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His words, however, were not meant as an insult to the meditation ability of his disciples. He didn’t mean to accuse them of failure. He simply wanted to make sure they knew that the work was not finished so that no one should rest on their laurels until victory was achieved. Before the Great Abbot died, he made prophecies about the temple. He said that Wat Paknam would become very popular and there would be many new students coming to join the congregation. He ordered the nuns not to cremate his body but rather to embalm it. His entombed corpse would continue to ensure the prosperity of the temple — ‘nurtur-ing’ those who lived on by attracting pilgrims to visit Wat Paknam and pay homage. Instructions for meditation would be received from a tape record-ing of his voice in the chamber where his body lay. Pilgrims would thus continue to make donations for the prosperity of the temple. Something had changed since the Great Abbot had fallen ill. He had no time to lead his students in the meditation workshop. The abbot had no time to train new workshop meditators either. Without the Great Abbot’s involvement, the educational emphasis of the temple swung more and more in the direction of the academic studies to the neglect of the meditation research. Indeed, from that time forth, Wat Paknam verily became one of the national centres for Buddhist scriptural study. By the time of the Great Abbot’s death, most of the masters of meditation had fled the temple, to live elsewhere, away from the temple in isolation. The only ones left were some nuns who still practised at the temple and followed the original pattern of teaching taught