Bhikkhu Bodhi: Translating the Buddha's Words

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 20 September 2026

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Bhikkhu Bodhi (born 1944) is an American Buddhist monk and the translator behind the standard English editions of the Buddha’s discourses. If you have read a footnote citing the Majjhima, Saṃyutta or Aṅguttara Nikāya in English, you have probably read him. He is also the founder and chairperson of Buddhist Global Relief, a Buddhist hunger-relief organisation.

That second fact is what makes him more than a bibliography: the man whose translations are cited across this site is also the one who wrote the essay that prodded Western Buddhism into building a relief agency of its own. He named both, together with his ordination, as the three blessings of his life, in a letter written after his eightieth birthday:

From Brooklyn to a forest hermitage

He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1944, took a BA in philosophy from Brooklyn College and a PhD in philosophy from Claremont Graduate School, and came to Buddhism in his early twenties. Bodhi Monastery’s biography and his publisher’s author note record all of this between them; the part they leave out he supplied himself. His first Buddhist teacher, he told Inquiring Mind, was “a Vietnamese monk with whom I lived in California back in the late 1960s”, and it was that monk who pressed on him the importance of learning Pali as a tool for understanding the Dhamma.

He travelled to Sri Lanka after his studies, receiving novice ordination in 1972 and full ordination in 1973, both under Balangoda Ananda Maitreya (1896–1998) — chosen, he says, because “at the time he was reputed to be one of the top scholar-monks in Sri Lanka.” In 1974 he spent time with the German monk Nyanaponika Mahathera, then president and editor of the Buddhist Publication Society in Kandy, and at the end of 1975 moved there to live with him at the Forest Hermitage, for what became about ten years. Nyanaponika read his private translations and set him a task: the Brahmajāla Sutta with its commentary and subcommentaries. That work, published in 1978, is where the career began.

He was appointed editor of the Buddhist Publication Society in 1984 and its president in 1988, and held the editorship until 2002. In May 2000 he gave the keynote address at the United Nations on its first official celebration of Vesak. He returned to the United States in 2002 and has lived at Chuang Yen Monastery in Carmel, New York, since 2007.

What the translations actually are

The early discourses survive in four collections, called Nikāyas, each organised on a different principle: the Dīgha (long), the Majjhima (middle-length), the Saṃyutta (connected by theme) and the Aṅguttara (arranged by number). They sit at the heart of the Pāli Canon, the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism.

Bhikkhu Bodhi is responsible for three of the four, all published by Wisdom Publications in its Teachings of the Buddha series:

• The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (Majjhima Nikāya, 1995) — not solely his. Wisdom describes it as “based on an original draft translation left by the English scholar-monk Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli, which has been edited and revised by the American monk Bhikkhu Bodhi.” It won the 1995 Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award and the Tricycle Prize. This translation is behind our pages on the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta and right view.
• The Connected Discourses of the Buddha (Saṃyutta Nikāya, 2000).
• The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha (Aṅguttara Nikāya, 2012) — 1,944 pages.

The fourth, The Long Discourses of the Buddha, is in the same series but is Maurice Walshe’s translation, not his. It is worth saying plainly, because the set is often credited to him whole.

Around them stand In the Buddha’s Words (2005), the 496-page thematic anthology that most readers meet first; The Suttanipāta (2017), 1,616 pages of the Sutta Nipāta with its Paramatthajotikā commentary; and Reading the Buddha’s Discourses in Pāli (2020), a 548-page practical guide to the language for readers who want to go behind the English. He was also general editor of the widely used English edition of the Abhidhamma manual, the Abhidhammattha Saṅgaha.

Reviewing the Aṅguttara volume in Inquiring Mind, the teacher Guy Armstrong called the 1995 Majjhima “a revolutionary work”, counted “a total of 5,448 pages of sutta translation and commentary” across the three Nikāyas, and concluded that with the Aṅguttara complete, Bhikkhu Bodhi “has completed a monumental work that ranks as one of the greatest scholarly contributions yet to the growth of Dhamma in the West.” The Khyentse Foundation gave him its 2013 Prize for Outstanding Translation; its citation reads, “No other living scholar has made a contribution of such magnitude to the translation of Buddhist scriptures into a modern language.”

He has been candid about why he did it. He began translating, he told Inquiring Mind, simply to make the texts intelligible to himself, with no thought of publishing:

Where he says to start

Asked in the same interview where a newcomer should begin, he gave an order: Nyanatiloka’s short anthology The Word of the Buddha, or the schematic selections on Access to Insight; then — “I would throw modesty to the winds” — In the Buddha’s Words, “after all, they’re mostly his words, not mine”; and only then a full collection, starting with the Majjhima. His advice on method is equally plain: read each discourse once for acquaintance, again with notes, then sort the notes under recurring topics until, over a year or two, you acquire what he calls a “global view” of the Dhamma, in which the teachings fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. For our own shortlist, see the best Buddhist books.

”A Challenge to Buddhists”

In 2007 Buddhadharma published a commentary of his that did more than any of the translations to change what he does with his days. Reading the news each morning, he wrote, raised questions in his mind about the future prospects for Buddhism in the West — because the first noble truth, as Western practitioners tended to hear it, had shrunk to fit their own lives.

Compassion, he argued, was being pursued “largely as inward, subjective experiences geared toward personal transformation”: “Too seldom does this type of compassion roll up its sleeves and step into the field.” He pointed at Christian Aid, World Vision and the American Jewish World Service — relief agencies, not missions — and asked the question the essay turns on: “Why doesn’t Buddhism have anything like that?” He was careful to grant that many individual Buddhists were already engaged in social service and that “a few larger Buddhist organizations work tirelessly to relieve human suffering around the globe”; his complaint was that “their appeal has as yet been limited.” It closes by naming what he takes to be the work of the age, which is to stand up “as an advocate for justice in the world, a voice of conscience for those victims of social, economic, and political injustice who cannot stand up and speak for themselves.”

Buddhist Global Relief

He did not expect the essay to be acted on, least of all by the people around him.

By his own account “the workings of karma are sometimes unpredictable”: by mid-2008 “unexpected nets of causality” had brought a group together, and Buddhist Global Relief emerged out of the group’s initial meetings, his own among them. The organisation’s own history page tells it the same way: students who read the essay “accepted his challenge and joined together to form a Buddhist relief organization.” Wisdom Publications’ author note puts it more briskly — “In 2008, together with several of his students, Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi founded Buddhist Global Relief” — and BGR’s annual report calls him simply “our founder”. All three are true; the first is the most exact about how it happened.

Its mission is narrow on purpose: chronic hunger and malnutrition. BGR grounds that choice in two lines of the Buddha’s, one of them the best known verse on the subject in the Dhammapada:

What it funds is food assistance, long-term sustainable food production, the education of girls and women, and right-livelihood projects for women. It states that it does not proselytise: “Our guiding purpose is to provide aid and empower people, not to convert others to Buddhism.” In fiscal year 2024 — the last full year reported — BGR’s executive director records that it gave over $1.1 million to 59 projects in 20 countries, plus more than half a million dollars in crisis grants for Gaza, Ukraine, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Sri Lanka. Its financial statement for that year puts 91 per cent of expenditure into direct programmes and its administrative ratio at 3 per cent. As of September 2026 its projects page lists work in 22 countries, the United States among them.

He remains its chairperson, and in 2025 created a “Sangha Council” of younger monastics and clergy to carry its spiritual leadership. The word he wanted for all of this was not compassion, which he thought had gone soft through overuse, but conscience: “what we need most, as a spur to socially transformative action, is a compassionate sense of conscience that is, at the same time, a conscientious compassion.” It is one of the more unusual careers in modern engaged Buddhism: a textual scholar who asked in print why Buddhism had no relief agency of its own, and ended up chairing one.

Where he parts company with his own readers

Much of his readership comes to the suttas through secular or psychological doors, and on several questions he is not where they are.

Rebirth. He holds that the early texts mean it literally, and has argued so at length. In Does Rebirth Make Sense? he notes that the teaching “crops up almost everywhere in the Canon, and is so closely bound to a host of other doctrines that to remove it would virtually reduce the Dhamma to tatters” — and told Inquiring Mind flatly, “I fully believe in the principle of rebirth.” See rebirth and reincarnation for what is and is not being claimed.

Mindfulness. He thinks the way it is now taught in the West has “undergone a sea change from its traditional function” — presented mainly as a way to heighten the present moment and accept whatever arises. That is not nothing, he allows, but as a statement of the Dhamma it inverts the point: the teaching “isn’t designed to culminate in acceptance of the world”, and mere detached acceptance “could easily lead through the back door to a reconciliation with samsara”. The argument belongs to secular mindfulness, where his is one of the sharpest voices. Purser and Loy’s 2013 essay “Beyond McMindfulness” quotes his warning that “absent a sharp social critique, Buddhist practices could easily be used to justify and stabilize the status quo, becoming a reinforcement of consumer capitalism.”

None of which makes him a literalist about everything. In the same interview he warns that the second danger of scripture is to “let one’s capacity for critical thought fly out the window and buy into everything the suttas say” — because “there is quite a lot in the suttas that can’t stand up against modern scientific knowledge. We can’t criticize Christian creationists while we become Buddhist variants of the same.” The first danger, he says, is using the texts as weapons, the Buddha’s own simile of grasping a water snake by the tail.

And he is disarming about himself. Asked what scholarship had done for his practice, he began by rejecting the “sharp wedge between study and practice” that he says many new Western Buddhists drive, and then answered about himself without flinching: “I have to admit that my own meditation practice has fallen far short of my ideal”, which he ascribes to a chronic health condition rather than to his books. His verdict on the study-versus-practice argument is blunt: “scholarly knowledge without practical application is barren; vigorous meditation practice without the guiding light of clear conceptual understanding is futile.”

Where to find him now

As of September 2026 he lives at Chuang Yen Monastery in Carmel, New York. The Buddhist Association of the United States, which runs it, lists him as its president since 2013 and advertises his Saturday-morning programme of meditation and Aṅguttara Nikāya study, held at the monastery and on Zoom, offered free with dāna welcome. Buddhist Global Relief’s leadership page lists him as chairperson.

For the collections he translated, see the Pāli Canon; for the tradition that preserved them, Theravada Buddhism; for his non-sectarian treatment of the ideals at issue between the schools, arahant, buddha and bodhisattva; and for his defence of the word “enlightenment” against “awakening”, what is enlightenment. He stands among the most consequential teachers of modern Western Buddhism, though the word he would prefer is probably translator.