Bhikkhu Bodhi knows hunger not as a metaphor, but as a memory etched into his body. As a young American monk in the early 1970s, he began his monastic training in rural Sri Lanka at a time when the country was facing a severe economic crisis. This forced the villagers to cut back on the offerings they could make to the local temple, and as a result his meager midday meal did not provide the basic nutrients his body needed. Sometimes, the hunger was so sharp he’d catch himself eyeing his rubber slippers and wondering if they were edible. That physical emptiness would later shape his lifelong commitment to ending hunger.
Today, Bhikkhu Bodhi is one of the most influential voices in American Buddhism. His books include In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon and Noble Truths, Noble Path: The Heart Essence of the Buddha’s Original Teachings, and for many years, he served as the editor and president of the Buddhist Publication Society in Kandy, Sri Lanka. Notably, he’s also the chairperson of Buddhist Global Relief (BGR), a nonprofit dedicated to ending chronic hunger and malnutrition. But how does someone go from being born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, to becoming an erudite Buddhist monk and ethical humanitarian?
Born Jeffrey Block in 1944, he grew up in a secular Jewish household. His intellectual curiosity led him to study philosophy at Brooklyn College, where a chance encounter with Buddhist texts in a campus bookstore redirected the course of his life. Initially, Block’s attempt at meditation was short-lived—he expected to go into samadhi (intense concentration) with minimal effort, and when that did not go as planned, he gave up.
Through its support of Shraddha Charity Organization (SCO), BGR helps deliver nutritious meals to food-insecure children in Sri Lanka. Photo courtesy of Buddhist Global Relief
It wasn’t until Block was doing a doctoral program in philosophy at Claremont Graduate University in Southern California that his spiritual path began to solidify. This was in 1967 when the United States—entangled in the Vietnam War—sponsored several Vietnamese monks and nuns to study stateside, hoping to win the loyalty of Vietnamese Buddhists. One of these monks, Thich Giac Duc, went to Claremont and moved into Block’s residence hall. Thich Giac Duc became his first dharma teacher, and under the monk’s guidance he learned not only the basics of meditation, but also that practice demands patience and persistence; that the mind does not settle easily; and that it must be gradually tamed and transformed. Block began meditating two hours a day as he continued his studies in Western philosophy. Then, in time, he decided to become a monk himself. With Ven. Giac Duc’s support, he was ordained as a novice (samanera) in the Vietnamese Mahayana tradition and given the monastic name Bodhi.
When Ven. Giac Duc returned to Vietnam in 1970, Samanera Bodhi stayed in the United States, working on his dissertation while teaching world religions at California State College at Fullerton. During this time, a friend of his teacher—another Vietnamese monk, Ven. Dr. Thich Thien-An—started the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Los Angeles. Samanera Bodhi volunteered to help establish the center and lived there from 1971 to 1972.
In early 1972, Samanera Bodhi connected with an elder Sri Lankan monk, Ven. Balangoda Ananda Maitreya, prelate of the Amarapura branch of the Sri Lankan Sangha. Ven. Ananda Maitreya, fluent in English and a foremost scholar-monk of the time, was known for his humility, kindness, and compassion. He welcomed the young American to his temple near the town of Balangoda.
Samanera Bodhi re-ordained in the Theravada tradition under Ven. Ananda Maitreya. He formally entered the Theravada monastic lineage as a novice in November 1972 and received higher ordination in May 1973. With this, he became a fully ordained bhikkhu, taking the name Bhikkhu Bodhi.
While naturally inclined to monastic life and enjoying his training in Sri Lanka, he still faced the kinds of challenges common to anyone venturing beyond the familiar. For him, the main challenges were the hot, humid climate; the language barrier; the new culture; and the spicy food. But beyond these, he often experienced bouts of loneliness.
At twenty-eight years old, he’d expected to study and live with other monks his age who were seriously committed to the dhamma and meditation practice. Instead, aside from his seventy-seven-year-old teacher, the only other monks at the temple were young novices—mischievous boys between eight and sixteen, many placed there by their parents, and with little interest in monastic life. While he enjoyed a close relationship with his teacher, he missed the companionship of fellow monks in his age range and with a similar Western background.
His studies were intense. Five days a week he received instruction on the suttas and the Abhidhamma, a scholarly summary and analysis of the Buddha’s teachings. He also delved deeply into the Pali language with the desire to read the Buddha’s discourses in their original language.
Visakha Girls’ School serves girls in a remote, underserved region of Bangladesh. BGR has partnered with Jamyang Foundation to improve facilities at the school and offer students a lunch program. Photo courtesy of Buddhist Global Relief
Interestingly, Bhikkhu Bodhi didn’t intend to become a translator. But dissatisfied with the English translations then available, mainly from the Pali Text Society in England, he began translating the texts for himself. When he encountered phrases or structures that he couldn’t fully grasp, he’d run them by a learned elder German monk, Ven. Nyanaponika Thera, who had been living in Sri Lanka since the 1930s.
When Bhikkhu Bodhi visited him and shared with him his translations, Ven. Nyanaponika complimented him, encouraged him to continue, and helped him refine his translation skills. In December 1975, Bhikkhu Bodhi went to live at the Forest Hermitage with Ven. Nyanaponika, who became his mentor and spiritual guide until his passing in 1994. Bhikkhu Bodhi’s first translation assignment was to translate the first discourse of the Digha Nikaya together with its commentary and passages from its sub-commentary. The result, The All-Embracing Net of Views: The Brahmajala Sutta and Its Commentaries, was published in 1978.
It was during his first two years in Balangoda that Bhikkhu Bodhi faced a challenge shared by nearly one in three people worldwide: food insecurity. Although his teacher, Ven. Ananda Maitreya, was one of the most respected monks in the country, his temple was in a poor region, and Bhikkhu Bodhi arrived during a time of economic hardship brought on by reckless government policies. Because of this, the temple could provide only the simplest food for its twelve residents—ten growing boys, one young man at his most vital, and the elderly abbot.
We’ve all heard someone say, “I’m starving!” (or said it ourselves) after a few hours without food. But as Bhikkhu Bodhi explains in his essay “Why Does BGR Focus on Global Hunger?,” his early experience in Sri Lanka taught him what chronic hunger feels like at the visceral level. Describing malnourishment, he writes, “I felt the vitality and energy ebbing from my body, until a point was reached where almost all I could think about was food…a physical craving anchored in bodily need. By mid-afternoon, hunger would swell like a giant wave, the feeling lasting into the night.”
Relief came when Ven. Saddharakkhita, a monk from India, came to stay at his teacher’s temple. The two met regularly to read suttas and discuss the Buddha’s teachings. One day, Bhikkhu Bodhi saw a banana leaf piled with discarded food by the door of his friend’s cottage—leftovers to be given to the temple dogs. In that moment, he thought, “The dogs here are eating better than I am” and burst into tears.
When Bhikkhu Bodhi told his new friend about his persistent hunger, Ven. Saddharakkhita invited him to join him on alms rounds. Each day, the two walked the countryside—even to distant hamlets—for their daily meal. This provided enough food for the two monks and allowed them to share their rice and curries with the novices and a temple worker’s children. The rounds also revealed spiritual benefits: Laypeople could see and interact with the monks, strengthening their faith and devotion, reminding them of, as Bhikkhu Bodhi has put it, “a transcendent dimension of tranquil majesty” in daily life. While it may seem that with alms round laypeople give and monks receive, the exchange is actually mutual.
After twenty years in Asia, Bhikkhu Bodhi returned to the U.S. in 2002, bringing with him the spirit of alms-giving as a mutually liberatory practice. Though he had never again experienced the acute hunger of his early years as a monk, his memory of that period would eventually lead to the creation of Buddhist Global Relief.
The catalyst came in 2007, when Bhikkhu Bodhi penned “A Challenge to Buddhists,” a fiercely compassionate opinion piece for Buddhadharma. “We Western Buddhists tend to dwell in a cognitive space that defines the first noble truth [that there is suffering] largely against the background of our middle-class lifestyles: as the gnawing of discontent; the ennui of over-satiation; the pain of unfulfilling relationships; or, with a bow to Buddhist theory, as bondage to the round of rebirths,” he wrote. But to focus on these aspects of dukkha blinds us to the vast, catastrophic suffering that daily overwhelms so much of the world’s population.
Bhikkhu Bodhi argued for broadening the individualistic approach to Buddhism that has taken root in the West. While affirming that “Buddhist meditation practice requires seclusion and inwardly focused depth,” he also insisted that “the embodiment of dharma in the world [would] be more complete by also reaching out and addressing the grinding miseries that are ailing humanity.”
He wrote that alleviating the suffering afflicting so many today “requires that we counter the systemic embodiments of greed, hatred, and delusion,” which he calls a deeply moral challenge.
After the essay was published, Bhikkhu Bodhi didn’t directly share or promote it, but several of his students who read the essay decided to take up the challenge. They approached him for some initial discussions, and together they decided to form a Buddhist organization to address global suffering. Their initial mission—providing “relief to people worldwide afflicted by poverty, natural disaster, and societal neglect”—proved too broad. They were a small team; they didn’t have the capacity to effectively tackle so many issues. But then Bhikkhu Bodhi suggested focusing on alleviating hunger and malnutrition.
Since its inception in 2008, BGR has been inspired by the Buddhist values of loving-kindness and compassion and has worked steadily to alleviate hunger and malnutrition wherever the need is most urgent. What began as three small pilot projects has grown into the sponsorship of almost sixty projects in twenty-two countries including Mongolia, Haiti, Peru, and Brazil.
Its active staff consists of only about six people, spearheaded by its dynamic executive director Kim Behan, an immigrant from Vietnam who’s lived in the U.S. since 1973. Annually, BGR spends roughly $1.2 million on hunger-relief projects, most in partnership with smaller local organizations in the countries served, along with several collaborations with major relief agencies. Recently, generous donations have allowed BGR to make a few exceptionally large contributions annually to address crisis-levels of hunger in places such as Afghanistan, Ukraine, Gaza, Somalia, South Sudan, and Ethiopia.
According to Bhikkhu Bodhi, by BGR’s second year, the team recognized that providing direct food aid alone was not enough to address chronic hunger. They learned that in many cultures, the subordinate status of girls and women is a major driver of poverty—and, in turn, of hunger and malnutrition. To lift communities out of poverty, they saw the need to improve the conditions of women. BGR adopted two strategies to meet this goal: promoting girls’ education and helping women launch right-livelihood projects to support their families.
In Cambodia, BGR partners with Lotus Outreach on GATE (Girls Access To Education), helping girls from the poorest communities complete high school. A second phase of this initiative, Catalyst, offers scholarships and financial support to outstanding GATE graduates to attend university or vocational training school. So far, BGR has helped about a hundred girls complete their college education and move on to professional careers.
BGR runs a similar initiative in Africa in partnership with CAMFED (Campaign for Female Education). CAMFED, as it says on their website, “supports some of the most excluded girls in Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe to go to school, learn, thrive, and lead change for their families and communities.” Graduates mentor the next generation, passing along skills, knowledge, and success.
Bhikkhu Bodhi (front left) joins fellow BGR supporters during a 2015 fundraising walk in San Francisco to help feed the hungry.
Photo courtesy of Buddhist Global Relief
BGR also supports numerous right-livelihood projects for women. One such initiative is in India, where the high suicide rate among Punjabi farmers leaves widows and their children in hardship. Partnering with the organization Building Bridges India, BGR trains Punjabi women—mostly widows—to grow traditional medicinal plants and to earn money through the traditional art of phulkari embroidery.
Recognizing that hunger exists at home too, BGR also partners on U.S. projects, including in Detroit. According to the Detroit Food Policy Council, systemic disenfranchisement—compounded by a 23.6 percent rise in inflation over the past several years—pushed a whopping 69 percent of Detroit residents into food insecurity in 2021. Far too many Detroiters live without reliable access to healthy, affordable meals.
For ten years, BGR has partnered with a community-based organization called Keep Growing Detroit (KGD) as a right-action response to food insecurity and the resulting risk of malnutrition among local residents. Through KGD’s Garden Resource Program, BGR helps supply seeds and transplants to 1,600 urban gardens and farms, offers gardening and cooking classes to four hundred growers, and fosters community through forty educational events reaching 1,800 people. In total, the program aims to benefit 21,400 Detroit-area residents.
Those who work for BGR and their collaborators understand that their commitment to eradicating global hunger benefits them as much as it does those they serve. The profound joy Bhikkhu Bodhi feels in witnessing others liberated from hunger is evident as he discusses BGR’s collaborative efforts with community-based organizations.
He urges people on the spiritual path to go beyond small acts of charity and to actually inquire how we can truly and sustainably serve others, especially by finding “ways to lift [poor] communities up from poverty,” he says.
And, indeed, when our spiritual practice includes work to free others from the concrete, material suffering they face in daily life, we in turn free ourselves. Ethics, compassion, loving-kindness, and generosity are not just theoretical. They are vital aspects of the Buddhist path to liberation.
Bhikkhu Bodhi is a testament to how living a life of truly inwardly focused depth can give rise to a desire to roll up one’s sleeves in community. As he has said, such practice can “translate into pragmatic programs of effective action realistically designed to diminish the actual sufferings of those battered by natural calamities or societal deprivation,” and, through wise effort, support the liberation of all beings.
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