On a typical weekday morning, two saffron-robed monks walk silently into Pike Place Market, alms bowls in hand, to accept food offerings for one meal of the day. They don’t touch money. They have no idea what, if anything, they are being offered. And yet they never went hungry for a single day in five years.
They are Ajahn Kovilo and Ajahn Nisabho, the co-founders of the company Clear Mountain Monasteryis a new Theravada Buddhist forest monastery taking shape on ninety acres of wooded land in North Bend, Washington, about forty minutes from Seattle. Their path to this moment is through Thailand, India, Myanmar, the Goenka Meditation Halls, and a warm, ongoing partnership with St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Seattle.
“The first day we went downtown, seven people offered food in thirty minutes,” says Ajahn Nisabho. There were surprising moments, too: On one occasion when it appeared they were fasting that day: “A homeless guy came out of an alley 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 began going to the market daily. “He said, ‘I’m worried that Ajahn Nisabho is going for alms in Pike Place Market.’ I said: Why? There are generous people in America too. “Because they sell fish,” he said deadpan.cue rim shot).
The skepticism, as it turned out, was unfounded. Seattle is “the most secular city in the United States,” says Ajahn Nisabho, “and we didn’t know how this monastic enterprise would work there.” But far from indifference, they found a hunger — especially among young people, at odds with most converted Buddhist sanghas, which tend to be filled with baby boomers. Their Saturday gatherings, held at St. Mark’s Cathedral, now have about 120 people in person, with about 100 more joining online, in addition to two or three Zoom meditation sessions a day. “The Buddha taught in the vernacular, and the vernacular of this age is social media,” says Ajahn Nisabho. “We’ve found a way to get the teachings out there through YouTube and other things, and people are so hungry for community.”
This hunger for community is a void they are trying to fill in people’s dharma lives, what Ajahn Nisabho calls “the silenced existence that is a common problem among Buddhist converts in the United States.” Clear Mountain, they say, is not just a meditation hall; it is an attempt to construct a social architecture of practice centered on social scandals and interreligious relations. “The last five years have built an architecture of faith,” he says. “Everything is offered freely and the support has been truly inspiring.”
The two monks are not alone in this. Ajahn Kovilo mentions the constellation of newer Theravada monastic communities that have sprung up and down the West Coast in recent years—a partial list would include the Pacific Hermitage in White Salmon; Passaddhi Vihara at Olympia; Parayana in Port Townsend; Dhammadharini in Penngrove, California; and Karuna Vihara in Santa Cruz; these newer monastic communities add to the old guard, which includes Sitavana in BC, 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,” says Ajahn Nisabho. “We’ve found a way to get the teachings out there through YouTube and other things, and people are so hungry for community.”
Ajahn Kovilo notes how, during a speech at one of their gatherings, the visiting teacher Ajahn Sonathe abbot of Sitavana Monastery in British Columbia, called the entire region the “New Gandhara”—referring to the ancient cultural crossroads where Buddhism once flourished—”because of all the Theravada monasteries for bhikkhus and bhikkhunis” that have been established there today. Buddha said it was his England it was not complete unless the “quadruple” of monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen was established. By monk count, there are currently only two places in the world that are close to this kind of total convergence of Theravadin monks and nuns: Western Australia and currently the Pacific Northwest.
After three years of searching, the community found their land six months ago: ninety acres of wooded land in North Bend, within an elk migration corridor and close enough—about forty minutes—to the city to sustain the daily almsgiving that defines their way of life. “In Asia, the model depends on being close enough to the city to receive alms,” explains Ajahn Nisabho, “so it’s not new—but it’s quite new for North American forest monasteries,” most of which are two or more hours outside any city. The community raised $5 million to purchase the property. The long-term vision, he said, includes housing for up to twenty cloisters, a quarter dedicated to visiting bhikkhunis, a lay hall for daily chanting and meditation, a beautiful temple open to daily visitors, and a wooded section of land reserved for monks engaged in deeper solitary practice. “We don’t want to lose that side of things,” he adds.
Ajahn Nisabho’s journey to monasticism began close to home. He grew up in Spokane, Washington, the son of Buddhist parents who studied with the likes of Jack Kornfield. At the age of 15, he read a book by Hermann Hesse Siddhartha– “not really a terribly Buddhist book in its plot,” he says, “but it’s archetypal and subtle” – and found something in it that took root. “The vision of the Buddha shone sweetly in my heart,” he recalls. “There are some moments in life when you step into a footprint that feels like it was made for you – and this was one of them.”
She meditated continuously in college and spent time focusing on social work—including a sabbatical in Calcutta with a slum doctor—before deciding she needed the deeper container of monastic life after a visit to Abhayagiri Monastery in California. “I entered 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 was ordained there.”
Ajahn Kovilo came to Buddhism through ten-day Goenka Vipassana retreats—and the realization, as he says, “that my life needs more than a ten-day retreat twice a year.” Digging deeper, he discovered the rich world of the teachings of the Pali Canon, and in 2003 he began devouring everything he could find in Access to Insight’s early online resources, much of it the work of American-born Thai forest monk Thānissaro Bhikkhu (Ajaan Geoff). When he discovered that Ajaan Geoff was the abbot of an actual monastery in Southern California, he sold his possessions and hitchhiked north with a tent and a backpack, planning to stay for ten days. He stayed for a year and a half. (“My last driver for that hitchhiking was Jesus,” he notes, “which seemed auspicious.”
Ordained by Ajahn Pasanno and Ajahn Amaro in Abhayagiri in 2010, he then spent six years between Thailand and the United States—training at a Pa Auk monastery, learning Thai and some Pali, and four years at Dharma Realm Buddhist University studying the Mahayana tradition. Today, both monks describe themselves as part of a wider network of teachers and elders within the Ajaan Chah lineage; Ajahn Nisabho is working on a biography of Luang Por Pasanno and Ajahn Kovilo Flowing in silenceBiography of Ajaan Chah by Ajahn Jayasaro.
About six years ago, after studying with Ajahn Jayasaro and spending time between Wat Maphrao and Abhayagiri, Ajahn Nisabho felt himself withdrawing to the northwest. “Seattle seemed to have rich dharma land,” he says, “and, oddly enough, no forest monastery. That seemed to me to be the big missing piece of the puzzle in people’s dharmic lives.” He and Ajahn Kovilo landed in the city—first Nisabho, then Kovilo part-time, finally full-time—and they just believed.
None of this would have been possible without St. 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 management, “we didn’t ask for anything, we just said that we want to exist in the space of giving if we can.” The response was immediate, offering a granola bar on the spot and the simple words, “Yeah, just meet me here.” Ajahn Kovilo adds a detail he clearly finds moving: the cathedral is where Luang Por Sumedho, Ajaan Chah’s oldest living monastic disciple and an early ancestor of the Thai forest tradition in the West, once served as an altar boy at the age of 11—a small thread connecting the two traditions even before the monastery existed.
The relationship has only deepened since then. The two communities now hold an annual luncheon in January where the Clear Mountain community brings food to the cathedral staff as a thank you. And something else was born out of the ongoing conversation between the two traditions – an interfaith service named after Thich Nhat Hanh, the so-called “Living Buddha, Living Christ, Living Spirit.”
The Reverend Canon Emily Griffin, who has served as Vicar of St. Mark’s since October 2024, traces the origins of the service to a conversation around mid-2023 when Ajahn Nisabho expressed interest in deepening the relationship through joint prayer or worship. Cathedral staff and a key lay volunteer sat down with the monks to explore what that might look like – and, perhaps unsurprisingly for those familiar with the long history of contemplative exchange between the two traditions, found real common ground. “What they discovered,” says Griffin, “is that there are resonances between the perfection of character associated with enlightenment in Buddhism and the Fruits of the Spirit in the New Testament. Around the same time, the cathedral began to house Taizé services—a song-based, ecumenical worship style that originated in France—and it became a natural form of new collaboration.”
The first service was held in the summer of 2024; the third took place just last week, attracting about 150 people. “The beauty of it is that people from both traditions come away feeling richer for their own faith,” says Griffin. “Not only do you appreciate the tradition that is not your own and you appreciate the other, but you also see your own tradition more deeply, which is just a gift.”
The exchange works both ways. In addition to the Saturday gatherings, Ajahn Nisabho and members of the Clear Mountain community occasionally join the Sunday service at St. Mark’s Church, and members of the cathedral have been invited to sit with the monks in meditation. “There is a wonderful spirit of openness, curiosity and respect,” says Griffin. “Our relationship has been life-giving and enriching.”
When asked what he thought the monks brought to his own congregation, Griffin pointed not to doctrine but to the 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 bit task-oriented… The emphasis on quality time and relationship building has been a real gift for us and helped us lean into that—because it’s part of our tradition, but sometimes we lose it in the rush to get things done. Just as they embody presence in enthusiasm.”
Reflecting on my conversation with the ajahn, I was struck by the theme of skillful connection and community building, which comes up again and again. “A beautiful friendship is half the holy life,” Ananda once famously told the Buddha.
– Oh no – answered the Buddha – beautiful friendship is the whole of the holy life.
