The Author

The author was born in Utrecht, Netherlands in 1905 from a well-to-do middle class family with a strict Roman Catholic outlook. His entire education was in Catholic schools and later in a Jesuit College in preparation for priesthood for which his religious inclinations seem to have earmarked him.

He rarely spoke of those times, which, however, must have been a solid preparation for the rest of his subsequent monastic life, of two years novitiate, three years philosophy and four years theology. His final year of studies and his first year after his priestly ordination were spent in an Italian monastery near Florence.

At the age of 31, he was sent to London to be in charge of a new foundation of his Order, during the time he taught Dogmatic Theology to the scholastics of Christus Rex Priory in North London.

Earlier doubts about several Catholic teachings, however, kept on disturbing him and made him follow a more intensive course of comparative religion. He started his search for intellectual satisfaction by attending various lectures on Vedanta philosophy of Advaita and Buddhist Abhidharma. These latter ones were conducted in London at the Maha Bodhi Society by Ceylonese Buddhist monk the Rev. Dehigaspe Pannasara Thero. Once he had discovered for himself that religion was possible without blind faith, this change-over was not difficult, even though it meant the breaking off from all family-ties and the surrender of all the securities of the home-country.

His grasp of the essentials of Buddhism came almost instantaneously: and within a year of his coming to Sri Lanka, he was ordained a Buddhist monk in Vidyodaya, Colombo, in 1938, under the name of Dhammapala.

From 1956 to 1968, he worked at the Encyclopaedia of Buddhism at the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, of which he was in the final years of Senior Assistant Editor and Administrative Officer. The Volumes issued during that time show hundreds of his contributions on a great variety of subjects, well appreciated at home (Sri Lanka) and abroad.