Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1939, he studied at the University of Iowa, specializing in Literature and Creative Writing.

He embraced Buddhism in 1966 in India, where he was ordained at the Bengal Buddhist Association of Calcutta, and spent several years as a monk in Island Hermitage and elsewhere in Sri Lanka.

In 1988, while on a return journey to the United States to join his father for the latter's eightieth birthday celebration, Ven.

For the BPS he edited The Tragic, the comic and the Personal: Selected Letters of Ñāṇavīra Thera (Wheel Publication series No.

This book contains all the known published and unpublished essays by S. Bodhesako: Beginnings, Change, The Buddha and Catch-22, The Myth of Sisyphus, Faith, and Being and Craving.