Bhante Sujato
Australian Theravada Buddhist monk
Sujato, known as Ajahn Sujato or Bhikkhu Sujato (born Anthony Best), is an Australian Buddhist monk formerly ordained into the Thai forest lineage of Ajahn Chah and presently identifying with the Early Buddhist movement.
Life
He is a former musician with the post punk alternative rock Australian band Martha's Vineyard, who had toured with, amongst others, Mick Hucknall's Simply Red, INXS, Annie Lennox' Eurythmics, and early proto-punk garage band The Saints before disbanding in 1990. He spent several years at Bodhinyana Monastery in Western Australia before going on to found Santi Forest Monastery in 2003 where he served as the abbot. Following Sujato's wishes, Santi became a bhikkhunī (Buddhist nun) vihara in 2012, and he returned to live in Bodhinyana Monastery.
Monastic work
In 2005, Sujato co-founded the Buddhist website SuttaCentral along with Rod Bucknell and John Kelly, to provide access to Early Buddhist texts in their original language and make translations available in modern languages. After being unable to secure copyright-free digital translations of the Pali Canon for SuttaCentral, Sujato moved to the island of Chimei, off the coast of Taiwan, to undertake the task of creating English translations of the four Nikāyas, living there from 2015 to 2018. These translations have since been published on SuttaCentral, and as free edition books.
In 2019, Sujato moved to Sydney to establish Lokanta Vihara (the Monastery at the End of the World) with his long term student, Bhante Akaliko, to explore what it means to follow the Buddha's teachings in an era of climate change, globalised consumerism, and political turmoil. He is also involved with Engaged Buddhism.In a Buddhist Dharma talk entitled I am an anarchist for Dhammanet, Sujato states his anarchist ideology, specifically aligning himself with anarcho-pacifism, which he explains as being compatible with the Buddha, Buddhism, lay man and lay women's practice and the renunciant life, as well as being in accord with the monastic vinaya. In the speech, Sujato explains his belief that the Buddha himself was also an anarchist.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q67187678. VIAF identifies the subject as 80613646. The Library of Congress control number is nb2016000527. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1990, 2003, 2012 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bhante Sujato” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.