ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of a biographical overview of the life of the Venerable Lokanatha, who was born in Italy as Salvatore Cioffi and raised in Brooklyn, New York. After converting to Buddhism in his late-twenties, Lokanatha travelled to Burma, took ordination as a monk, and began a remarkable 40 year career as a writer, lecturer, organizer, and Buddhist missionary throughout South Asia and the world. Beyond biography, Lokanatha and the various responses to him are contextualized within the different cultural spheres, in which he operated, from the anti-colonial Buddhist revival in Burma to the mocking indifference Lokanatha found in the United States. Scholarship on modern Buddhism, particularly recent work on U Dhammaloka, is used to situate Lokanatha's life and its facets of conservative reformer and transnational actor. Finally, an account of the source material used to reconstruct the life of Lokanatha offers practical methodological explanations for his absence from conventional narratives of modern Buddhism.
