Nyanaponika Thera

Nyanaponika Thera was a German-born Buddhist monk who made his home in Sri Lanka from 1936 until his death in 1994, working as a translator, writer and publisher. After a period of meditation under Mahasi Sayadaw in Burma he wrote The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, a guide to satipaṭṭhāna practice that the Buddhist Publication Society calls a modern Buddhist classic, and in 1958 he co-founded the Buddhist Publication Society (BPS) in Kandy.

From Hanau to Island Hermitage

He was born Siegmund Feniger on 21 July 1901 in Hanau, near Frankfurt, the only child of a Jewish couple, Isaak and Sophie Feniger. He trained in the book trade, and by his twentieth year he regarded himself as a Buddhist. In Königsberg in the 1920s he started a Buddhist discussion group and lending library.

After losing his job with a publishing house in 1933 he was active in a Jewish self-protection organisation in Berlin. In December 1935 he left Germany with his mother for Vienna. In 1936 he travelled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to become a pupil of the German monk Nyanatiloka Mahāthera, whom the BPS tribute calls the first Buddhist monk from continental Europe. He was ordained as a novice at Island Hermitage on 4 June 1936 and received higher ordination at Dodanduwa on 29 June 1937.

Internment during the Second World War

When war broke out in 1939, the British authorities in Ceylon interned German men, including Nyanatiloka and Nyanaponika, first at Diyatalawa and from 1941 at Dehra Dun in northern India. He spent the war years translating: the Sutta Nipāta into German, and the first book of the Abhidhamma with its commentary.

In the camp he also compiled a German anthology of texts on satipaṭṭhāna, which later went into The Heart of Buddhist Meditation. He was released in September 1946 and returned to Island Hermitage. In 1951 he and Nyanatiloka became citizens of Sri Lanka.

Training with Mahasi Sayadaw

In January 1952 he and Nyanatiloka travelled to Burma to help plan the Sixth Buddhist Council. In Rangoon he lodged at the Thathana Yeiktha, Mahasi Sayadaw's meditation centre (now Mahasi Sasana Yeiktha), and stayed on for a period of meditation training under Mahasi Sayadaw. According to the BPS tribute, the experience impressed him deeply and inspired him to write about this system of practice for others.

He rewrote an earlier German book on satipaṭṭhāna in English, adding instructions based on what he had learned at the Thathana Yeiktha. The result, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, was first published in Sri Lanka in 1954, with a revised and enlarged edition in England in 1962. The tribute notes that it had been translated into seven languages by 1995.

He also edited Mahasi Sayadaw's Practical Insight Meditation and translated his treatise The Progress of Insight from the Pali. These links are the reason this site lists him under the Mahasi noting tradition; most of his own work was writing, translating and publishing.

He returned to Burma for the opening of the Sixth Council in 1954, reading Nyanatiloka's message to the assembly because his teacher had laryngitis, and attended its closing session in 1956.

The Buddhist Publication Society

On New Year's Day 1958, with two lay friends from Kandy, Richard Abeyasekera and A. S. Karunaratna, he founded the Buddhist Publication Society.

The founders first planned about 25 small booklets in English, but the response was strong enough that the Society kept growing. He was its editor and honorary secretary, and later its first president. He wrote many of its Wheel booklets himself and checked every manuscript.

In 1984, with failing eyesight, he retired as editor and handed the work to the American monk Bhikkhu Bodhi. He stayed on as president until 1988.

Bare attention and his other writing

His short book The Power of Mindfulness (1968) is, in the BPS bibliography's words, "an inquiry into the scope of 'bare attention' and the principal sources of its strength". The Four Sublime States (1958) covers the four brahmavihāra, including mettā. Many of his booklets are free to read on Access to Insight.

Last years

He lived at the Forest Hermitage in the Udawattakele forest above Kandy from 1952. He died there before dawn on 19 October 1994, after an illness of almost two months. His remains were interred at Island Hermitage, Dodanduwa, near those of his teacher Nyanatiloka. The practice he wrote about is described in the guide to the four foundations of mindfulness.