The Dhammapada
Balangoda · 1995
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Balangoda Ananda Maitreya
Balangoda Ananda Maitreya
1896 CE–1998 CE · Modern · Balangoda
1896–1998 CE
Balangoda Ananda Maitreya (1896–1998 CE) was a leading Sri Lankan scholar-monk of the 20th century, prominent in the revival and global teaching of Theravāda Buddhism. Born near Balangoda in central Sri Lanka, he became a master of Pali, Sanskrit, and Sinhala, authored around fifty works on the suttas, Vinaya, and Abhidhamma, helped found Nalanda College in Colombo, and contributed to the Sixth Buddhist Council in Burma. He was widely revered, and some devotees regard him as a bodhisattva—a devotional belief noted here as tradition. He lived to 101 and was a teacher of later Western monks, including Bhikkhu Bodhi. He is well documented and treated aniconically.
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Balangoda
What they did here
DOCUMENTED: born in 1896 near Balangoda in central Sri Lanka; over a long life he mastered Pali, Sanskrit, and Sinhala and authored some fifty works.
About Balangoda
Balangoda is a town in the Ratnapura district of Sri Lanka. It was the birthplace, in 1896, of Balangoda Ananda Maitreya Thera, an eminent twentieth-century Sinhalese scholar-monk and teacher, who took his monastic name from his home town.
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Balangoda Ananda Maitreya’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Balangoda Ananda Maitreya’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.