Buddhist Dictionary: Manual of Buddhist Terms and Doctrines
Island Hermitage, Dodanduwa · 1952
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Nyanatiloka Mahāthera
Nyanatiloka Mahāthera
1878 CE–1957 CE · Modern · Wiesbaden
1878–1957 CE
Nyanatiloka Mahāthera (Anton Gueth, 1878–1957 CE) was, in modern times, the first Continental European to become a Theravāda monk and a foremost Western exponent of the tradition. Born in Wiesbaden, Germany, he ordained in Burma in 1903 and settled in Sri Lanka, where he founded the Island Hermitage at Dodanduwa as a training place for Western monks. His German translations of Pali texts and his 'Buddhist Dictionary' made canonical and Abhidhamma material accessible to European readers, and his pupils—Nyanaponika among them—carried the work forward. He is well documented and treated aniconically.
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WiesbadenGermany
What they did here
Born Anton Gueth in 1878; developed an early interest in Buddhism and travelled to Asia to ordain.
About Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden, the capital of the German state of Hesse, is one of Europe's oldest spa towns; the Romans knew its thermal springs as Aquae Mattiacorum, and in 1806 it became the capital of the Duchy of Nassau. Abraham Geiger, later a leading figure of Reform Judaism, served as the city's rabbi in the 1830s and edited a journal of Jewish scholarship there. Wiesbaden was also the birthplace, in 1878, of Anton Gueth, who as Nyanatiloka became one of the first Europeans ordained as a Theravada Buddhist monk, in Burma in 1904, and a noted translator of Pali texts. The city's main synagogue was destroyed in the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938.
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Nyanatiloka Mahāthera’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works(2)
The Word of the Buddha: An Outline of the Teaching of the Buddha in the Words of the Pali Canon
Island Hermitage, Dodanduwa · 1907