"My aim was to ordain for life," Phra Nicholas says. "But for that you have to be fairly sure in your mind what you are doing."
Phra Nicholas was born Nicholas Woods and raised in Manchester, England, where he attended church schools as a boy. He read the Bible "cover to cover," yet it failed to make an impression.
"The whole subject of religion turned me off, even as I had a whole lot of questions about spiritual issues," he says. "I had a fairly negative view of organized religion."
As a university student he began exploring religious and psychological issues more deeply, and he was routinely drawn to an overlapping element of both: meditation. Woods studied and practiced meditation at a Buddhist society in Manchester in the 1980s, learning of Sri Lankan, Japanese, Vietnamese and Myanmar strains of Buddhism.
The Theravada school most common in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka originated with the monastic community that first followed the Buddha. It tends towards conservative and cautious interpretation of its canon of scripture, which is considered Bhuddism's oldest surviving texts.
Phra Nicholas says: "What I liked about the Thai approach was that the teachings were very much based in daily life -- they were speaking in practice and not just in theory," he explains. But many of his instructors were Westerners. He was seeking the source itself.
"I needed to get the feel of something completely different from my own culture."
Eventually Woods made his way to Thailand in 1988 to learn more. He taught English at a local school, but after visiting Wat Dhammakaya with some friends he experienced an ephiphany. What he discovered at Wat Dhammakaya was a very active spiritual community that wasn't afraid to press its founder's guiding philosophy on outsiders, including foreigners.
Over the space of nine years he prepared for the monkhood by learning Thai and studying the precepts. He changed his last name when he became a monk eight years ago, and has worn the robes ever since.
Today Phra Nicholas splits his time between Bangkok and Manchester, where he has set up educational courses and teaches meditation. He also arranged to teach a meditation class to Thais and foreigners at a fitness center in downtown Bangkok.
Hope Weiner, a 37-year-old American who works in Bangkok for the Red Cross, emerges from the class elated.
"It reminded me of Russian dolls, with all these little yous inside!" she tells the monk. "Damn, they need this in New York."
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