Getting Off, A Portrait of an American Buddhist Monk
Samanera Bodhesako(Robert Smith, known also as Ven. Vinayadhara and Ven. N‘anasuci in his early monastic life) was an American Buddhist monk. Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1939, he studied at the University of Iowa, specializing in Literature and Creative Writing. He embraced Buddhism in 1966 in India, where he was ordained at the Bengal Buddhist Association of Calcutta, and spent several years as a monk in Island Hermitage and elsewhere in Sri Lanka. (His autobiography of his early monastic life can be found in the book calledGetting Off: A Portrait.) After leaving the robe in 1971, in 1980 he again took ordination, this time in Thailand under the Venerable Somdet N‘anasamvara (Supreme Patriarch of Thailand) of Wat Bovornives. In 1982 he returned to Sri Lanka, living mostly in the upcountry region of Bandarawela. In 1988, while on a return journey to the United States to join his father for the latter s eightieth birthday celebration, Ven. Bodhesako died from a sudden intestinal hernia while in Kathmandu. During the last years of his life he founded the Path Press for which he editedClearing the Path: Writings of Ñanavira Thera(Colombo, 1987). For the BPS he editedThe Tragic, the Comic and the Personal: Selected Letters of Ñanavira Thera(Wheel Publication series No. 339 41, 1987.) In 2008 the BPS publishedBeginnings: Collected Essays by S. Bodhesako.