Mirka knaster biography

Mirka was born in Europe and educated in America.
Mirka Knaster is an independent scholar and freelance writer and editor who applies a cross-cultural perspective to her work, whether on women, healing arts, or spiritual traditions.
Mirka Knaster is a fibre artist who views every work of fibre as a journey into colour, line, texture, pattern, shape and space.

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Honoring a Life & Legacy in the Dhamma: Mirka Knaster on Munindra

A young man in the East Bengal region of India, born in 1915 to a Buddhist family that traces its roots to the time of Siddhattha Gotama, raised in a home that respects both study and practice, reads every book he can get his hands on. Becoming fascinated with the Dhamma, he comes to work for the Mahabodhi Society, a group devoted to reawakening Buddhism in the land of its birth.

Through this work he comes to meet with everyone who is anyone among those spurring the emergence of Buddhism in the West, from Mahasi Sayadaw to the Dalai Lama. After nine years in Burma, practicing vipassanā, studying the Pāli Canon virtually non-stop for five years, and then teaching, he returns to India, to Bodh Gaya, the place of the Buddha’s enlightenment.

There he mentors most everyone who is now anyone among the Westerners prominent in the late-twentieth century manifestation of Buddhism in the West. He does all this with immense humility, scholarship, sincerity and intensity over the decades, including signific

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Mirka Knaster is the author of Living This Life Fully: Stories and Teachings of Munindra, a book about the Bengali meditation master who was a grandfather of the vipassana/mindfulness movement in the West and who taught many of today's most prominent Western dharma teachers. She interviewed nearly 200 people around the world for their down-to-earth yet inspiring poignant and humorous remembrances of someone who embodied the qualities of awakening and who believed it was possible for all of us to cultivate them. The book also draws on discussions Robert Pryor had with Munindra before his death in 2003, early talks Munindra gave in the U.S., and includes rare photographs. Shambhala is the publisher (October 2010). Mirka collaborated with Robert Pryor on this project. The book has been translated into Vietnamese and Korean.

Mirka has a Ph.D. in Asian and Comparative Studies. Based on interviews with Buddhist and Jewish teachers, her dissertation examines how we transform habits of everyday talk into a spiritual practice of ethical speech. She has written and spoken on the inter

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Featured Artist September 2017

Fiber artist and writer Mirka Knaster was born in Europe and educated on both coasts of the U.S., with degrees in Romance Languages and Literature, Latin American Studies, Asian Philosophies and Cultures. As a child, she learned how to sew, knit, crochet, and embroider from her mother. For many years, Mirka worked as a writer, first at Stanford University, and then commercially, producing reference works, non-fiction books, and many articles and reviews for magazines and journals. Now she focuses on her blog, Exploring the heART of It.

Mirka has lived in the Andes, Blue Ridge Mountains, and Hawaiian Islands, and traversed much of the world’s continents and islands. Her cross-cultural experiences and research indulge her fascination with how people live, dress, decorate their homes and religious institutions, and celebrate holidays and rites of passage. Since 2005, she has been working on a bluff on the northern Sonoma coast, where she witnesses, with awe, how the ever-changing light transforms the colors of l