Gil Fronsdal has practiced Zen and vipassana since 1975 and has a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Stanford. Trained by Jack Kornfield, he is the founder and primary teacher of the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. He is also a husband and father, and is the author of The Issue at Hand, A Monastery Within: Tales from the Buddhist Path, co-editor of Teachings of the Buddha, editor of Voices From Spirit Rock, and has published an acclaimed new translation of The Dhammapada.
Nona Olivia has been practicing meditation for some 40 years, during which time she raised her children and became a grandmother. Deeply involved in the Insight Meditation tradition of Theravada Buddhism, Nona graduated from Spirit Rock Meditation Center’s first Dedicated Practitioner Program and is a Lay Buddhist Minister, ordained by Gil Fronsdal. Nona practices with and is very inspired by the monastics in the tradition of Ajahn Chah. She holds a PhD from Brown University and teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Bhikkhu Anālayo was born in Germany in 1962 and ordained in Sri Lanka in 1995. In the year 2000 he completed a Ph.D. thesis on the Satipatthana-sutta at the University of Peradeniya (published by Windhorse in the UK). In the year 2007 he completed a habilitation research at the University of Marburg, in which he compared the Majjhima-nikaya discourses with their Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan counterparts. At present, he is a member of the Centre for Buddhist Studies, University of Hamburg, as a Privatdozent, he teaches at the Sri Lanka International Buddhist Academy and works as a researcher at Dharma Drum Buddhist College, Taiwan. Besides his academic activities, he regularly teaches meditation in Sri Lanka. List of publications.
Sean Kerr, Dept. of South and Southeast Asian Studies, Ph.D. student and candidate, University of California at Berkeley.