Dhamma Seeds In Unlikely Soil: The First Ugandan Buddhist Monk
Nuggets from the Awakin Call with Bhante Buddharakkhita — in conversation with Mark Foley & Zoe
A Buddhist monk and pioneer of Buddhism in Uganda and across Africa, speaking on Vesak day from Alaska.
Bhante Buddharakkhita's journey carried him from a curious, adventurous, compassionate boy in Uganda to becoming the first Buddhist monk his country had known. Even as a child, his compassion for all life ran so deep that he could no longer eat meat, unable to bear the suffering he was causing other animals. When the Dalai Lama encouraged him to find others with whom to share the path, he set out to build that community himself — beginning with his own mother, who became a Buddhist nun; creating Uganda's first Buddhist Center; and starting a peace school for children. His dream now reaches far beyond one life or one country: to bring peace, service, and harmony — Buddhist principles and practices — not only across Uganda, but across the entire continent of Africa. Even an assassination attempt became soil for that dream — choosing to dwell not on the fact that he was targeted, but that the bullet missed him, he turned trauma into compassionate action. He opened the conversation by describing the banyan tree, whose tiniest of seeds grows into the biggest of trees — and we were blessed to have so many seeds, small and large, planted through this call.
I really like the way you use the word seeds, because it reminds me — the banyan seed is the smallest, but it can bring the biggest trees. I was born into a Catholic family, and I was lucky enough to be the firstborn of my mother, so she loved me so much. There was a gap before my sister came, so she really lavished me with love. I learned how to love from my mother.
And then she introduced me to my grandmother, who also loved me so much. This is very common in Uganda — the grandmother treats you almost like a husband, which sounded very weird to my ears, but they love you so much. So I was given a lot of love, both from my mother and my grandmother. And I said, okay — I should also love others.
But I can tell you about the seeds that were inside me, that didn't come so much from outside. One was curiosity. I was a very curious boy, asking questions again and again and again, until my mother told me, "If you have nothing to say, keep quiet." I was never contented by things I didn't know; I would go to my teacher, go to my mother, and ask for answers.
The second was being adventurous. I used to have this idea that if I used one road to go somewhere, I would do my best not to come back the same road. I got into a lot of trouble getting lost on roads that weren't familiar to me. But later I could see how that led me to try a new road even in ideologies — born a Christian, I should try something else. Something always had to be new for me.
The third was compassion. I loved plants, nature, insects and animals so much that I developed a strong disliking of eating meat. I would pass the place where they killed the animals and be disgusted; when they forced me to eat meat, I would throw up. My siblings were given herbal medicine so they could eat meat — I ate the same medicine, but I never learned to eat meat, up to this day. When animals suffer, my mind didn't like to see them dying.
Curiosity, adventurousness, and compassion toward living beings — those three shaped me from inside. They were the seeds that later would blossom into something.
As a little boy I was a bit naughty — playing with the kids, playing with the dogs, climbing on a shed and falling off when the ladder was gone — the other kids may have gone off with it. I turned my hand badly. That was my first time to really experience dukkha — suffering. They took me to an elderly Ugandan chiropractor who turned it very fast, at sunrise and sunset, with ghee. I hated that, but that pain taught me a lot about how to be patient with suffering.
To keep me out of trouble, my mother gave me a simple instruction: "If you have nothing to do, sleep." She was a very good sleeper, and after lunch she would rest for almost an hour. According to our culture you are not allowed to step over your mother, so she made me lie near the wall while she slept on the edge. I couldn't talk to anyone, and there was silence, so I would just look at her sleeping.
So stillness and silence — I grew up with these two things. When it came to meditation later, I already had them. In fact, when I came to America, silence was used as a punishment for children — "go to your room and keep quiet." But for me it was never a punishment. It came naturally, from those days when my mother enforced that advice.
Those were the seeds my mother planted — that later, when I came to meditation, I was already comfortable with silence and stillness.
I went to India in 1990 on a government scholarship to study business. I hadn't even planned to go to India — I'd applied to study in the UK, where I had relatives. When the invitation came it said Punjab University, a place I'd never heard of, but with a leap of faith I said, let me go to what they have chosen for me. Shortly after I arrived there was a strike that lasted almost two months, and during that time I met two young monks from Thailand.
As soon as I saw them, it looked as if I had seen them before in my life. In Punjab the men had long beards, and even when they smiled you couldn't see it well. But these monks had no hair around the face, so their smile was a beaming smile. I saw the kindness on their faces — and inside, they had generosity, compassion, and care. I asked myself, what is inside these robes?
I didn't even know Buddhism was a religion. When I left Uganda I knew only one word — not "Buddha," not "Siddhartha," only "Gautama." So I wasn't attracted because they were monks; I didn't know they were monks. I was attracted because of their virtues — their selflessness, their generosity. Wherever they went they would call me, "Come, let's travel together." Usually monks and lay people keep a gap, but these people kept no gap. They offered me food, gave me warm clothes because I didn't have enough, and lent me a bicycle.
They took me to the temple, showed me the Buddha statue, and taught me the culture — that you offer the monks food before you eat. These were the people who encouraged me to meditate, and who pointed me toward vipassana — the Buddha's meditation. So we became very, very good friends — an experience I had never planned.
In 1994 there was a twelve-day retreat — an introduction to Tibetan Buddhist philosophy — at a monastery in Dharamshala. A friend from England, a Buddhist, helped me pay for it because I couldn't afford it. I was still studying, juggling my course, and I thought maybe I'd attend only one or two days and come back. But once I entered the retreat, I liked it very much: breathing in, breathing out, watching the intention even in opening a door. The silence and stillness were already familiar to me from my mother — what was new was the philosophy. Those twelve days changed my life.
I had been under heavy stress in India — culture shock, and an academic gap, because my course required three years of accounting that I had never started in Uganda. The shame of failure was weighing me down; if I failed, the scholarship would be cancelled. But after those twelve days of meditation, my stress almost evaporated. I felt so free.
I felt a sense of freedom in general — but the meditation really broke the shackles.
I came out of that retreat with two determinations. One: I must introduce this to the entire African continent. Two: I must see His Holiness the Dalai Lama. When I did meet the Dalai Lama and asked how I could establish Buddhism in Uganda, he gave me one instruction: find friends. So I went around looking for friends.
The friends I looked for were not very cooperative. But when I went back to Uganda, my mother became not only my mother — she became a friend, which is what the Dalai Lama had been trying to tell me. When I became a Buddhist monk I wondered who would join me, and the first person to join me, after two weeks, was my mother. She brought me food, and one day she kept looking at the Buddha statue, saying how beautiful it was. When I told her the story of the Buddha, she asked how long I had been a Buddhist. "Over ten years," I said. She started blaming me — why hadn't I told her? But in Buddhism we don't advertise or convert; we don't convert people, we convince them, and when they're convinced, they convert themselves.
Later she asked how to become a nun. I warned her that at her age two things might be difficult — cutting her hair, and not eating in the afternoon. The hair was easy, she said. Not eating in the afternoon would be hard — "Do you do it?" she asked. I said yes. And she said, "You are my son. If you can do it, I can do it." So she became a nun — my first disciple. From that time, things were never the same.
People in the village became attracted to the temple — not because of me, but because of my mother. I would often be teaching abroad, and I'd find three new people had joined. When I asked them why they became Buddhist, they said, "Because of your mother." But my mother doesn't know much about Buddhism, doesn't even speak English — how is she teaching you? They said, "We learn by her example. Whenever someone dies in the village, she's the first to bring food."
When I gave her the precepts, I gave her back her own instruction — only changed: "If you have nothing to do, meditate." Now, after lunch, instead of lying down, she meditates.
The projects at the Uganda Buddhist Center all grew organically. Over the years we kept increasing the number of children we ordain temporarily during the holidays — from 2, 3, 10, 20, 30, 75 — and last year, for our 20th anniversary, we increased it to 200 children, who came to stay for seven days. We run it as an annual Peace Ethical Camp, under a theme drawn from the Ubuntu philosophy: I am because you are. The children eat together, play together, and meditate together.
On the last evening I asked two questions: "Who wants to go home?" Nobody raised a hand. "Who wants to stay?" They all raised their hands. I was in trouble — how do you keep 200 children in your temple?
In the morning we disrobed them and the parents came; the children were crying and hiding this way and that, but finally they were taken home. Then, in one home with three children, they got a saucepan and a knife to make a bell. For robes — because they had left their robes at our temple — they tied bedsheets around themselves, and helped tie a bedsheet around the youngest boy too. I'm telling you, the boy sat down, rang the bell, and started meditating exactly the way we did at the temple. They chanted in Pali, and afterward did walking meditation, just as we had taught them.
We got a video from the mother. Her only complaint was the language she couldn't understand — but she was praising how the children were doing their work without being told, how well-behaved they were. The parents had only one request: "Please allow our children to come to your school."
I call it the Bedsheet Revolution because I see a revolution that is going to take place in Africa. We are not teaching them Buddhism — we teach African values, the philosophy of understanding, how to have peace within, and ethics. We started with one or two of my own relatives, expanded to the village, then to our school, then to other schools. This year we want to make it countrywide, and then replicate it in other countries.
In 2010, on a dark night, a security guard we had hired to protect the temple decided to shoot at me. That was the closest I have ever been to death, and it was a very traumatizing experience. It shook me deeply, because I had been feeding that man myself — the company was neglecting him, so I'd invited him to take breakfast with us. I trusted him, and he betrayed that trust. For a while I was afraid to see any person with a gun. When fellow teachers in California asked when I'd go back to Uganda, I said, "After ten years."
To process the fear, I leaned on the resources in Buddhism, and I began writing a cartoon book about the whole incident — enacting where I stood, how it happened. Drawing it was funny, and it was healing; later, doing a diploma in Buddhist counseling, I learned that writing your experience down is itself a form of healing. Two questions helped me most. The first terrified me: what karma did I create in the past that I should be repaid by being shot at? But the second changed everything: what good did I do, that this bullet missed me?
That gun had only one bullet — and it missed. I decided to lean on the positive side: I must have done good things to survive that bullet. That re-energized me, and I started forgiving the man who shot me.
A third question followed: what can I do from now on, so that if it happens again, at least I will leave a legacy? All of what I am doing in Uganda came from that awakening. Before, I took things easy — "I'll do this next time, start a school some other time." This is what we call trauma growth: you decide to act now, so that even if you don't see the fruits, the seed will be in the ground, well watered, and will germinate by itself.
Forgiveness, I learned, is healing. If you hold on to bitterness it's too heavy. When you forgive first, you are the first person to be let off the hook. This whole experience led me to do my doctoral research on healing intergenerational trauma — combining mindfulness and African wisdom — because I know so many people in Africa have been shot at, and I wanted to learn how to help them heal.
I have a dream that occupies my life every single day. It comes back to what I formed after that retreat, an Afro-Tibetan Friendship Society, to create a center in every African country. I want to replicate what I'm doing at the Uganda Buddhist Center in every African country — there are 54, minus Uganda, so 53 to go. I hope I can live long enough to see it; and if I don't, it will go on, because I am planting the seed.
I'm grooming the novice monks for exactly this. My name is Buddharakkhita, so I give them names like Kenya Rakkhita, Chad Rakkhita, Nigeria Rakkhita, Tanzania Rakkhita — so that when they are mature enough, they can go and replicate the work in those countries. Some have already started giving Dhamma talks.
When you have a dream bigger than you, and you're passionate about it, that alone keeps you going. Where there is faith and confidence, there is no hill too high to climb. In the early days I slept in a tent that wasn't even waterproof; when it got wet I'd just move into the shed. But I had already worked two years in Thailand as a scuba diving instructor — I was used to being wet, it was my job! What I learned in India was to let stumbling blocks be stepping stones. Being wet would end — in Buddhism, everything is impermanent. What kept me going was patience to endure, and the determination to make my vision a reality.
As my friend Mark quoted Thoreau: though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders. Zoe, I have the seed.
People always say, "Bhante, you have so much energy — where do you get it?" I tell them: I get the energy from serving people. I'm a chief volunteer, serving society. All the projects in Uganda evolved organically, with the heart opening of serving others — and through serving others I've learned how to be more kind, more peaceful. It teaches me something I could never learn at any university: how to be compassionate, determined, patient; wisdom, discernment, equanimity. People read about these qualities in books; for me, they manifest when I'm relating with others.
If you want to be happy for an hour, take a nap. If you want to be happy for a day, go fishing. If you want to be happy for a month, get married. If you want to be happy for your entire life, help others.
So when people ask how they can support this work: please join hands and work together. This is not an African vision, not a Ugandan vision — it's a world vision. Come and volunteer, come and teach in the schools, come and see what we are doing. We've just finished the high school; now we need dormitories, because so many children want to come but there's no space for them to stay. We teach children to be peaceful from preschool onward, and to be of service to others.
That's why the vision is peace for all — not peace for Uganda, but for all. So let us see how we can continue to water that seed. May this seed be watered, and may all beings learn to be of service to others.
Curated nuggets from the Awakin Call with Bhante Buddharakkhita. Stories are presented as told by the speaker, lightly edited for readability with care to preserve his meaning, voice, and emphasis.
Listen to the complete conversation with Bhante Buddharakkhita.