Profile: Birken Forest Monastery

By David Kirk

Thirty-five years ago, when Canada’s bounteous natural resources still seemed inexhaustible and the environment barely rated among leading popular concerns, Tom West was already raising alarms about “the bad times ahead.” In a prescient article for his high school newspaper, the conscientious teen examined the delicate coastal ecosystem in his home province of British Columbia, speculating on the devastation that would result if one of the giant oil tankers frequenting the waterways south from Alaska should ever spring a leak. That was nearly two decades before Exxon Valdez disgorged eleven million gallons of crude off the coast of Alaska.

Tom West is now Bhikkhu Sona, the abbot of Canada’s first Buddhist monastery in the Thai Forest tradition, Birken Forest Monastery, located in British Columbia. And though he’s dedicated himself to a monastic life, he has not lost any of his ecological zeal, which is clearly evident in the monastery’s sound ecological design.

Bhikkhu Sona began work on Birken in 1994, at the age of 40, after returning from Thailand, where he spent three years training in monasteries, including Ajahn Chah’s Wat Pah Nanachat. In the early days, Birken was just a two-room shack located in the mountains near Pemberton, British Columbia, that Bhikkhu Sona shared with fellow monk Bhikkhu Piyadhammo. Despite the remote location, the scavenging bears, and the absence of plumbing, electricity, a phone, and even a sign to point the way, “a certain magic prevailed, and people showed up.” In less than a decade, in fact, their supporters ballooned from a handful to hundreds, then thousands.

The shack of Birken I gradually transformed into Birken II, featuring running water, power, a furnace, refrigerator, sink, “and even carpeting.” And finally, the existing monastery, Birken III, was built, nestled on eighty acres of forest and pristine marshland, 4,000 feet up, eight miles from the nearest neighbor, with room for twenty-five residents and guests—all sustained by “good-hearted, unsolicited donations.”

“You can talk till you’re blue in the face, but when a person lives a certain way, it’s very effective,” says Bhikkhu Sona. “That’s what inspires people, if you actually do it.”

Excerpted from the Spring 2008 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly, available on newsstands now.

DAVID KIRK is a former television producer living in Kelowna, British Columbia.