Ep 75: My Mother and I Both Ordained: She as a Nun, I as a Monk. Here’s Why ft Phra Anand

Published on Oct 16, 2026

https://youtu.be/J0KpHDNEgIw

Summary

What do you owe someone whose choices you’ve spent years resenting — and what do you learn the moment you’re the one making the failing choice?

In this segment, the guest reflects on being raised by a mother who parented “while fighting” — a relentless, sometimes frightening force who pushed, yelled, and battled schools and relatives on her children’s behalf, all while never seeming to rest or be happy. He traces how that same mother, after nearly giving up on a string of meditation teachers, was steered by his father toward a teacher who taught wisdom before technique — and how her slow transformation over years is what first made him take Buddhist practice seriously himself.

The turning point arrives in an unrelated, almost embarrassing moment: asked to write a donor’s name on a temple board, he realizes he never learned to write Thai, despite speaking it fluently. Facing that exposure, he suddenly understands his long-held resentment toward his father — who “refused” to learn English — from the inside: both of them simply made choices and lived with the consequences, and neither owed the other a different outcome.

He doesn’t arrive at a tidy resolution — he’s still working out how to hold unresolved family trauma — but he lands on something durable: the recognition that judging someone else’s choices assumes a right to choose for them that he’d never grant in reverse.

About the Speaker

🧘 Phra Anandapanyo (Anandapanyo Bhikkhu)

Anandapanyo Bhikkhu was born and raised in San Francisco to a Thai immigrant family, fluent in both Thai and English from childhood. Before ordaining, he earned a degree in Electrical Engineering from UC Santa Barbara and later pursued a Master’s degree at San Francisco State University while helping run the family business.

For ten years as a layperson, starting in 1999, he trained directly under Ācariya Thoon Khippapañño and one of Thoon’s most devoted students — Mae Chee Yo, who is also his own mother. He ordained on May 20, 2009 at Wat San Fran Dhammaram, becoming the temple’s first monk fluent enough in English to teach comfortably in both languages.

He’s since become known for delivering sermons and teachings that move fluidly between English and Thai, and — alongside his sister, Neecha Thian-Ngern — was personally entrusted by Ācariya Thoon to translate and spread his teachings to a wider audience. He is the author of Right Start, Right Finish.
https://watsanfran.org

Key Takeaways

🌊 She was pulling her children with her while she was trying not to drown.

His mother’s fierce, exhausting parenting wasn’t cruelty for its own sake — it was survival, and he only understood the difference decades later.

🪨 Refuse means they can do it, but they choose not to.

The word he used to condemn his father’s choices became the same word that indicted his own, the instant he stood in his father’s position.

🧭 There’s no such thing as a finish line — except in the Dhamma.tually just a habit — and a habit that can be stopped.

Every worldly goal (money, status, success) resets the moment you reach it; he found the only place that actually resolves is inner work on yourself.

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