Acariya Mun’s UFO Experience

Acariya Mun (1870 – 1949) is a famous Theravadan monk who lived in Thailand and is credited with reviving the Forest Monk or dhutanga tradition. He is widely held to have had considerable what we would call psychic powers; specifically, the ability to know exactly what was going through anyone’s head and the ability to converse with nagas, devas and others.

The Forest Monk or dhutanga tradition is a rigorous, ascetic and only loosely institutionalized form of Buddhist practice that focuses on training one’s awareness. This is a form of Buddhism perhaps most closely mirroring Buddhist practice as it was during the Buddha’s lifetime and shortly thereafter.

It just so happens that there’s a very readable biography of Acariya Mun available for free in English. The book is fascinating from perspectives anthropological, mystical, historical, Buddhist, and so on. The author, Acariya Nanasampanno (‘Acariya’ is an honorific), one of Acariya Mun’s disciples, has a very natural, direct, engaging way of telling a moving and incredible story. I especially appreciate that he always mentions where he got his information – if it was from Acariya Mun himself, another disciple, local villagers, or what.

In the first chapter of the book, Acariya Mun is still a young man experimenting with and striving to perfect his technique of meditative practice. This is when he had what a Westerner might interpret as a UFO experience.

“Acariya Mun’s citta [roughly, attention] converged into a state of calm and a vision arose spontaneously. The mental image was of a dead body laid out before him, bloated, oozing pus, and seeping with bodily fluids. Vultures and dogs were fighting over the corpse, tearing into the rotting flash and flinging it around, until what remained was all scattered about. The whole scene was unimaginably disgusting, and he was appalled. 

From then on, Acariya Mun constantly used this image as a mental object to contemplate at all times … he continued in this manner until, one day, the image of the corpse changed into a translucent disk that appeared suspended before him. The more he focused intensely on the disk, the more it changed its appearance without pause. The more he tried to follow, the more it altered its form so that he found it impossible to tell where the series of images would end. The more he investigated the visions, the more they continued to change in character – ad infinitum. 

For example, the disk became a tall mountain range where Acariya Mun found himself walking, brandishing a sharp sword and wearing shoes. Then, a massive wall with a gate appeared. He opened the gate to look inside and saw a monastery where several monks were sitting in meditation. Near the wall he saw a steep cliff with a cave where a hermit was living. He noticed a conveyance, shaped like a cradle and hanging down the face of the cliff by a rope. Climbing into the cradle-like conveyance, he was drawn up to the mountain peak. At the summit, he found a large Chinese junk with a square table inside, and a hanging lantern that cast a luminescent glow upon the whole mountain terrain. He found himself eating a meal on the mountain peak and … and so on, and so forth, until it was impossible to see an end to it all. Acariya Mun said that all the images he experienced in this manner were far too numerous to recall. 

For a full three months, Acariya Mun continued to meditate in this way. Each time when he dropped into samadhi [meditative absorption] he withdrew from it to continue his investigation of the translucent disk which just kept giving him a seemingly endless series of images. However, he did not receive enough beneficial results from this to be convinced that this was the correct method. For after practicing in this manner, he was over-sensitive to the common sights and sounds around him. Pleased by this and disappointed by that, he liked some things and hated others. It seemed he could never find a stable sense of balance. 

Because of this sensitivity, he came to believe that the samadhi which he practiced was definitely the wrong path to follow. If it were really correct, why did he fail to experience peace and calm consistently in his practice? On the contrary, his mind felt distracted and unsettled, influenced by many sense objects that it encountered – much like a person who had never undergone any meditation training at all.”

Acariya Nansampanno (2003), Biography of Acariya Mun, pp. 8-9

Acariya Mun concluded that directing his attention to external phenomena like the translucent disk is a flawed method and from then on centered his investigations on his own body.

I’ve read fairly widely in English translations of various Eastern mythological and esoteric traditions and this is one of the more stand-out accounts of something that might count as a Western UFO. Translucent, hovering disk that shape shifts (or reality warps) and can float you off in a basket? Check, check, and check. Acariya Mun doesn’t exactly call the phenomenon self-negating, but it is described as an endless series of images which even as you chase after them keep changing. Maybe I’m projecting, but by the end of the story it sounds to me as if he decided the whole hovering translucent disk thing is just a waste of time.

Anyway, if you are up for a taste of something new, check out Acariya Mun’s biography. Bhikkhu Dick Silaratano’s English translation is very accessible to non-Buddhists and there’s some good stories in there (like The Hypercritical Naga).

One of many ways to read the book