Escaping the draft, Aryadaka traveled the world; he went to India, Nepal, the Himalayas, Morocco, and Afghanistan. He converted to Buddhism in his twenties, during his imprisonment in 1974 for 22 months in Finland on a drug charge, when he joined the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, now the Triratna Buddhist Community. He discovered Buddhism out of his prison experience, when he took meditation seriously and found dharma in his cell. He returned to the US 1981, and began teaching meditation in his home, and started a family in 1984.