Nyanatiloka Mahathera (Germany, 1878–1957), born Anton Gueth, renounced a promising career as a gifted composer and violinist to travel to Burma where in 1904 he became the first recorded continental European to be ordained a Buddhist monk. In 1911, on the southwest coast of Sri Lanka, he founded the Island Hermitage, which became a focal point for succeeding generations of Westerners who were drawn to the monastic life, including the bhikkhus Silacara, Nyanaponika, and Nanamoli.
Much of the Venerable Nyanatiloka’s scholarly work was completed under great hardship. As a German national he was arrested, interned, and deported during WWI and WWII. From 1914 to 1919, while in concentration camps in Sri Lanka and Australia, and wandering in China, often living in unsanitary and crowded conditions, he managed to complete his six-volume German translation of the Anguttara Nikaya. He was not permitted to return to his Sri Lankan hermitage until 1926 and so remained a monk in Japan and Thailand.
The Island Hermitage was particularly vibrant between the wars as many Western bhikkhus, novices, and lay supporters, mostly German, came to visit or to stay.
Again interned with several of his students from 1939 to 1946 because of war, first in Sri Lanka, and then in India, the Ven. Nyanatiloka finished his German translation of the Visuddhimagga, wrote his classic Buddhist Dictionary, and prepared English translations of the works he had formerly completed in German.
He was able to spend the last 11 years of his life, from 1946 to 1957, in relative tranquility in Sri Lanka, becoming a citizen of the newly independent country in 1950.
The Ven. Nyanatiloka and his disciple Nyanaponika visited Burma in 1952 and, at the Sixth Buddhist Council in Rangoon in 1956, were the first Western monks to attend any of the Buddhist Councils, unless perhaps there were Greeks at the Third Council in Patna, India, in 250 BCE.
Throughout his life Nyanatiloka Mahathera attracted many disciples, not only due to his scholarship and translations, but also because of his character and the inspiration he gave as one of the very first Europeans to walk successfully the path of a Buddhist monk.
