Steve Smith, Part 2
Coming Soon…
“My real sense of immersion was in the mid-1970s,” Steve Smith notes, recalling his experiences in Burma, “just descending on that rural village, up north, where Mahasi comes from…”
In the second of our three-part series with Steve Smith, a teacher in the Mahasi tradition, he continues reflecting on his half-century exploration into the country’s spirituality, culture, and politics, while also sharing what he learned from prolonged and intimate contact with some of the greatest meditation teachers and civil leaders of the day.
When Steve and his friends arrived in Seikhun, Mahasi Sayadaw’s village, the great monk was giving a discourse to a large number of villagers. He suddenly paused the talk and requested some lay supporters to help these recently arrived foreign yogis get settled. Steve was struck by the fact that it seemed that nearly the entire village was there to listen to the talk, which demonstrated the extent to which this rural community prioritized the Buddha’s teachings. He notes that to them, the Dhamma was like “the glue that holds it all together.”
But Steve’s fellow practitioners weren’t limited to local villagers living near the monastery. Senior government ministers, future democratic leaders, business magnates, and others with elite social standings practiced alongside him, such as U Tin Oo, Aung San Suu Kyi, and U Maung Khin. “There was no division [between the worldly and the spiritual]!” he states emphatically. “[Practicing Dhamma] wasn't something you did, and then you take a break from doing that, and go do something completely different and unrelated. It seemed seamless to me.”
Between meditation sessions, Steve remembers long conversations that meandered between politics and practice. There at the monastery, in that oasis of calm, some activists had just emerged after years of incarceration as political prisoners, while others would sadly find themselves jailed, in exile, or even killed in the years that followed. As for Steve, his association earned him a blacklist for decades from the military regime that spied on foreign visitors and democratic activists alike, and he was only permitted to return once Aung San Suu Kyi was installed as State Councilor in 2015.
Steve’s fascinating, first-hand account of the role that meditation practice played in the upper echelons of the democracy movement is one that perhaps has never been examined thoroughly by any past scholar or historian, making his reflections all the more valuable
“The people I was talking with were leaders of the country, and had been working for the previous dictator or tyrant, and were now beginning to prepare to work toward a democratic motion, a movement toward changing the whole culture,” he says. “And then the meditation part was just like, the food they ate, the air they breathed. I assume that they felt that their balance and their capacity and the purity of their intentions came out of their deep and silent meditative practices to be able to take on such a huge endeavor.”
It was quite an experience for a young Westerner to suddenly find himself among such august figures, and it did much to inform his own spiritual path. Where some have criticized Asian forms of Buddhism as being less socially active than the Engaged Buddhism of the West, Steve found a very different reality taking shape before him. “That gave me a huge injection of inspiration and admiration. At a young age, I was fully embracing meditation to the degree that I probably was ignoring the social and political aspects of things, and I was just so one-pointedly into finding and practicing an authentic meditation system. So it was a welcome awakening, to see that there was no difference!” Indeed, he was witnessing an attempt to “create a democratic society that was inspired and informed from the purity of their silent mind,” emerging from one of the world’s most repressive military dictatorships.
When Steve traveled or return back home to Hawaii, he often found himself disappointed that Buddhist and mindfulness communities elsewhere weren’t able—or even interested in trying—to integrate meditation with social engagement. Yet as he reflected on his time in Burma, he became more convinced that “the same generative and ancient teachings of the Buddha [were being] applied in their deepest personal, psychological, emotional, spiritual lives, as well as how it influenced their social, and government and business lives as well. It seemed effortless and seamless, just like such a natural thing.”
In sharp contrast to the inspiring and intertwined nature of the democratic and vipassana movements, however, was the brutality of the military. He observed a “division of a forceful and [tyrannic] government by oppression, side by side with some of the greatest spiritual leaders of the past centuries, of bringing a line of connection from the 1800s into our modern era… the core of anything that's going to shine brightly and work for humanity is a culture that has a profound spiritual teaching and guidance, absent of any fanaticism.” And it was this new style of governance that many of Steve’s fellow yogis were trying to work out, between breaks from their practice.
For Steve, the French expression “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” [the more things change, the more they remain the same] is certainly relevant in describing how the political environment of Burma a half century ago has transformed into unified resistance against yet another oppressive military dictator. However, he is the first to acknowledge that his finger may no longer be on the pulse of either the democratic or vipassana movements in Myanmar. “I have the feeling it's a Burma or Myanmar that is unlike any I've known in the last 45 years since I've been going to that country. I don't know what to think of people being afraid and that the access to practice in monasteries, to certain teachings of nuns or monks, may not be as available.”
Steve feels tremendous gratitude for the instructions he received so generously as a lay meditator and monk in Burma, the result of painstakingly care in assuring the transmission of the teachings from one generation to the next… and ultimately to foreign seekers. “One understands the purpose then of the ordained Sangha, the monks and nuns, and the strict discipline they follow to keep it sacred and to keep it really protected. One understands how the oral tradition lasted for so many centuries, and then being written down, but still being memorized.”
In return, he has given back in different ways over the years, from supporting health and education projects throughout the Sagaing Hills, to fundraising for nuns, to organizing annual acupuncture treatment for villagers. And for someone who never really saw clear distinctions between the spiritual and political, he also lent a hand when his Burmese friends found themselves in the crosshairs of the regime. Steve worked to help some get safely out of the country, while providing cameras and satellite phones to others who chose to remain and document the military’s atrocities.
He also learned much from his monastic teachers about how to respond effectively to tyranny. In particular, he describes how Sayadaw U Pandita approached this challenge. The great monk never engaged in acts of overt defiance or explicit advocacy, yet unmistakably signaled his displeasure in subtle ways. “It was just as effective as any overt political activity, and in some ways it can be more influential,” he says. “Those who observe it hear about these ways of showing that one is not going along with the incorrect behavior that that affects a populace, a community, a country.” To Steve, this was the Burmese Saṅgha in its very best form: a calm nobility in standing up for righteousness, creating a ripple effect that impacted all of lay society.
“It was a welcome awakening to see that there was no difference [between] the two components: the meditative inward life, and the expressive, outward creative,” Steve comments, summing up his deepest lessons from the Golden Land. “Life didn't have to bring them together, they were seamless! They fed each other in a kind of beautiful cycle, if you had the depth and inspiration and vision to understood what it meant to have pure intention.”