Bhikkhu Sumangala

Bhikkhu Sumangala was a Nepali monk who taught insight meditation in Kathmandu before it was widely known in the country. From 1975 he ran a twice-weekly Vipassana class at Gana Mahavihar, one of the first regular meditation programmes in Nepal, and he later helped raise the money that built the International Buddhist Meditation Center. He should not be confused with Sumangal Vihara, a monastery in Lalitpur that appears in histories of the same period.

Training in Burma and Japan

He was born Bhakta Krishna Shilpakar in Lalitpur in 1929 and was ordained as a monk in Burma in 1959 (LeVine and Gellner). In Rangoon he spent several months at Thathana Yeiktha, the meditation centre of Mahasi Sayadaw. Back in Kathmandu he opened a school at Gana Baha, also called Gana Mahavihar, and handed it over to Dhammawati Guruma in 1964 when he left to study in Japan. He took a master's degree in Buddhism at Rissho University in 1972, and died in 1999.

Teaching meditation at Gana Mahavihar

On his return from Burma he began teaching Vipassana to a few fellow monks (LeVine and Gellner). The Dutch scholar Ria Kloppenborg, who interviewed him during her fieldwork in 1973–77, found him running a programme at Gana Mahavihar for American students and others who wanted an introduction to satipaṭṭhāna meditation. He also gave meditation courses to Nepalis and regularly invited monks from abroad to lecture. In 1974 he published a book, Buddhist Meditation, in Lalitpur.

Kloppenborg records that from 1975 a Vipassana bhāvanā programme met at Gana Mahavihar for two hours every Tuesday and Friday, attended by 30 to 70 people. LeVine and Gellner credit the class to Sumangala and note that he did not invite nuns to join it. At the time very few people in Nepal meditated: Sarah LeVine wrote in 1998 that before the 1980s only a few Theravāda monks, nuns and lay people practised any form of meditation.

Schools, pilgrimages and a federation

Much of his work was social. He founded and ran the Siddhartha Sisu Niketana kindergarten at Gana Mahavihar, where in the mid-1970s eight teachers looked after about 100 children each day, with toys and teaching materials sent by his friends in the United States and Japan. He led pilgrimages to India five times and also to Burma, Thailand and Malaysia. In 1973 he founded the All Nepal Buddhist Federation, an attempt to bring the country's Buddhist groups into one body (Kloppenborg).

LeVine and Gellner describe him as one of the first monks to use international connections to fund Buddhist projects in Nepal. He built Buddha Vihara at Bhrikuti Mandap in Kathmandu, brought the Japanese healing movement Sei Mei Kyo to Nepal, and in 1993 opened a home for elderly people in Banepa.

Helping to found IBMC

After Mahasi Sayadaw's visit to Nepal in 1981, Sumangala worked with Mahasi's leading disciple, Sayadaw U Paṇḍita, and a group of Kathmandu businessmen led by Gyan Jyoti Kansakar to raise money for a permanent meditation centre (LeVine and Gellner). The International Buddhist Meditation Center at Shankhamul was founded in 1985, with money from Thailand, Burma and Japan as well as local donors, and still runs retreats in the Mahasi tradition, which is described under Mahasi noting.

Bhikkhu Gyanapurnik later taught meditation there, and Dhammawati Guruma sat on its board. The story of how these first classes grew into Nepal's meditation centres is told in Vipassana in Nepal: a short history, and today's centres are listed under centres in Nepal.