverished students and novice monks continue their higher education. Monks cannot earn money or directly fundraise, so after ten years Phra Peter temporarily disrobed from the monkhood to establish SET as a Foundation in Thailand.

The real-life stories of the novice monks in Little Angels reflect the lives of many youths in rural Thailand who are trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty, broken homes, illiteracy and drug abuse. When all else fails, Buddhism becomes their last resort: providing them with physical shelter and spiritual refuge. It heals their childhood traumas and gives them a moral framework for living and a better outlook on life. Each individual story, heartrending as it may be, subtly shows what Phra Peter sees and hopes to show to others: the human face of Thai Buddhism.

Phra Farang

IN 1994, PHRA Peter Pannapadipo and his friends established a small fund to help one impoverished Thai student study at university. More than enough was collected so the balance became the foundation of a non-profit-making charity dedicated to helping other students with similar difficulties. The charity the Students Education Trust has since grown and now receives support from concerned people all around the world.

SET has a very specific aim: to make a difference. That difference is between a disadvantaged student being able to study at university or vocational college, or instead being forced to labour in the rice paddies, on a Bangkok building site, or in some other mundane, dead-end job.

More than 1,000 students have already benefited from SETs Scholarship Programme. Thats 1,000 university degrees or vocational diplomas for students who, without help, might never have been able to study at all. Hundreds more have benefited from SETs Student Welfare Programme, receiving grants to pay for their uniform and shoes, books and tools, bus fares or for school lunch. Through its Educational Projects Programme, SET sponsors English Language Camps, Narcotic Drugs Awareness Camps and other projects with both short and long term benefits. The SET for Society Programme encourages scholarship students to voluntarily work with orphans, handicapped children, AIDS patients and old people. Students also give thousands of hours of voluntary labour each year to renovate rural primary schools. Every year since 1994, SET has improved and expanded its programmes to reach increasing numbers of students. We do it voluntarily, cost-effectively and with great enthusiasm.

It costs very little to make a difference but there are thousands of students in Thailand who are prevented from achieving anything worthwhile simply because of their impoverished backgrounds. By supporting SET, you can make a positive difference to the lives of some of these deserving young men and women.

To find out more about SET and how you can help, please contact:

Peter S. Robinson, Director, The Students Education Trust, Academic Resource Centre, Rajabhat University, Sawanwithi Road, Amphur Muang, Nakhon Sawan 60000, Thailand.

Email: SET_THAI@hotmail.com

Website: www.thaistudentcharity.org.

I HAVE LIVED as a Buddhist monk in Thailand for nearly ten years. Ive lived in a monastery in Bangkok, one in a forest and one in a rural city. Ive stayed briefly in many more during my travels around the country. Theyve all been very different monastic environments, but always the community has included at least a few novice monks, and sometimes dozens. The majority of novices are in their early to late teens but they can range in age from as young as seven, to as old as twenty. After twenty, a novice is usually expected to either ordain as a full monk or disrobe entirely. There are some exceptions. In a few monasteries, particularly in the international forest communities in the northeast of Thailand, novices may sometimes be much older than twenty. Within those communities, ordaining as a novice for a time may be seen as a way of testing a mans spiritual commitment to the monastic life, before he is allowed to become a monk.

Over the years I have observed, but generally ignored, hundreds of Thai novices. Those I have observed, even casually, have often been very different in background, intelligence, outlook, character and behaviour, as well as in age. Despite their obvious differences, like most of my Thai monk colleagues I always tended to lump them all together as simply novices; naughty little orange-robed figures useful for running errands or doing odd jobs, but not much else, and of a different caste to the monks. Its not usually necessary for a monk even to know a novices first name. The Thai word for novice, nehn, acts as a prefix to the boys name and is normally sufficient in itself for addressing him.

Because I live within a country and culture that I do not entirely understand, and probably never will, I try not to be too judgemental about the people I come into contact with. I prefer to observe in a more neutral way if I can. But I do understand the Buddhist novice precepts and training rules. In recent years, I have had the experience, responsibility and pleasure of training many novices of my own. My novices have usually been young Westerners, but I also occasionally train Thai boys. Western or Thai, I know how novices are supposed to behave and the standards and ideals to which they, theoretically, should aspire. Based on that understanding and judged only within the framework of the precepts and training rules, I can safely say that a few of the novices I have observed have been excellent little angels indeed. The majority of them have been good, or at least reasonably well behaved, and some have been mediocre. A minority has definitely fallen into the little devils category.

Before I ordained in Thailand, I think I must have been very nave about the order of Buddhist monks. For nearly five years, as a layman, I had studied under and been trained by some excellent and very senior monks at Wat Buddhapadipa, the Thai monastery in London. I was forty when I started studying and some of my teachers had ordained as monks before I was even born. One, coincidentally, had become a monk on the very day I was born. There were no junior or new monks living in the monastery, and no novices.

In all my years of studying at the London monastery, and later when I lived there full-time in preparation for my own ordination, I never once saw even the slightest deliberate infringement of the monks precepts by my teachers. By agreement amongst all the resident monks, some training rules had to be laid aside, or slightly bent, but that was a sensible and necessary compromise to time and place. The English weather isnt the same as that in India, where the precepts and rules were laid down, and it can be bitterly cold in winter. Some of the monks in London were quite old, which meant they sometimes needed to wrap up warmly in more than just the thin robes allowed by the rules. Thick socks, shoes, long johns, vests and assorted woolly undergarments (provided they couldnt be seen under the robes) were necessary and healthy precautions during the winter months. One lovely old monk used to venture out in winter wearing a woollen hat and scarf, an overcoat reaching down to his ankles and fur-lined snow boots. Besides sometimes compromising about clothes, the monks couldnt rely on getting food by walking on daily alms round, since they would have starved to death, so breakfast food was bought weekly at a supermarket. Common sense dictated that a few other rules had to be adapted too, though even that shocked some of the Thai lay-people who visited the monastery.