The following passage is very revealing. It shows how the vipassanā movement had a huge impact on the way that thudong forest monks were perceived in Thai society.
It is worth saying a few words about the effect that the popularity of vipassanā meditation had on peripatetic (thudong) monks and lay interest in other types of meditation practice. Tiyavanich (1997: 287) cites Phra Ajharn Thet’s assertion that it was only with the success of this movement that the meditation practice of Thammayut thudong monks became popular, whereas previously their practice had been viewed as an insignificant part of the order. With the success of the popularization of vipassanā practice by the Mahanikai order, the Thammayut order began to celebrate the forest meditation masters; thus different types of meditation within Thai Buddhism began to gain followers as never before. Whereas at the turn of the century ascetic monks and practice were perceived by many educated urbanites as ‘backward, uncivilized, old-fashioned, and standing in the way of westernization and modernization’ (Tiyavanich 1997: 286), by the 1960s they had become firmly located within the centralized sangha bureaucracy, and by the 1970s the royal family had visited some of the more famous forest monks, thereby giving them and their practice popularity nationwide. ‘Within less than a century, thudong monks had risen from the bottom of the national sangha hierarchy to the top, and from being despised as vagabonds (by urban elites) to being venerated as saints’ (Tiyavanich 1997: 288).12
Cook, Joanna. Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life (pp. 34-35). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
Oh how things change.
Renaldo