The idea behind each Dhutanga was that it would help monks shed their worldly attachments, meditate more easily, and acquire enlightenment more easily. The Dhutangas were not a part of mainstream Buddhist life—the forest monks began practicing them to aid in their asceticism. In this way, traditional Buddhism was again slightly skewed by the Thudong monks.
	 Buddha claimed to be a follower of the “middle path”—something between indulgence in sensory pleasures and sensory pain. Other religions in the area put heavy emphasis on one or the other. It can be easily observed, however, that the Thudong monks fell to the side of self-mortification. One story tells of Ajan Man, Thudong master, suffering from extreme hunger. Despite intense stomach pain, Ajan Man would still wander into villages—not to eat, but to purposefully tempt himself. This helped his detachment to be sure, but it also strayed dangerously close to the self-mortification Buddha advocated so strongly against. In this way, Thudong monks were again pushed by their surroundings to defy the conventional notions of Buddhism.
	Finally, Thudong monks placed heavy emphasis on one unique form of meditation—corpse meditation. In corpse meditation, an ascetic spends the night meditating in a cemetery. The idea is that the fear of ghosts and corpses drives all else from the monk’s mind. The monk experiences no desire for sensory pleasures or for sensual contact. All that the monk can consider is his own fear. The monk then learns to control his fear and get rid of it. In so doing, the monk realizes the fundamental concept of Anicca—impermanence. This form of meditation did not receive special attention in mainstream Buddhism. In the forests, however, where conquering fear was of paramount importance and spending the night in a cemetery was sometimes a necessity, corpse meditation was emphasized. In this way, forest monks again tweaked the standard Buddhist practice.
	The Thudong monks practiced a unique form of Buddhism. They strove to recognize Anicca by living in the forests and cultivating no attachments whatsoever. They took the Dhutanga very seriously, and integrated it into their daily lives. They upheld the Visuddhimagga as their primary enlightening text. For all of these reasons, they were different than the mainstream Theravada Buddhist community. However, they were a benign influence. The Thudong monks did not convince all Buddhists to become ascetics, nor did they scare the community away from asceticism. In fact, Ajan Man felt that most people saw them as interesting periphery figures. They did not interest themselves much in learning from the ascetics, but rather in observing them and marveling at their strange ways. Therefore, the Thudong monks of Thailand were an internal, benign force on both the Buddhist monastic and lay communities.
The doctrinal concept most affected by the Thudong monks was the Noble Eightfold Path. The Buddha described it as a “middle path” between sensory pleasures and self-mortification. Inherent in the Noble Eightfold Path was the concept of meditation. 