Robin’s Bio

Robin Moore was born in Palo Alto, USA in 1963. At the age of 16 he attend­ed North­field Mount Her­mon School in Mass­a­chu­setts. Here, both in the com­par­a­tive reli­gion class­es and in the Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture class, in which the stu­dents read Jack Kerouac’s ‘The Dhar­ma Bums,’ he was intro­duced to the Bud­dhist teach­ings. Lat­er, he stud­ied reli­gion for two years at Swarth­more Col­lege in Penn­syl­va­nia. His inter­est in Bud­dhism bur­geoned and as a result he worked on staff at the Insight Med­i­ta­tion Soci­ety (IMS) at Barre, Mass­a­chu­setts dur­ing the year of 1987. Here he met Ajahn Sumed­ho, who pro­vid­ed an inspi­ra­tion which led him to the monas­ter­ies in England.

After two years as a novice he was ordained in 1990 as a bhikkhu (named Suriyo Bhikkhu) at Chithurst Monastery in the UK with Ajahn Sumed­ho (Tahn Chao Khun Raja Sumed­hachariya) as pre­cep­tor. After train­ing in Eng­land for sev­en years he lived in Thai­land for eight years. Three of these years were spent as an itin­er­ant (‘tudong’) monk, wan­der­ing for sev­er­al thou­sand kilo­me­ters across Thai­land. Dur­ing the final year and a half he lived at Wat Nyanavesaka­van with Phra Ajahn Payut­to (Tahn Chao Khun Brah­ma­gun­ab­horn) and began the trans­la­tion of Ajahn Payutto’s Bud­dha-dham­ma. Between 2003 and 2006 he act­ed as abbot of Har­tridge Monastery in Devon, UK. After a long strug­gle with poor health, he left the monk­hood in 2007. He now resides in Bangkok and works as a trans­la­tor for the Bud­dhad­ham­ma Foundation.