About Katannu

My birth name is Derek. I was born in Yorkshire in Northern England and lived on a working farm throughout my childhood. Early encounters with the slaughter of animals moved me to become a vegetarian, which was almost unheard of in those days, especially for a farmers son. Consistently, throughout my life, my views on the ways of the world seemed to be at variance with the mainstream of opinion and I could never work out why that was. In 2006 my partner suggested (very strongly) that I took up meditation and I followed that suggestion by attending the centre in Mandurah that was run by Paul Beard. My immediate experience was that I had found what I had been missing all those years – the company of like-minded individuals. It was like a sense of coming home. It would be fair to say that coming into contact with the Dharma has changed significantly the direction of my life and the name that was given to me when I formalised my commitment to the Dharma path, is an accurate description of who I am now. I was ordained into the Dharmadatu Buddhist Order in Sri Lanka by Paul Beard on 13th June 2014.

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