Matrimony comes to S.N. Goenka

Like most in his community, Goenka began to establish his own family when he was quite young, not long after he left school and took up the family business. His marriage with the eldest daughter of a family friend of the same community—a man by the name of Balchand Makharia, who was a close neighbor—had been arranged many years earlier. When it came to marriage, Goenka was once again rebellious. He insisted that, unlike his two older brothers who had been married to child brides at the young age of fifteen, he would not be married until the age of eighteen. He was able to convince his family to allow this to happen based on the palm reading of an astrologer, who warned that he would face great difficulty in his eighteenth year and perhaps even die. Goenka claimed to have used this as a pretense to push back the date of his marriage for the sake of the young bride.

An excerpt from Daniel Stuart’s S. N. Goenka: Emissary of Insight (Lives of the Masters), describing the circumstances around Goenka’s marriage. Future posts will look more deeply into the book, and we hope to have Daniel on the Insight Myanmar Podcast at some point to discuss his new book.