The Science of Swimology
Recently, the Vipassanā organization of S.N. Goenka released a four-minute animated cartoon on YouTube, created around a story that Goenka tells during an evening discourse on his 10-day silent retreats. Whether one hears this story on a 10-day course or on this video, it is easy to get drawn in, as Goenka is a very engaging storyteller, and we can sense his audience is with him when we hear occasionally laughter from meditators in the background.
The narrative is simple enough: a learned professor traveling by ship provides daily lectures, which are attended by an old sailor. One day, after his talk has ended, the professor asks if the sailor has studied geology, and when the sailor replies in the negative, the professor regrets to inform him that he has wasted one quarter of his life. After his talk on the subsequent two days, he inquires about the sailor’s knowledge of “oceanology” (more commonly known as oceanography) and meteorology. With each negative response, the professor sadly tells the old man that he has wasted an additional quarter of his life, adding up to three-fourths in total, since he hasn’t studied the science of the earth he lives on, the sea he sails on or the weather around him every day. Since the old sailor is so in awe of the professor’s erudition, he takes the put-downs to heart, each time growing a bit sadder. The twist comes when the sailor rushes in on the final day to ask the professor if he has studied “swimology.” When the professor gruffly tells him he hasn’t heard of it, the sailor asks, “Can you swim, sir?” When the professor says he cannot, the old sailor regrets to inform him that in that case, he has wasted all of his life, since the ship is sinking and only those who can swim to shore will survive.
So what do we make of this story? Someone watching the animated version without benefit of having taken a 10-day meditation course may understand it merely as a humorous story, told for its own sake, while others hearing it out of context may have no idea at all of its purpose. However, in the context of a retreat, its underlying meaning is clear: it highlights the value of what Goenka often refers to as “the practical aspect of Dhamma,” an inspiration to practice seriously. There is likely more than one possible meaning to take away from story as it applies to the role of practice in daily life. For some, it stresses the importance of time on the cushion over academic learning and intellectual pursuits, while for others it more generally illustrates the value of practicing Dhamma over anything else at all in life. In either case, it reinforces a wider motivation in Goenka’s mission that prioritizes formal meditation practice.
This focus should not be seen as isolated to Goenka’s own personal perspective, or even his particular training and lineage, although these are certainly important factors. Interest in Buddhist meditation around this time (from the 1960s onward), among teachers and traditions in Burma and Thailand as well as among their Western students, who were mostly young hippies, was largely focused on on-the-cushion meditative insights. So Goenka is certainly not alone in his emphasis on sitting practice, and while the precious teaching that Goenka brought to the world has been one of the greatest catalysts for the spread of Dhamma practice to non-Buddhist countries, it does not mean that he and his organization are above critique. His swimology story can be used as a springboard to illustrate how they take this focus on formal practice to an extreme, in a way that goes so far as to suppresses theoretical study and critical thought.
First, let’s look at the video itself before examining the story’s deeper meaning. Animations of audio input has become increasingly common in our YouTube era, whether it be a short Louis CK joke or excerpts from the Joe Rogan podcast. So it’s refreshing to see an organization that teaches to an ancient path of liberation endeavor to reach a wider audience by using modern day technology. That said, as with all such productions, that shift opens the door to an analysis of its imagery, as the animators are required to make certain choices in a visual medium that do not arise in a purely oral telling. And in this particular case, there are some glaring issues in the animators’ choices. Foremost is the disappointing decision to make the erudite, apparently well-to-do professor white-skinned, and the poor, uneducated sailor dark-skinned. At a time when people’s consciousness about racism has been raised around the world, moving some meditation traditions—though clearly not all—to examine bias and privilege within their communities, the decision to assign skin color according to education and status is both oblivious and disheartening, to say the least.
Another questionable decision by the animators concerns the literal death of the academic, which is only inferred in the oral telling. But the animators chose to depict the water climbing up and engulfing the professor’s body, drowning him as the sailor swims away. The macabre scene of a human, even a cartoon one, realizing he will soon die—and then actually drowning—is disturbing to say the least, and the harmless and perhaps even welcoming student laughter in the background begins to sound downright creepy. At this point, I wonder if even for some of those sympathetic to Goenka’s overall message, there wouldn’t be some agreement that the moral could and should have been achieved through a less morbid means.
And there’s the minor but obvious issue of misspelling “meteorology” as “meterology,” in large letters on one of the plaques used to highlight each of the professor’s three “-ologies.” Even though Goenka’s non-native English pronunciation sounds like “meterology,” that is no reason not to have spelled the word correctly. In an animation with very few words shown on the screen, allowing a simple spelling error like that—especially highlighted, and in such large letters—only serves to create an unnecessarily amateurish impression, whether due to an oversight, overzealous fealty to their teacher, or any other reason.
Finally, there is an issue to consider when the sailor informs the professor about the sinking ship. In the oral version, Goenka gives no explicit indication of the sailor’s state of mind, yet he does say, “The next day, it was the turn of the old man,” which alludes to the possibility of payback. So was the old sailor satisfied that the professor was finally going to suffer, after bearing his insulting the previous three days, thus illustrating the workings of karma? Or was the sailor genuinely concerned for the professor’s welfare? Or maybe he was just innocently (and perhaps humorously) informing him about another field of study, in spite of the dire situation? Even though Goenka does not give any indication in the oral version, assigning the old sailor a clear facial expression in this visual medium would have helped flesh out the story’s full meaning—especially since the animators had already gratuitously gone one step further than Goenka’s original by showing the actual death of the professor.
In fact, the primary purpose of the stories that Goenka tells during the ten-discourse is their allegorical meaning, which is perhaps what he alludes to through his frequent, light-hearted aside, “Story is story,” at some unusual or unlikely turn. But while the story’s fundamental meaning is the exhortation to practice, is there a deeper meaning? Let’s turn our attention there.
Simply put, one of the striking features of these four minutes is how it conveys an anti-intellectual message. The academic is portrayed as cold, arrogant, and judgmental; his fields of study are shown to be inadequate, inconsequential, and quite clearly a waste of time. So one can certainly draw the conclusion that the story is also meant to illustrate the emptiness of academic study to a meditator on their journey seeking liberation through the Buddha’s teachings. I think everyone would agree, at least, that making the academic so unlikeable and then (literally) killing him off is certainly not to convey a positive message!
And in fact, I’m proof that at least one person drew this anti-intellectual conclusion: At the time that I was sitting all those courses and hearing those stories on loop, along with similar messaging expressed continually throughout the discourses and reinforced by organizational policies, I happened to be in the process of looking at grad school options. “Swimology” played a somewhat prominent role for me then, pitting my own worldly plans against the fledgling spiritual path I was still trying to work out. More than once I declared to anyone who would listen that my happiness and satisfaction could be just as easily sought by being a gas station attendant as a grad school student, since academic fields were little more than factories that encouraged you to, as Goenka says, “roll in thoughts” (though as you might expect, my parents were none too happy to hear this). Granted, I may have taken the suggestion more extremely than was intended, but it was not something I pulled out of thin air—my grad school career reminded me of the professor’s path, while the gas station attendant was a kind of landlocked parallel to the old sailor.
But there seems to be a deeper level to this anti-intellectual message than just worldly knowledge, since Goenka’s overriding concern is the path of liberation from suffering. I believe it is meant to illustrate the contrast between the value of meditation practice and the study of the Buddhist scriptural and commentarial tradition, with the vivid juxtaposition that latter road wastes one’s time, while the former carries one inexorably towards salvation. This interpretation actually fits quite comfortably into the wider worldview of Goenka’s organization, and although this may seem stark and an unfair characterization for some, Goenka himself has said, “For a student who is practicing meditation [i.e., the vipassana technique promoted at centers in this tradition], with one hundred percent faith in what is being taught, it is not necessary to go to pariyatti [scriptural learning] for more interpretation or guidance.” His reasoning for this is that the student should avoid even reading contrary interpretations from what is being taught, as he goes on to say: “But if a student comes across a book which gives a totally different interpretation of Buddha’s teaching, then certainly confusion will be created in the mind of the student, and the student will find it difficult to progress in Dhamma.”
Among the many Buddhist (or “Dhammic”, to use the organization’s word of choice) activities offered at centers, none include any form of study. Pretty much the only exceptions are a short course on the Maha Satipatthana Sutta, which largely serves more as a platform for Goenka to attempt to link the technique with the sutta than a proper study of this scripture on its own merits; and the occasional Pāḷi course, which is only open to committed old students, and in a limited number of locations. Just as concerning, the organization minimizes the scriptural learning of previous lineage holders to shoehorn history into its particular narrative. There are many examples. For instance, some teachers in the organization have claimed as a fact that Webu Sayadaw dropped out of the prestigious Masoyein Monastery because he ultimately realized that study was useless, yet there is zero historical evidence for this; it is pure conjecture. Perhaps the most colorful example is the oft-repeated story of Saya Thet Gyi ordering several learned meditation students to burn all their books. While this may have happened, rather than considering it as a “teaching moment” for those several students in particular, it’s over-emphasized as a defining feature in Saya Thet Gyi’s belief system as a meditation teacher: namely, that he devalued scriptural knowledge. Well, while the reason for that particular decision to burn the books may be lost in the mists of history, a fact that has not been lost is that as Saya Thet Gyi began his lay teaching career, he was so concerned that his scriptural learning was not up to the task that he not only memorized Ledi’s words, but also the very page numbers they were on, and constantly referred to Ledi’s books to ensure his own meditation was on track.
One might think it would be more challenging to minimize the importance that Ledi Sayadaw assigned to scriptural study, as he is one of the greatest and most prolific intellectual masters in all of Burmese monastic history, and the author of over one hundred works on Buddhist theory. And yet the organization still finds a way to superimpose its present-day bias by claiming that Ledi far preferred meditation to study, a view that becomes quite problematic the more one learns about him, such as through the work of Erik Braun in The Birth of Insight.
It’s not a stretch at all to infer that, as these lineage holders were all quite devout Burmese Buddhists, educated in a traditional system, none of them would ever have deigned to pursue a meditation practice disconnected from the Pāḷi Cannon, the Commentaries, their past monastic teachers, or the writings of other master teachers, nor would they have dreamed of teaching even a single set of instructions without going to great lengths to show how it was supported by the scriptures. Again, there are many examples of this, but a recent one is that Sayagyi U Ba Khin did not dare to open his International Meditation Center until several renowned monks signed off on the fact that his proposed technique was adequately in accordance with the scriptures.
No one who has glimpsed the promise of liberation from suffering would ever deny the power or import of meditation practice. So I have no argument at all with Goenka’s passionate exhortation to prioritize practice and dedicate oneself to awakening. My concern is the lengths to which he goes, in this and other stories and instructions, to diminish and denigrate academic study, particularly study centered in the scriptures (unless to reinforce his own, idiosyncratic interpretation), even though many renowned practitioners across history and the spectrum of Buddhist traditions believe that scriptural study provides an important foundation on which one’s practice can grow. To so strongly dissuade the practitioner from going to the source, as it were, let alone seeking out other perspectives, becomes an attack on critical thought itself, and an injunction to adhere to the organizational narrative as closely as possible, period. Reading other interpretations is highly discouraged, and even more, an element of fear is added with more than subtle warnings about the confusion, or even serious harm, that would inevitably result from doing so, even in small measure. This messaging works to diminish the overall role of critical capacity within the tradition, with continual reminders that only sitting—in this tradition, with this technique and only this technique—can provide answers, thus setting up a kind of reinforced feedback loop, in which potential transgressions are discouraged by warnings of harm, and active transgressions are punished through blacklisting from courses.
Carry this messaging to its logical conclusion, and you’re not very far off from the current Republican attacks on science. In other words, an insular, anti-intellectual view that discourages critical thought and discourse has given rise to convenient “alternative facts” that replace documented history, and a groupthink preferring to stay within its own messaging than to confront what the data show. There are numerous signposts that alert us to this trend: from photoshopping beads out of Ledi Sayadaw’s hands in perhaps the most well-known portrait of the great monk, as the organization’s research and publishing arm, the Vipassana Research Institute did, because Goenka forbids their use at his centers; insisting on the truth of an undocumented chain of teachers stretching unbroken to the Buddha himself, although the historical record is pretty clear that Ledi formulated his teaching himself from the scriptures and the Visudhimagga; or proselytizing about the tradition’s “pristine purity” of teaching as the one and only thing the Buddha taught as meditation. These are some of the clear consequences of the steady devaluing of the role that wise discernment should play.
Which brings us back around to the story. Can one imagine a similar version of this tale in which the study and practice of swimology are promoted as encouragements to dedicate ourselves to meditation, without conflating it with a fear of intellectual curiosity and critical thinking? Can there be an exhortation to practice that doesn’t also denigrate the value of overall academia in general, and scriptural study in particular? And taking a more bird’s eye view of the organization’s approach through the lens of this four-minute video, how can the value of the precious teaching that Goenka brought to the lay world be promulgated on its own merits, without artifice, anti-study messages, or the need to distort the historical record?
I don’t know the answers to those questions, nor am I aware of any official, transparent attempts to address them. But even if they as yet have no answers, I hope that teachers and others in the organization today are at least open to taking these questions seriously.