Boonthumme School (Ajahn Pichest Boonthumme)

About the school

This school has permanently closed. See the schools that are still open →

For three decades Ajahn Pichest Boonthumme was widely regarded as the most influential living teacher of Thai massage, and studying with him at his home in Hang Dong was a rite of passage for serious Western practitioners. He learned from his father, a Thai traditional medicine doctor, worked for years at the Old Medicine Hospital alongside Thai doctors and herbalists, and was among the first northern Thai teachers to take foreign students - his first was Asokananda, whose Sunshine Network lineage descends from him. He taught no fixed sequence at all. Classes were mixed-level and therapeutic, oriented around feeling and intuition rather than routine, organised around Buddhist dharma talks as much as technique, and delivered with a directness that many students found confrontational. His refrain to Western students - that they thought too much - captured the pedagogy. He died at his home in Hang Dong in 2023. No successor teaching operation at his premises could be verified, and prospective students should not plan travel around studying with him.