Ajahn Nisabho

Ajahn Nisabho 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 an instructor in the Sam Harris meditation app Waking Up.

Biography

Born in San Francisco and raised in Spokane, Washington, by parents whom a profile in the magazine The Fourth Messenger describes as "meditation-minded," Nisabho adopted their interest at fifteen and began to sit regularly, attending retreats and growing steadily more confident in the Buddha's path. According to the magazine Tricycle, his parents had studied with the teacher Jack Kornfield, and at fifteen he read Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, which he later recalled as "archetypal and delicious."

He kept meditating through college and spent time oriented toward social work, including a gap year in Calcutta alongside a doctor working in the slums, before deciding, after a visit to Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery in California, that monastic life was the deeper container he needed. In 2026 the monastery closed on the first of two properties near North Bend, a forty-minute drive from downtown Seattle, with a second adjoining parcel expected once a title matter is resolved; the two parcels together comprise about ninety acres, including forest that serves as an elk migration corridor and a view of Mount Si. The full purchase price of US$4.93 million was raised by the monastery's global community of lay supporters, who also dedicated over 3.3 million recitations of the traditional Pali refuge chant in support of the effort. The vision for the property includes up to twenty huts for monastics (kutis), a large temple, a multi-purpose hall and a residence for visiting bhikkhunis. and the two-part series "War & Peace", on the journeys of British veterans who found the Dhamma at Amaravati Buddhist Monastery. Together with Bhante Joe Atulo he also edited and introduced two installments of the teachings of the Sri Lankan monk Ñāṇadīpa, published posthumously in 2021 after the latter's terminal cancer diagnosis.