Egil (Gil) Fronsdal

Director, Insight Meditation Center, Redwood City

PhD, Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University

Graduation Year

1998

Dissertation Title

"The Dawn of the Bodhisattva Path: Studies in a Religious Ideal of Ancient Indian Buddhists"

Gil is the founding teacher and a co-guiding teacher of the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California, and the Insight Retreat Center in Santa Cruz, California. He is also a founder of the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies, where he is the Dean of its Buddhist Chaplaincy training programs. He has trained as a monk and as a teacher in both Burmese Theravāda and Japanese Sōtō Zen. In addition to books on Buddhist meditation practice, his published translations of Buddhist texts, including The Dhammapada: A New Translation of the Buddhist Classic with Annotations (Shambhala, 2005) and The Buddha Before Buddhism: A Translation of the Aṭṭhakavagga with Commentary (Shambhala, 2016). His dissertation was published in 2014 as Dawn of the Bodhisattva Path: The Early Perfection of Wisdom (Institute of Buddhist Studies and BDK America).