Monk Peter

Monk Peter (Venerable Pisit Sopakdithapong) is a Theravada monk based in Thailand. After a twelve-year career in business, he realized that the worldly pleasure, status, and security he’d been seeking was not bringing him true happiness. Indeed, he’d come to feel “empty and dead inside.” In search of something better, he began to meditate and to learn about the dhamma (dharma). What he found led him six years ago to ordain as a bhikkhu (“monk”), and to train under the Thai master Ajahn Tong, who teaches a meditation-centered approach based on the mindfulness method of Burma’s Mahasi Sayadaw.

For the past several years, Monk Peter has divided his time between Northern Thailand and periods of wandering and living with monastic and lay communities in Nepal, India, South Korea, Europe, and America. Connecting and sharing dhamma with good-hearted people around the world helped him see that the dhamma is not a matter of a particular form of practice, ritual, doctrine, or custom, but rather that its essence is the same for everyone.

He has created and currently leads two organizations that grow out of this recognition. GiveLoves is his poverty alleviation project that brings food, clothing, school supplies, shoes and medicine to remote regions of Nepal and India, with plans in the works for Bolivia and Chile in the coming year. OneBuddhism introduces a new generation of people—kids, teenagers, and young adults—to Buddhist practice and ideas as “something practical and useful, not boring, not preachy, not sectarian; something that offers tools to make their lives better, happier, and more meaningful.”