What the Buddha Taught

Walpola Rahula Thero was a Buddhist monk and university professor from Sri Lanka. Born in 1907, Rahula became a Buddhist monk at the age of 13. According to his biography on the Walpola Rahula Institute website, Rahula was educated by the Venerable Paragoda Sumanasara at a Buddhist monastery in Sri Lanka. He completed his monastic training there and later worked with a Buddhist missionary organization that sought to help people who were oppressed by the caste system in Sri Lanka. Rahula believed that the Buddhist clergy should not discriminate based on caste, as he felt that this opposed Buddhist doctrine.

As a young adult, he attended the University of London in Colombo, Sri Lanka, giving him the distinction of being the country’s first Buddhist monk to receive a university education. As Sri Lanka became independent from Great Britain, Rahula joined other monks in campaigning for social reforms such as free education. In 1950 Rahula moved to Paris to attend Sorbonne University as a post-graduate research fellow. He completed many important works during this time, such as translating ancient Buddhist texts into French. During this time, he also wrote What the Buddha Taught, which soon became a classic in literature on Buddhism.