Ajahn Prasoot: Returning to the Cave Temple of Wat Nai Tao
In Thailand's Trang province, the story of Phra Ajahn Prasoot Piyadhammo (พระอาจารย์ประสูติ ปิยธัมโม) begins at the temple he would one day lead. Its formal name is Wat Tham Phra Phutthakosiy (วัดถ้ำพระพุทธโกษีย์), while local people also know it as Wat Nai Tao (วัดในเตา). For Prasoot, the cave temple was not merely a later appointment. It was part of his childhood.
A schoolboy at the temple
Thai biographical reporting places Prasoot's birth in Trang in BE 2508 (1965), in a rubber-growing family. As a schoolboy he stayed at Wat Nai Tao, where the abbot at the time was Luang Pu Saeng Thammasaro (หลวงปู่แสง ธัมมสโร). Living there brought him close to both his teacher and the temple's daily life. The place to which he would eventually return had already shaped his early years.
Prasoot was ordained in BE 2529 (1986). He studied Buddhist teaching and monastic discipline, passed the advanced Nak Tham examination, and travelled to learn from teachers in different parts of Thailand. His education reached beyond Trang, but the bond formed at Wat Nai Tao remained central to his story.
A lineage brought home
Thai accounts associate the former abbot, Luang Pu Saeng, with the southern tradition of Wat Khao O (วัดเขาอ้อ). He passed elements of the knowledge he had learned to Prasoot. The connection was more than a list of teachers: after years of study elsewhere, Prasoot returned to the same temple where he had known Saeng as a boy.
Following the former abbot's death, Wat Nai Tao went through a period without a settled resident leader. Villagers who knew Prasoot invited him to take responsibility for the temple. Thai reporting dates the start of his abbacy to BE 2544 (2001); a more recent Thai government report still identifies him as its abbot.
Memory within the cave
The temple's story reaches further back. Thailand's Cultural Encyclopedia records a local legend about monks and a novice who practised in the cave. After a rockfall, villagers are said to have placed Buddha images there in their memory. The cave and its images have remained part of the community's religious life through later periods of repair and renewal. The account is a story preserved by the locality, and it helps explain why this place means more to its neighbours than an address on a map.
Prasoot's life gives that older setting a human continuity. He first stayed there as a student, left to study after ordination, and returned to care for the same temple and the community around it. The lasting thread is not simply that he inherited a role, but that he came back to the place where his relationship with the lineage began.
A connection to life today
Traditions survive in books, but they also survive when someone returns home and shares what they have learned. Prasoot's journey from Wat Nai Tao and back makes this cave temple a living point of departure rather than a distant historical name.