Ajahn Munissara
Ajahn Munissara was born in 1978 to Thai parents in Manila, Philippines, where she mostly lived (except for 2 years in Bangladesh) until completing high school. She then earned a bachelors’ degree in History from Harvard University.
Although she had been exposed to the Dhamma since she was young, it was during her university years when her interest deepened. At Harvard, surrounded by people who were intellectually brilliant, she noticed that few seemed genuinely happy. She started to question what true intelligence really was. Experiencing severe depression in her second year, she realised that when you are in the midst of acute suffering, all that you care about is somehow ending it, and that real intelligence was the wisdom that knows how to do so. The real purpose of life, she clearly saw, was to practice a spiritual path that uncovers this wisdom, and leads to freedom from all suffering.
After university, she worked for a few years in New York City, and then moved to Thailand. She engaged in various kinds of work including freelance writing for the Bangkok Post and teaching while devoting more and more time to studying and practicing the Dhamma. She also did a master’s degree in Southeast Asian Studies at Chulalongkorn University to learn more about Buddhism and figure out if she was ready to devote her life to the Dhamma.
Around this time, she came across Ajahn Brahm’s teachings, which she felt strongly connected to, and was heartened by his support for female monastics. She ordained as a samaneri (novice nun) in 2009 in Chiang Mai at Nirodharam, one of the few bhikkhuni monasteries that existed then in Thailand. In 2012, she received bhikkhuni ordination at Dhammasara and Bodhinyana, and then returned to Thailand to continue her training. She later moved to Dhammasara Monastery in 2016, where she has resided ever since.
In Thailand she gained experience sharing the Dhamma at monasteries, schools, universities, and a prison. Currently she enjoys teaching the Vinaya to the monastery residents and sharing the Dhamma with the wider community at Dhammasara and other settings within and outside the BSWA, including online.
One of her great aspirations is to learn how to be more succinct.