I wrote to the Mahanayaka Thera, telling him of my background and of my desire to come to Sri Lanka to ordain as a bhikkhu and to study Pali and Buddhism. Piyadassi to remind him of his invitation, and he wrote back, giving me the name of a senior prelate who, he said, had previously ordained Westerners. The next year the decision had crystallized in my mind to go to Asia to take ordination as a Theravada Buddhist monk. Piyadassi suggested to me that some day I should come to Sri Lanka, where he could arrange for me to stay at a Buddhist monastery. Piyadassi's host during his stay, drove him around town over Los Angeles's forbidding maze of freeways, and accompanied him to the airport when it was time for him to leave. That Buddhist monk was none other than Ven.
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We invited him to stay with us and give a series of lectures on Theravada Buddhism at our center. One day our center received notice that a Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka would be arriving in Los Angeles.
I had been ordained as a samanera (novice) in the Vietnamese Mahayana Order and was lecturing in world religions at a local university. At that time I was living at a Vietnamese Buddhist meditation center in Los Angeles. The background story to my meeting with the Mahanayaka Thera goes back to the year 1971. Ananda Maitreya as my own ordination teacher, the one who brought me into the Sangha and guided my first steps in the life of a bhikkhu. For me it is a personal honor to be able to name Ven. Yet such honor and fame hardly touched him inwardly: at heart he always remained a simple monk whose greatest joy was quiet study and meditation at his small village temple near the town of Balangoda. In the course of his exemplary life this outstanding Mahathera has held some of the most prestigious academic and ecclesiastical posts in the country. Venerable Balangoda Ananda Maitreya was one of the great personalities of Theravada Buddhism in the twentieth century, and it is testimony to his vast store of past merits that his life span stretched clear across this century from its beginning almost to its end.
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