Meditation under Ledi Sayadaw: Hiding in Plain Sight All Along!

Ledi Sayadaw was certainly endowed with enormous dynamism and intellect, and an ability to think outside the box. He saw opportunities and possibilities where others did not. Specifically, he broadened people’s understanding of what was allowable within the scripture regarding spiritual development. From our present vantage point, where there is now such open and widespread access to Buddhist meditation, it is a given that insight practice is possible even for householders with full lives; they do not need to cultivate a base of very deep absorption, or commit to taking robes and renouncing the world. While this had scarcely even been acknowledged as a theoretical possibility before Ledi, he taught that householders could cultivate bhāvanā, and that justification for this (at that time) radical perspective had actually been hiding in plain sight all along, in the scriptures and other works such, as the Visuddhimagga.