The Heart of Buddhist Meditation: Satipatthana
Kandy (Buddhist Publication Society) · 1962
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Nyanaponika Thera
Nyanaponika Thera
1901 CE–1994 CE · Modern · Hanau
1901–1994 CE
Nyanaponika Thera (Siegmund Feniger, 1901–1994 CE) was a German-born Theravāda monk and scholar who did much to present Buddhist meditation to a global readership. Born into a Jewish family in Hanau and drawn to Buddhism in Berlin, he left Germany in 1936 and was ordained in Sri Lanka by Nyanatiloka. In 1958 he helped found the Buddhist Publication Society in Kandy, which he led for decades, and his book 'The Heart of Buddhist Meditation' became an influential modern exposition of satipaṭṭhāna mindfulness practice. He is well documented and treated aniconically.
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Stop 1 of 2Born
Hanau
What they did here
Born Siegmund Feniger in 1901 into a Jewish family; encountered Buddhism in Berlin before emigrating as the Nazi threat grew.
About Hanau
Hanau, on the Main about 25 km east of Frankfurt in the German state of Hesse, was the seat of the Counts of Hanau and later capital of the County of Hanau-Münzenberg. In 1597 Count Philipp Ludwig II invited French and Walloon-Dutch Protestant refugees to found a new town beside the old one, and he also let Jews settle, re-establishing a community from 1604; Jews are first recorded there in 1313. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Hanau was an important centre of Hebrew printing. The Brothers Grimm were born there, as was Siegmund Feniger (1901), who became the Theravada monk Nyanaponika Thera and co-founded the Buddhist Publication Society in Kandy, Sri Lanka, in 1958.
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Nyanaponika Thera’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Nyanaponika Thera’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.