Ajahn Chah, a direct disciple within the lineage descending from Ajahn Mun, founded Wat Pah Pong in northeastern Thailand in 1954 and went on to establish a network of affiliated forest monasteries, including, significantly, monasteries specifically for the growing number of Western students who sought him out from the 1960s and 1970s onward, drawn partly by his own approach to teaching, direct, often using simple, memorable stories and analogies, and accessible to practitioners without deep prior Buddhist textual training. His Western disciples, including the British-born monk Ajahn Sumedho, went on to found Chithurst Buddhist Monastery and later Amaravati Buddhist Monastery in England, establishing the Thai Forest Tradition as a durable and continuing presence in Western Buddhist practice rather than a tradition known in the West only through occasional visiting teachers or translated texts.
This Western branch of the tradition has since produced its own further generation of Western-born ajahns, trained within the lineage's specific monastic discipline and meditation approach but leading communities and monasteries adapted to Western institutional and legal contexts, a genuine transplantation of the tradition's core practice and teacher-student structure rather than a loosely inspired adaptation, while maintaining regular contact and a recognized lineage relationship with the tradition's original Thai monasteries.