Ven. Walpola Rahula

Venerable Walpola Rahula was a Sri Lankan Theravada monk, the first Buddhist monk to hold a chair at a Western university (the History of Religions chair at Northwestern), and the author of What the Buddha Taught (1959) — for sixty years the standard introductory text on Buddhism in English. His Heritage of the Bhikkhu was a foundational document of socially-engaged South Asian Buddhism.