Bhante Gunaratana

Bhante Henepola Gunaratana is a Sri Lankan Theravada monk who has taught in India, Malaysia and the United States for almost eight decades. He is the author of Mindfulness in Plain English, which the Bhavana Society calls a classic meditation manual, and the abbot of the Bhavana Society, a forest monastery and retreat centre in West Virginia. He is widely known as Bhante G.

A novice at twelve in Sri Lanka

Gunaratana was born in rural Sri Lanka in 1927. The Nalanda Buddhist Society in Malaysia marked his 98th birthday in December 2025. He entered monastic life at the age of twelve and received full ordination as a bhikkhu in 1947.

Missionary work in India and Malaysia

Before going to the United States he spent five years in missionary work among Harijan communities in India, and about a decade in Malaysia. According to the Nalanda Buddhist Society, he was a resident monk at the Buddhist Mahā Vihāra in Kuala Lumpur from 1958 to 1968, where he assisted the late Ven. K. Sri Dhammananda in spreading Buddhism in Malaysia.

Chaplain and scholar in Washington, DC

He came to the United States in 1968. In Washington, DC, he served as president of the Buddhist Vihara and as Buddhist chaplain at American University, where he also earned a PhD in philosophy.

The Bhavana Society

In 1982 he co-founded the Bhavana Society, and he became its abbot in 1985. Some other accounts, including Wikipedia, give 1985 as the founding year; this page follows the Society's own account. He set it up as a forest monastery where students could pursue extended, intensive meditation practice.

The Society stands on more than 50 wooded acres in High View, West Virginia. Monks and lay residents train there, and its meditation retreats are offered free of charge. As of December 2025 he still lived there and, in Nalanda's words, "continues to teach with vigour" as its founder-president and abbot.

Mindfulness in Plain English and other books

Mindfulness in Plain English was published by Wisdom Publications. Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness is its companion volume, and Journey to Mindfulness is his autobiography, reissued in an expanded anniversary edition in 2017.

His study The Jhanas in Theravada Buddhist Meditation, published by the Buddhist Publication Society, looks at the meditative absorptions called jhāna. It begins from the traditional division of meditation into two systems: the development of calm, samatha, which aims at a concentrated and unified mind, and the development of insight, vipassanā, which aims at directly understanding the nature of phenomena. See Samatha and Vipassana for more on the two terms.

Later years

On his 90th birthday in 2017 he announced that he would no longer accept invitations that required long-distance travel. His student Bhante Saddhajeewa serves as his successor at the Bhavana Society. Other insight meditation centres in the United States are listed under centres in the United States.