Where Ledi Sayadaw lived and practiced....

Ledi Sayadaw was a key figure in the development and spread of Vipassana, and so for meditators coming to the Golden Land, visiting the sites where he lived, taught, and practiced can be greatly inspiring. This is why most of our Myanmar Pilgrimage dhamma tours pass through the Monywa region, and time is spent visiting and learning about this great monk. 

To hear just one anecdote now about his accomplishments, take his support for females in learning the Dhamma:

Unusual for his time, Ledi Sayadaw actively taught young girls as well as boys. He believed that if they gained more peace and wisdom, that would spread throughout their future families when they became wives and mothers. Like other of Ledi’s teachings, the consequences of this initiative were both short- and long-term, and developed in ways that even Ledi likely did not foresee.

One example of a woman who benefited from greater accessibility to Dhamma was Mya May. In 1905, Mya May did something that would likely not have been possible for a woman prior to that time, and which would come to have far-ranging repercussions for the spread of Dhamma even well beyond Burma’s borders: she sponsored a German man, Anton Gueth, to become a full bhikkhu in Burma. (Gueth had come to Burma to visit the British monk Ānanda Metteya. A wealthy woman by that point, Mya May also sponsored Kyundaw Monastery in Rangoon, where both monks ended up residing for a time.) She would become well known to German Buddhists through her sponsorship of Gueth, and was credited with helping bring the Dhamma to Germany. He became the Venerable Nyanatiloka, and practiced deep samādhi in the Sagaing Hills under a reputed Arahant, later going to Sri Lanka to study Pāḷi and the scriptures. Venerable Nyanatiloka was one of the first Western monastics to become a key figure in the spread of Buddhism to Western audiences, through his translations and other Buddhist-related initiatives across Europe and beyond. Mya May and her husband were also quite involved in Buddhist missionary work and hoped to bring the Buddha’s teachings to the West; Ledi supported their effort by writing the Vipassanādīpanī, which was then translated by Sayadaw U Ñāṇa of Masoyein monastery and distributed abroad. And although only circulated among a small following at that time, it later received its due in 1965, when the Buddha Sāsana Council reprinted it under Sayagyi U Ba Khin’s guidance, and then again when Sayagyi U Goenka’s Vipassanā Research Institute included it in the “Manuals of Dhamma.”

 Mya May’s granddaughter, Mya Sein, also became famous in her own right. She was the first Burmese woman to study at a British university, and once gave a talk at the British Parliament on the subject of Burmese independence, eventually becoming a history lecturer at the University of Rangoon and visiting professor at various American and British universities. It was this same Mya Sein who encouraged a young and distraught S.N. Goenka not to leave his initial 10-day course with Sayagyi U Ba Khin in 1955. She was, in Daw Onmar’s view, a “good meditator,” perhaps an understatement given her ability to enter into the “unconditioned state” whenever traveling by plane in order to avoid air sickness! And all this can be traced back to Ledi Sayadaw's forward-looking views...