From Buddhism to Bishopric: The Kanishka Raffel Story
Celebrating 200 episodes of Chip Lunch with
Archbishop Kanishka Raffel
How a humid Sydney night, a pocket-sized Gospel, and years of faithful prayer led a devout Buddhist student to become Archbishop of Sydney
There's something almost cinematic about the night Kanishka Raffel's life changed forever. It was January 1986, a humid Sydney evening where sleep wouldn't come. A 21-year-old university student, raised Buddhist, deeply committed to achieving enlightenment through meditation and the eight-fold path, reached for a small book a friend had given him weeks earlier (the Gospel of John). He thought it might help him fall asleep.
He read it three times that night. By morning, everything had changed.
A Buddhist Childhood in Australia
Kanishka's story begins in Sri Lanka, where he was born into a family split along religious lines. His father's parents were devout Christians, but his mother and her family were Buddhist, the majority religion in Sri Lanka. When the family immigrated to Australia in the 1970s, his mother took charge of their religious upbringing.
"We had a little shrine in our house," Kanishka recalls, "and as children, we used to chant prayers before we went to bed." When a Buddhist temple opened in Stanmore in 1975, the family began attending regularly. Buddhism wasn't just a cultural identity for young Kanishka, it was the framework through which he understood reality itself.
The first noble truth of Buddhism is that all life is suffering. According to Buddhist teaching, we're trapped in an endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, a cycle of suffering driven by desire. The goal is nirvana: to be released from the cycle through intense self-discipline, right action, right speech, right meditation, right understanding. You have to get everything right.
"The Buddha took 530 lives to achieve this," Kanishka explains. As a young man entering his third year at university, he decided it was time to take his religion seriously.
The Pursuit of Enlightenment
While studying arts and law at Sydney University, Kanishka threw himself into Buddhist practice. He read Buddhist literature. He visited the temple and spoke with monks. He practiced meditation with renewed discipline. He was committed to gaining total control over every part of his mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual life.
"You're trying to purify your desires because desire is really the root of all the suffering," he says. "You desire the wrong things. You desire what you can't have. You have what you want, but you can't keep it the way you desire to hold on to it. And so this desire and the frustration of desire and the misdirection of desire creates the suffering which keeps you locked into the cycle."
It was serious, intentional religious devotion, but it was about to collide with something completely unexpected.
The Beach Mission That Changed Everything
At the end of his third year at university, Kanishka went on holiday with a group of friends, some of who were Christian friends. The group stopped at a beach mission to pick up some of the team before heading on to their final destination. Kanishka had never experienced anything like a beach mission before.
After lunch, someone said, "Oh, Kanishka, we're going to pray now, so you might want to have a walk on the beach."
"Is it okay if I just stay here?" he asked.
So he sat with this group of twenty-somethings and listened to them pray. It completely blew his mind.
"Suddenly their heads were bowed. They were talking to God. They were talking about the mission. They were talking about families they'd met during the week and about other missions which had problems with tents or whatever."
Kanishka found himself thinking, "Who are they talking to? What is going on here?"
That evening, he sat down with his friend Andrew after the youth gathering. Because Kanishka had spent the year reading Buddhism, he felt confident enough to ask: "What's the deal? Why are you a Christian?"
Andrew's answer was simple. He said being a Christian meant he'd lost control of his life to Jesus Christ.
For someone committed to gaining total control over every aspect of life to achieve enlightenment, this was provocative. "A guy who at best was dead 2,000 years ago," Kanishka thought. But Andrew was a friend he respected. So he agreed to read the two pocket editions Andrew gave him of the Gospels: Mark and John.
Kanishka read Mark's Gospel the next day. "I thought, 'Oh, I've heard some of these stories. I never knew they came from here.'" It was interesting but not life-changing. The pocket Gospel of John sat unread for about six weeks.
Until that humid January night…
Three Times Through John
Unable to sleep, Kanishka remembered his promise to Andrew and pulled out John's Gospel. "I thought, 'Ah, that'll probably put me to sleep.'"
It began: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
"I thought, well, this sounds like a fairy tale. Sounds like once upon a time."
But the more he read, the less it sounded like a fairy tale. In fact, he thought: "This is history. I'm reading about things that happened."
The contrast with Buddhism struck him immediately. Buddhist texts were written 250 years after the Buddha's life, an oral tradition recorded by people who had never spoken to him. But John's Gospel was written within 60 years of Jesus' life, probably by someone who knew him: the disciple John himself.
As a law student at the time, this hit home for him, "It sounds like a witness statement," Kanishka realized. "It's got a historical veracity to it that you can pick up off the pages."
More than that, Jesus emerged from the scriptures as a real person, someone with friends and enemies, compassion and mission, someone interacting in surprising situations. "There's an authenticity about that account," he says. "You get a sense of the personality because the personality matters."
The Phrase That Divided Him
As Kanishka read through John's Gospel for the first time, God drew his attention to a phrase that appeared multiple times: "At this the people were divided."
Jesus would do something, and John would note that the people were divided in their response. Kanishka found himself turning the phrase inward: "Jesus divides people. People are against him or for him. I'm against him. Why am I against him?"
It was a question he found hard to answer.
"I thought, no, this is authentic. This is true. These things that I'm reading, these are true things. Why am I against Jesus?"
So he read it again. And then a third time.
The Last Day
On his third reading, around one in the morning, Kanishka reached John 6:44. Jesus says: "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them to me, and I will raise them up on the last day."
Most people reading that verse focus on predestination, the idea that the Father must draw people to Jesus. But Kanishka was reading as a Buddhist, and what struck him was the expression "the last day."
"As far as I knew, life was just an endless cycle of birth and death and rebirth. And you were never going to get out of it, and it was going to go on forever."
But suddenly Jesus was talking about a line with an endpoint. A last day. "When is it? This is a bit of a problem because I'm kind of counting on at least 530 lives, right? Not having a last day."
Then he read verse 45: "It is written in the prophets, 'They will all be taught by God.' Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me."
"Well, I've been reading this thing. I've been learning about Jesus. Reading this book. And Jesus says, 'Everyone who learns from the Father comes to me.'"
The Spirit convicted him. "Right, I've got to come to Jesus now."
Kanishka remembered that when he was 15, the Gideons had come to his high school and given out New Testaments. He remembered that at the back was a prayer to pray if you wanted to be a Christian.
He went rummaging through his desk, found the book, opened it up, and read the prayer.
Then he went to bed and fell asleep.
The next day, he started telling people he'd decided to follow Jesus.
The Response
His Christian friends were overjoyed, and not entirely surprised. "We've been praying for you for years," they told him.
It was only then that Kanishka began to understand the full scope of God's work in his life. His grandmother, his father's Christian mother, had undoubtedly prayed for him before she passed away. His friend from school who had become a Christian at 14 had told his youth group about Kanishka. "A bunch of teenagers, some of whom didn't even know me, had been praying for me."
What felt like one night was actually the culmination of years of faithful prayer.
"When I got the word into my hand and God opened my heart, it was in response to the prayers of God's people."
Time to Tell Mum
The hardest conversation was with his mother. His father had died when Kanishka was eight, leaving her to raise three children alone in a country where they had no extended family. Buddhism was deeply important to her.
Kanishka tried to find the right moment to tell her. One day while gardening, he prayed about it. The clouds parted, the sun shone on his face, and he thought, "Maybe that's how it works. Maybe this is God telling me to go tell mum."
He started walking inside. Just as he reached the door, the phone rang. His mother answered it and was on the call for a while.
"That wasn't it,"
Within a week, he was walking down the corridor when his mother called out from her bedroom: "Oh, son, is there something you want to tell me?"
He sat on the bed and said, "Look, I've been reading the Bible and I've decided to follow Jesus."
Her response? "That would please your grandmother."
Later, it became much more difficult. She was very upset, worried that it was a rejection of their family or heritage, that somehow he didn't love her. "I think it just took a while to say, 'I do love you. This is not a criticism. This is not a rejection. I've met God in his son, and so I need to do this, but that doesn't make me love you any less.'"
Years later, when Kanishka first preached, his mother came and sat in the front pew. "She cried for the entire service," he recalls. But she also joined the language ministry at his church in Perth, made Christian friends, and was deeply impacted by their love. After she passed away, friends told Kanishka: "Your mother never stopped talking about her Perth friends."
From Law to Ministry
After becoming a Christian at 21, Kanishka joined St. Paul's Castle Hill and then moved to St. Paul's Carlingford, partly to be near a young woman named Kaylee, whom he'd met at a school debate.
God gave Kanishka an immediate desire to share the gospel. "I just felt like this was the best-kept secret that there was. I would be walking down the street thinking, 'Wow, I wonder if you know about Jesus. You need to know about Jesus.'"
He contemplated dropping out of university to pursue ministry but was counseled to finish his law degree first. He worked as a lawyer for a time, which allowed him and Kaylee to save money for theological college. Eventually, he applied to be ordained in the Diocese of Sydney.
After college, they served in Canberra for three and a half years before moving to Perth in 1999, where Kanishka became rector of St. Matthew's Shenton Park. They stayed for nearly 17 years.
"We had a wonderful time," he reflects. "It is a tremendous privilege to be a pastor, to live among God's people and to serve among and with God's people."
Back to Sydney
In 2015, Archbishop Glenn Davies invited Kanishka to return to Sydney as Dean of the Cathedral. It was an unexpected opportunity to reach the city through ministry in the workplace, civic events, and the unique openness of a cathedral where "the doors are wide open, literally and metaphorically, and all kinds of people walk in."
They led the cathedral through the challenges of COVID, producing 37 weeks of pre-recorded services that reached a global audience. "Every week we'd get emails from Peru and Singapore and India and the United States," Kanishka remembers. But by week 37, he was exhausted from preaching to a camera.
In May 2021, Kanishka was elected Archbishop of Sydney, the first person of non-European background to hold the position.
Treasuring Christ More Than Reputation
Being Archbishop means navigating public scrutiny, media interviews, and cultural pressure to compromise biblical truth. When asked how he approaches these challenges, Kanishka's answer is simple: "I want to honour the Lord. I want to be faithful to him."
He asks people to pray for "wisdom and courage." When he says courage, he clarifies: "What I mean is that I wouldn't have the fear of humans, that I would have the fear of God."
"We don't have anything to fear from the unbelieving world," he says, "because the worst it can do is put you to death, and death has been defeated and you're off to heaven. So I want to treasure Christ more than my own reputation or anything else."
When he speaks to the media, his goal is straightforward: "I want to tell them what the Bible says, why it says it, why it's trustworthy. Then they do the editing. But I just want to be faithful and consistent."
Advice to His Younger Self
Looking back over decades of ministry, Kanishka offers two pieces of advice he wishes he'd known earlier.
First: Read more Christian biographies. The witness of Christians from previous generations, from the Apostle Paul to the early church fathers, from Luther and Calvin to Spurgeon and Billy Graham, provides tremendous encouragement. "There's just a tremendous amount to be learned from that, to encourage you in the way in which scripture has been a bottomless resource for the life of devotion and service to which we're all called in every generation."
Second: Get to know older Christians in your church. When Kanishka was a young rector in Perth, a small group of Christians 30 years older than him attended a 6:30 AM Thursday prayer meeting. "They were at the prayer meeting praying for me, praying for our ministries, praying for our church family. And I benefited so much from their ministry as well as their testimony and example. God blesses us with each other…"
He Draws Us To Him
Kanishka's story is a reminder that conversion is always God's work. A Buddhist student reading John's Gospel three times in one night. A grandmother's prayers. Teenage friends interceding for someone they barely knew. A friend at a beach mission speaking just the right words at just the right time.
"No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them to me," Jesus said. And somehow, in his kindness, God drew a young man committed to self-discipline and total control into a relationship based on surrender, grace, and losing control.
That humid January night in 1986, Kanishka Raffel discovered what Buddhists spend 530 lifetimes searching for: not escape from suffering through personal achievement, but rescue from sin through the finished work of Jesus. Not an endless cycle, but a last day. Not self-salvation, but a Saviour.
And nearly forty years later, he's still telling people about it.
Listen to the full conversation with Archbishop Kanishka Raffel on Episode 200 of the Chip Lunch podcast, available wherever you listen to podcasts.
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