We study the pion decay process in the presence of a circularly polarized laser field propagating along an arbitrary general direction. Using the first Born approximation and the Dirac-Volkov states for charged particles, we derive an analytic expression for the decay rate. The direction of the laser field was found to have no significant effect on the nature of the result obtained. This study generalizes the results found for a field with a wave vector along the z-axis by Mouslih et al in a recent paper (Mouslih 2020 Phys. Rev. D 102 073006).