The German Buddhist Pioneer Nyanaponika Mahathera

Nyanaponika Mahathera was born in Hanau, Germany in 1901. His secular name was Siegmund Feniger.

He converted to Buddhism at the age of 21 after reading several Buddhist books in German.

After his families' move to Berlin in 1922, he got acquainted with other German Buddhists, from whom he learnt about a German Buddhist monk named Venerable Nyanatiloka, who had founded the "Island Hermitage" in Sri Lanka.

Longing to study Buddhism more deeply, Feniger traveled to Sri Lanka in 1936 and became a Theravadan Buddhist monk under the Venerable Nynatiloka, taking on first the novice ordination and then the full ordination and receiving the monk name "Nyanaponika" ("leaning towards knowledge").

After the outbreak of World War II, Nyanaponika and his teacher Nyanatiloka were arrested as "hostile Germans" by the British and later sent to the Northern Indian prisoner's camp "Dehra Dun" and to live under severe austerities.

Nyanatiloka made use of the time in the camp to translate several texts from the Pali canon into German, building the basis for his broad publication activities in the following years.

After the end of WWII, Nyanaponika moved back to the Island Hermitage in 1946. With Ceylon becoming independent from Great Britain, Nyanaponika became a citizen of his adoptive country in 1951.

Together with Nyanatiloka, he moved into the new meditation centre "Forest Hermitage" in Kandy in the Highlands Sri Lanka.

In 1958, Nyanaponika founded the Buddhist Publication Society (BPS), a charity whose goal is to explain and spread the doctrine of the Buddha by publishing translations of classical Buddhist texts as well as modern works explaining the doctrines of Buddhism and meditation techniques.

With his guidance and dedication to the Dhamma, the Buddhist teaching, the BPS became a Buddhist publishing house supplying readers in more than eighty countries around the world. us ending explained Nyanaponika was the BPS's English editor from its inception to 1984, followed by the American scholar-monk Bikkhu Bodhi.

Nyanaponika was one of the first major contemporary scholars of the Satipatthana Sutta, a sutra focusing on mindfulness and meditation.

He was a guide and teacher to many other Western teachers including Bhikkhu Bodhi and Shan-jian Da-shi. In the later years of his life, Nyanaponika received several honors appreciating his merits in the field of Buddhism.

Nyanaponika died in Hermitage Forest in 1994, marking the end of an era in the annals of the Western encounter with Buddhism.

Among Western Buddhists, he was perhaps the last survivor of the generation of pioneers who had their first contact with the Dhamma in the 1920s and 1930s. His translations and publications built the foundation of modern Buddhism in the West, making many Buddhist sutras available in English.