About

I greatly appreciate feedback to the posts on this blog and will attend to whatever matters are brought to my attention so please do not hesitate to drop comments on the various posts. If you want to contact me personally please use this form.

I was born near Birmingham in England and spent the better part of my first 35 years there, but I have now been resident in the East since 1987, mainly in Sri Lanka, India, and Malaysia. I ordained in the Theravāda tradition in 1995 and received higher ordination the following year. I am currently resident in Vivekavana Solitude Grove, a remote meditation centre near the top of a mountain in Penang State, Malaysia.

I have four websites besides this blog, so if a particular aspect of the blog attracts or interests you, you may want to follow up the links below. The first website I started was Ancient Buddhist Texts in 2002 as a way of publishing material from the broader early Buddhist Tradition in the original languages together with annotated translations. The website, which is still expanding, includes texts, translations, and studies from both the early and medieval periods, in Pāḷi, Sanskrised Prākr̥t (BHS), and Classical Sanskrit, with a special emphasis on the collection and organisation of the texts, and also their grammar and prosody.

Around the year 2004 at the suggestion of Jeanne Mynett I started another website to house the teachings of Godwin Samararatne, one of the best-loved lay meditation teachers in Sri Lanka in the 20th century. Godwin was my first Dhamma teacher and my first Buddhist meditation teacher, so he has proved to be one of the most influential people in my life. Although I see to the publication side of things, both in soft- and hard-copy, Jeanne is the main editor on the site, she is one of Godwin’s long-term students, who has been resident at the Nilambe Meditation Centre for most of the time since 1990.

In the year 2006 a supporter in Sri Lanka gave me a camera, and since then I have been taking photographs of the natural surroundings, temples, pilgrimage centres and historical remains in the East. These were originally published in Picasa Web Albums.

However, in 2009 after a trip to Borobudur, the material had outgrown the web albums, and I started a dedicated website, Photo Dharma, to house the various collections. As of 2011 there are more than 4,000 photographs on the site all published in high-definition files.

Besides all this while looking after the Bodhi Lankārāma Buddhist Temple in Taiping Malaysia for a couple of years I started regularly publishing works by other people, mainly Dhamma talks and chantings that were made at the temple. Even now though I am in much more seclusion I am still working on many different projects for other people.

And that is where this blog comes in, I am working in so many diverse fields that there has been nowhere to connect them up until now. So this blog will act as a central record for my publication activities, and will also be a place where I can share different things that I come across in my daily life and work.