Bhikkhu Bodhi

Twenty years old and killing time in the Brooklyn College bookstore, Jeffrey Block picked up a book on Buddhism almost at random. What he found there, he later said, was “a clear analysis and diagnosis of the human condition” paired with concrete methods for training the mind (budsas.org). That single afternoon among the stacks eventually produced Bhikkhu Bodhi, now among the most read translators of the Pali Canon into English and the monk who once stood before the United Nations to explain what the Buddha’s birth actually means. Nothing about the moment announced itself. It was just a philosophy student, no plan, browsing.

Brooklyn, December 10, 1944, is where he started, born to a Jewish family that held its identity more as culture and ethnicity than as religious practice (Wikipedia; Brooklyn College Vanguard). His mother kept books; his father worked customs. Home was Borough Park, near New Utrecht Avenue (Vanguard). Elementary school was P.S. 160, and Brooklyn Technical High School came next, though he didn’t last there; science and engineering held no pull for him, so he transferred and finished at New Utrecht High School instead (Wikipedia; Vanguard). A bar mitzvah, public school, an unremarkable Brooklyn boyhood in the 1950s: that was the shape of things. Nothing in it foretold where he’d end up.

Two years into Harpur College, now folded into SUNY Binghamton, he stopped and took a year to figure out what he actually wanted (Vanguard). That year he went door to door for the Fuller Brush Company, selling paintbrushes and cleaning products. Decades later, recalling it, he’d smile: “It was an interesting experience” (Vanguard; Wikipedia). When he’d had his fill of brushes, he landed at Brooklyn College, cheap and unglamorous, the kind of school most of his friends attended anyway, and declared philosophy as his major. Campus politics swept him up too; he joined the growing anti-war movement and called the American war in Vietnam a producer of death that was “violent and unnecessary,” though he insists he stood somewhat apart from the counterculture around him and now remembers most of college “in the mist of memory” (Vanguard). A classics course in Whitehead Hall stayed with him, oddly, on a campus that (per his own alumni magazine) doesn’t teach classics anymore at all. In 1966 he collected his B.A. in philosophy (Wikipedia).

Buddhism had already gotten under his skin by then. His reading ran from the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita toward D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, who opened up Zen and Mahayana thought to him during his junior year (budsas.org). His ancestral religion left him cold, he’d say later, and Christianity didn’t offer much more; what actually drew him in were “the religions of the east.” There’s something worth noticing here: an entire spiritual pivot, and it didn’t begin in any temple or at any teacher’s feet. It began in used-book bins at a campus store, right next to philosophy texts he was reading for a completely different class.

That pull followed him west, to Claremont Graduate University in Southern California, where he entered a doctoral program in philosophy. Early in 1967 is when everything actually shifted. A Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Giac Duc, arrived at Claremont to study and moved into Block’s residence hall. Friendship came first, then discipleship, and with it his first real training in meditation and Buddhist doctrine (budsas.org; Wikipedia). He’d walked in assuming meditation meant sitting down and waiting for the mind to slip into some deep, absorbed state. Years afterward he’d laugh at how little he understood (Vanguard). Thich Giac Duc’s curriculum covered mindfulness of breathing, loving-kindness practice, and contemplation built on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, each one matched against one of four basic distortions of perception: mistaking the body for something pure, feelings for something pleasant, mental states for something permanent, phenomena for something possessing a self (budsas.org). Bodhi noticed, and later commented on, how strongly this teaching carried classical Indian Buddhist currents for something coming out of a Vietnamese Mahayana lineage. He traced that to Vietnam’s geographic and historical closeness to older Indian transmissions of the Dharma, and guessed a stream might have reached Vietnam by way of Cambodia rather than only through southern China.

May 1967 brought ordination. Still a graduate student, Block became a samanera, a novice, within the Vietnamese Mahayana order (Wikipedia; budsas.org). He’d later concede the choice wasn’t entirely about spirit: the draft was expanding for Vietnam right then, and formal ordination could have won him a ministerial deferment where conscientious-objector status might not have. But he pushed back on that being the real reason. “It felt like the natural fulfillment of that urge to live a deep spiritual life,” he said. “There was no struggle, no period of indecision” (Vanguard). For five years he held that novice status in the Vietnamese order, finishing his dissertation while teaching a world religions course at what’s now Cal State Fullerton, work he’d taken partly to chip away at education debts (budsas.org; Vanguard). Thich Giac Duc, meanwhile, fled to the United States in 1975 as Saigon fell, carrying pro-Western views that put him at odds with the more radical wing of the Vietnamese exile community. By 1981 or 1982, without either man planning it, they wound up living on the same Washington street, Bodhi at the Washington Buddhist Vihara and his old teacher a few doors down, running a Vietnamese temple (budsas.org).

Los Angeles, 1971 to 1972: Block was living at a meditation center run by Thich Thien An, a monk who’d originally come to the city for a teaching post at UCLA before founding his own center and who would die of cancer in 1980. It was there that a string of visiting Sri Lankan monks crossed his path (budsas.org). Piyadassi of Vajirarama in Colombo, already well known, stayed about a week; Bodhi drove him through the city, introduced him at public talks, brought him into his university classes as a guest lecturer. Ananda Mangala, a Sri Lankan monk based in Singapore, passed through too, as did Dikwella Piyananda, then chief monk of the Washington Buddhist Vihara, who stayed several days with the group (budsas.org). At the Los Angeles airport, saying goodbye, Piyadassi suggested Bodhi visit Sri Lanka someday and offered to arrange lodging at a monastery there.

Three separate Sri Lankan monks, one Los Angeles meditation hall, roughly a year’s span. Each one nudged the same young American toward the same island. Bodhi would later call it “some deep underlying karmic connection with Sri Lanka.”

He finished his doctorate in February 1972, taught out the rest of the academic year, and boarded a flight east that August. The route zigzagged: a week in Thailand at Wat Pleng Vipassana, then two months in Vietnam, mostly Saigon with a detour to Hue, where he found monasteries unsettled and monks uncertain what the war meant for Buddhism’s future (budsas.org). The stopover let him see Thich Giac Duc again. Sri Lanka came last, and he landed in Colombo wearing the flowing robe of his Vietnamese training; his teacher had told him to switch to yellow rather than brown so Sri Lankans would recognize him as a monk on sight (budsas.org). A letter to Piyadassi asking for a place to study got a reply recommending a specific teacher: Balangoda Ananda Maitreya, at the time serving as Mahanayaka of the United Amarapura Nikaya, a post he’d apparently held since around 1969 or 1970 for a five-year term (budsas.org).

Bodhi later called Ananda Maitreya the leading Sri Lankan scholar-monk of his generation, and it was under him that he studied (bodhimonastery.org; budsas.org). Samanera ordination in the Theravada order came in November 1972, weeks after he’d arrived at the monastery near Balangoda; full ordination, upasampada, followed in May 1973 (budsas.org; Wikipedia). Presiding as preceptor at the upasampada ceremony was Bibile Sumangala Nayaka Thero, a figure of standing in the upcountry Amarapura Nikaya but otherwise obscure. Bodhi described the role afterward as purely ceremonial. He had no real relationship with the man. The relationship that counted was with Ananda Maitreya (budsas.org).

He’d arrived braced for years of study under a teacher who, at 77, might not survive long enough to pass on everything. Ananda Maitreya lived to nearly 102 instead (budsas.org). Walking, Bodhi came to think, was part of the secret: twice weekly, Ananda Maitreya walked roughly four miles from his temple to the pirivena, a monastic school he had once run on the far side of Balangoda before handing its administration to his own students, and four miles back, research books tucked under one arm the whole way. Young Bodhi often walked beside him, stopping midway for tea (budsas.org). Pali came to Bodhi on those walks and in his teacher’s library, mostly self-taught from textbooks, with exercises brought back for correction rather than delivered through formal grammar lessons (budsas.org). Ananda Maitreya died in 1998. Bodhi dedicated The Connected Discourses of the Buddha to him, alongside two other men he called his “chief kalyanamittas”: Nyanaponika Mahathera, who died in 1994, and Piyadassi Maha Thera, who died the same year as Ananda Maitreya (Wikipedia).

Those first Sri Lankan years weren’t gentle. No electricity, no running water, and Bodhi’s one-room kuti was mud, straw, and cow dung (Vanguard). “It was difficult to adapt to the different culture, and a very simple way of living,” he said of it. Roughly three and a half years in, an invitation from another monk took him to India, where he made a pilgrimage to the Buddhist holy sites and spent nine months teaching monks. Back in the United States, he joined the Washington Buddhist Vihara, billed as the country’s first Theravada Buddhist monastic community, and lived there from 1977 to 1982 (Vanguard).

Political instability in Burma killed a planned move there, so Sri Lanka got him back instead, this time for nearly two decades, from 1982 to 2002 (Vanguard). His scholarly reputation took shape across those years. In 1984 he took over from co-founder Nyanaponika Thera as English-language editor of the Buddhist Publication Society in Kandy, an organization built in 1958 to bring Theravada texts to a global readership and to represent, in its own phrase, “the oldest living Buddhist tradition” as the Pali Canon records it (Wikipedia; bps.lk). Almost fifty years after its founding, BPS had become a publisher with hundreds of titles circulating worldwide: standard introductions to Buddhism, meditation manuals, canonical translations and commentaries, original essays, and it also distributed titles from Wisdom Publications, the Pali Text Society, and Motilal Banarsidass (bps.lk). The Society’s headquarters and bookshop still sit at the eastern end of Kandy Lake, six days a week, stocked with books on meditation, philosophy, ethics, and history, plus recorded Dhamma talks and children’s titles (bps.lk). Bodhi became BPS president in 1988, a title he still carries, though he stepped down as editor in 2002 (Wikipedia; bodhimonastery.org).

Working first under BPS and later through Wisdom Publications, Bodhi became the translator largely responsible for opening the Pali Canon to English readers outside academia. With Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli, he produced The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya in 1995 through Wisdom. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, his translation of the Samyutta Nikaya, followed in 2000, also from Wisdom, and in 2012 came The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha, his full translation of the Anguttara Nikaya, again through Wisdom (Wikipedia). A partial version of that same material, an anthology he co-edited with Nyanaponika Thera called Numerical Discourses of the Buddha, had already come out from Altamira Press in 2000. Even earlier, BPS had published The Discourse on the Fruit of Recluseship in 1989, a study of the Samaññaphala Sutta and its commentaries, and Great Discourse on Causation in 1998, covering the Mahanidana Sutta and its commentaries (Wikipedia). Pariyatti published his 2000 edition and translation of Ācariya Anuruddha’s Abhidhammattha Sangaha, A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma, a dense scholastic digest of Buddhist psychology few translators outside academic Pali studies would even attempt (Wikipedia). BPS issued The Buddha and His Dhamma in 2001, and a second edition of his commentarial study on the Brahmajala Sutta, The Discourse on the All-Embracing Net of Views, appeared from the same press in 2007; a third edition of his early Mulapariyaya Sutta study, The Discourse on the Root of Existence, followed from BPS in 2016 (Wikipedia).

Pamphlet-length essays for a general audience made up his Collected Wheel Publications for BPS. Among them: Nourishing the Roots and Other Essays on Buddhist Ethics (Wheel numbers 259 and 260), Transcendental Dependent Arising (277 and 278), Going for Refuge, Taking the Precepts (282 and 284), Dana: The Practice of Giving (367 and 369), a study of the disciple Maha Kaccana titled Master of Doctrinal Exposition (405 and 406), and Facing the Future, four essays on Buddhism’s social relevance (438 and 440) (Wikipedia). Cheap and widely distributed, these pamphlets introduced many Western readers to Bodhi’s writing long before his full translations reached their shelves.

In the Buddha’s Words, his 2005 anthology from Wisdom Publications, is still one of the most recommended starting points for newcomers to the canon. It organizes the material thematically instead of following the traditional four Nikayas, which makes it far easier for a first-time reader to find footing (Wikipedia). His edition of The Noble Eightfold Path: Way to the End of Suffering, from Pariyatti, reached a third printing by 2006, proof of how steadily this introductory work has stayed in circulation. The subtitle was deliberate. In his rendering, the path isn’t some abstract ethical ideal; it’s a practical route out of dukkha, mapped step by step rather than merely gestured toward.

An unglamorous conviction sits at the center of everything Bodhi teaches: the texts matter, precision in translation is itself a form of practice, and Buddhism’s diagnosis of suffering only holds up if you read what the Buddha actually said instead of what people assume he said. His 2000 UN address, delivered May 15 at the United Nations’ first official Vesak celebration, spelled out the doctrinal scaffolding behind that conviction (bodhimonastery.org; buddhanet.net archive). A Buddha, he told the assembly, isn’t a proper name at all but a title, “the Enlightened One,” conferred on whoever rediscovers a path to liberation lost during an age of spiritual darkness, much as “American President” names whoever holds that office rather than one man forever (buddhanet.net archive). He sketched the cosmology underneath that claim too: a beginningless universe of world systems arising and dissolving, realms of rebirth running from heavenly planes down to hell, and a being’s movement between them governed by karma, not by any outside judge.

He walked his UN listeners through the ten paramis, the perfections a bodhisattva cultivates across countless lifetimes before Buddhahood becomes possible: generosity, moral conduct, renunciation, wisdom, energy, patience, truthfulness, determination, loving-kindness, equanimity. He recounted Siddhartha Gautama’s own renunciation at 29, after a boyhood of luxury in the Sakyan capital of Kapilavastu and a marriage at sixteen to Yasodhara. Rejecting both extreme asceticism and sensual indulgence for a middle way, Gautama reached enlightenment beneath the Bodhi Tree near the Nerañjara River, close to Gaya, around his thirty-fifth year, on a Vesak full moon that most scholars place somewhere between roughly 563 and 483 BCE, though Bodhi noted a smaller group of scholars argue for dates a century later (buddhanet.net archive).

He pushed back against a habit common among Western converts: treating Buddhism as nothing more than an inward technology for personal calm. Writing in 2007 for the magazine now called Lion’s Roar, in a piece titled “A Challenge to Buddhists,” he argued that Western practitioners often pursue the teaching “largely as inward subjective experiences geared toward personal transformation,” adding that “too seldom does this type of compassion roll up its sleeves and step into the field” (Lion’s Roar; Wikipedia). That’s a pointed thing for a monk this steeped in contemplative practice to say about his own tradition’s reception in the West. It’s no accident, either, that it came from someone who spends his life translating suttas. He knows exactly how much of the Pali Canon deals with social conduct, generosity, the ethics of shared life, which probably explains why he later assembled an entire anthology on the subject, The Buddha’s Teachings on Social and Communal Harmony, published by Wisdom Publications in 2016 (Wikipedia).

The essay didn’t stay on the page. In 2008, Bodhi and a group of fellow monks acted on it, founding Buddhist Global Relief to fund anti-hunger projects and support women’s empowerment work worldwide, running somewhere between thirty-five and forty projects annually, everything from earthquake relief after Nepal’s 2015 disaster to continuing food security programs (Wikipedia; Vanguard; buddhistglobalrelief.org).

There’s something bigger than one life in this record, and it’s worth saying plainly. Buddhism moved from northeast India through Sri Lanka and Vietnam and eventually into a Brooklyn bookstore, keeping its essential shape while completely different people carried it across completely different centuries. Bodhi’s own trajectory, a Jewish kid who became a Vietnamese Mahayana novice, then a Sri Lankan Theravada monk, then a speaker at the UN, is small proof that no tradition belongs to any one geography. Traditions belong to whoever will do the unglamorous work: learning the language, sitting with the texts, year after year. That’s not really about Bodhi being exceptional. It’s about what happens when a person takes a tradition seriously enough to spend fifty years translating it.

He came home to the United States for good in 2002, settling first at Bodhi Monastery in Lafayette Township, New Jersey. He now lives and teaches at Chuang Yen Monastery in Carmel, New York, a 225-acre complex that houses the largest indoor Buddha statue anywhere in the Western Hemisphere (Wikipedia; Vanguard). Since 2013 he’s held the presidency of the Buddhist Association of the United States, and he chairs the Yin Shun Foundation as well (Wikipedia; bodhimonastery.org).

But his most visible public moment happened earlier, on May 15, 2000, when he gave the keynote address at the United Nations’ first official Vesak celebration, marking the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and death (bodhimonastery.org; buddhanet.net archive). He opened by naming the oddity of his own position outright: “Though I wear the robe of a Theravada Buddhist monk, I am not an Asian Buddhist but a native of New York City, born and raised in Brooklyn” (buddhanet.net archive). Nerves got the better of him that first time, so much so that he typed out every word rather than risk speaking from notes. He’s returned to that podium several times since, including 2019, when he used the moment to push for climate action, working by then from notes alone, comfortably (Vanguard; One Earth Sangha; Wikipedia).

Vegetarianism came after he resettled in the United States. By 2022, in an interview with Pariyatti, he described his diet as “complete vegetarian, almost vegan, not completely” (Wikipedia; Pariyatti). Small detail, but it tracks: this is a man whose commitments seem to tighten, not loosen, with age.

Publishing didn’t slow in his seventies and eighties, either. The Suttanipata, his translation of one of Buddhism’s oldest verse strata, came out from Wisdom Publications in 2017, the same year as two essay collections through Pariyatti, Investigating the Dhamma and Dhamma Reflections (Wikipedia). In 2020 he published Reading the Buddha’s Discourses in Pali, a language guide built for serious students who want to work with the original texts rather than lean on translation alone, and in 2023, again through Wisdom, Noble Truths, Noble Path laid out what he called the heart essence of the Buddha’s original teaching (Wikipedia).

He’s tackled contested ground too. His 2009 monograph The Revival of Bhikkhuni Ordination in the Theravada Tradition, from Inward Path, took up the reintroduction of full ordination for women, a question that has split Theravada communities across Sri Lanka, Thailand, and beyond. Some senior monks argue the nuns’ ordination lineage died out centuries ago; Bodhi, among others, has argued for restoring it (Wikipedia). The stance put him at odds with more conservative voices in his own monastic world. He took it anyway.

Academic circles noticed his work too, not just Buddhist publishing houses. A 2009 paper in Contemporary Buddhism by Dhivan Thomas Jones, “New light on the twelve Nidānas,” engaged directly with Bodhi’s treatment of dependent origination, evidence that his translations were being read and argued with inside universities, not only inside monasteries (Contemporary Buddhism).

In his eighties now, he still teaches at Chuang Yen and still chairs the Yin Shun Foundation (bodhimonastery.org). Asked how he fills his days, he skipped past lectures and committee work entirely. “I spend quite a lot of time reading Chinese,” he said (Vanguard). More than fifty years after that Brooklyn bookstore, he’s still, at bottom, a student.