In The Buddha in the Jungle, real-life stories about 19th and early 20th century Buddhist monks in Thailand are ingeniously intermingled with experiences recorded by their Western contemporaries. Stories tell of giant snakes, bandits, boatmen, midwives, and guardian spirits and collectively portray a Buddhist culture in all its imaginative and geographical concreteness. By juxtaposing these eyewitness accounts, Kamala Tiyavanich presents a new and vivid picture of Buddhism as it was lived and of the natural environments in which the Buddha's teachings were practiced.