Piya Tan

[1] He is the first full-time lay Dharma worker ("Dharmacari") in Singapore to be supported by donations from the Buddhist community.

[2] As a youth, Piya was a self-confessed bookworm who loved the great outdoors, especially climbing Mount Ledang in Malaysia.

In 1970, Piya co-founded The Young Buddhist Association of Malaysia as vice-president just before leaving for his monastic training in Thailand.

In 1994, in recognition of his Buddhist work (said to be "of PhD equivalent"), Prof Lewis Lancaster of the University of California at Berkeley's Dept.

In 2000, Piya and his family were invited by his ex-students to live and teach in Singapore, where he works as a full-time lay teacher.

During his early years as a Theravada monk, he was privileged to learn insight meditation (Vipassana) directly from the venerable Mahasi Sayadaw himself in 1979.

Piya is a regular teacher at the Brahm Education Centre (BEC) where he has been running the popular Meditation for Beginners classes since Jan 2004,[6] and other courses.

The Sutta Discovery translations have been endorsed and used by various monks, such as Ajahn Sujato of Australia, Bhante Aggacitta of Malaysia and Ven S Pemaratana of Sri Lanka.

Despite being "digitally challenged", he launched the Dharmafarer website single-handedly in late 2006, where his annotated Sutta translations and works are made freely available online.

[citation needed] He is well known for his futuristic visions of Buddhism, especially in terms of the full-time lay Buddhist ministry.