Ajahn Kovilo

Ajahn Kovilo is an American Theravada Buddhist monk of the Thai Forest Tradition, co-founder and co-abbot of Clear Mountain Monastery in North Bend, Washington. He is a translator and editor of Buddhist texts and an instructor in the Sam Harris meditation app Waking Up.

Biography

Born in Ohio and raised in a Unitarian family, Kovilo began reading spiritual literature on his own at eighteen, moving from Mahatma Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau to the Bhagavad Gita and the Dhammapada. He attended Hampshire College in Massachusetts, where his favorite course was a world religions class on religious experience and literary form.

At twenty-one, in 2003, he attended his first ten-day Goenka Vipassana retreat, which he later described as having "turbocharged" his spiritual inclination, and he eventually dropped out of university to pursue monastic life.

Clear Mountain Monastery

In 2021 Kovilo joined fellow monk Ajahn Nisabho in founding Clear Mountain Monastery in the Seattle area, serving as co-abbot.

Translation work

Kovilo served as editor of Stillness Flowing: The Life and Teachings of Ajahn Chah (2018), by Ajahn Jayasāro, and of Gold Wrapped in Rags: Autobiography of Ajaan Jia Cundo, by Ajaan Dick Sīlaratano, and is the compiler and translator of Thus Should You Train Yourselves and The Wellbeing Cascade.