Meditating On History
Coming Soon….
“I’d say this book has had a long gestation process… my audience has always been first and foremost, the practitioner, because I feel like that’s really what this material is for. It’s for the people who are in the tradition,” explains Daniel M. Stuart about his recent book, Insight in Perspective.
This work addresses the history and formation of the S.N. Goenka Vipassana tradition, and grew out of decades of research and personal involvement in both the scholarly and meditative worlds. This is his second book on this general topic: his earlier work is a biography of S.N. Goenka called Emissary of Insight, which he wrote for a broader audience. He says Insight in Perspective began as a brief academic critique but expanded into a comprehensive historical and interpretive study, merging archival research with lived experience. His aim was to bridge two audiences—the committed practitioner and the academic scholar— because “this material is for the people who are in the tradition,” yet also needs to be placed in conversation with the scholarly discourses that have shaped global understanding of Buddhism.
Stuart situates his work partly as a response to Eric Braun’s The Birth of Insight (2013), an influential book about the start of the modern mass mindfulness meditation movement. While recognizing the validity of some of that book’s main assertions, Stuart argues that overall, Braun’s scholarly narrative is much too restrictive. He summarizes Braun’s thesis as being that the insight movement is a manifestation of “Buddhist Modernism,” a rationalized, secularized reinterpretation of Buddhism that privileges science and modern values. Stuart put it simply: this narrative sketches out the very incomplete picture of a movement “born of a few Southeast Asian [reformers] reacting to colonialism and scaling up mass meditation.” He argues that this prevailing understanding presumes that monastic figures like Ledi Sayadaw and Mahasi Sayadaw can be neatly fit into Buddhist orthodoxy and Western sociological, “scientized” expectations and categories. He further explains that in this process, the roles of lay practitioners such as U Ba Khin and S.N. Goenka have been overlooked or mischaracterized because their lives resist easy classification. To attend to individuals rather than abstractions, Stuart insists, is to encounter a far more intricate and at times uncomfortable picture—one in which faith, personality, and cultural translation all play defining roles. So he approached his own book as a way to help close this gap in the scholarship.
That said, there were some thorny challenges in reconstructing a fuller, more nuanced account of such a rich and complex story. For example, many who participated in the early decades of Goenka’s teaching chose to remain silent about some historical details and, in particular, about internal conflicts, often out of loyalty or fear of complicating the narrative, according to Stuart. From the tradition’s point of view, of course, silence is a practical strategy; conflict is seen as a distraction from “the work of teaching the Dhamma.” For the scholar, however, those very complications are vital to understanding how teachings change and communities form. This tension defines what Stuart calls the challenge of being a “scholar-practitioner,” where “you want to complicate things more” while also remaining committed to the tradition and its teaching.
One informant who was more forthcoming was the late Friedgard Lottermoser, but even then, with significant conditions. A German-born disciple of U Ba Khin, she guarded her memories for decades before finally recording many hours of conversation with Insight Myanmar—but with the condition that they not be published until after her death. Stuart also spoke with her, and recalls that although she shared some valuable material with him, she remained reluctant to reveal it all, believing certain teachings were “only for people within the tradition.”
Stuart returns to his critique that Western scholarship has been too eager to fit every contemporary Buddhist movement into a rationalized, demystified mold. “If you reduce everything to [modernism],” he says, “you miss out on a lot… often the most important stuff that’s going on!” He says that while Goenka employs the language of science and universalism, the roots of his teaching are actually steeped in Burmese cosmology, healing, the use of students’ and teachers’ supernormal powers, as well as calling on unseen beings and ritual chanting for protection.
The paradox is that even while Goenka’s meditation centers publicly emphasize the meditation technique as secular and universal, advanced practitioners in the tradition often discuss psychic experiences and cosmological forces. Stuart notes that this tension has historical roots stretching back to the nineteenth century, in particular to Ledi Sayadaw, considered by Goenka practitioners to be the founding figure of the teaching lineage that includes Maung Po Thet (Saya Thet Gyi), Sayagyi U Ba Khin and S.N. Goenka. In Stuart’s view, early Buddhist “modernizers” not only did not reject the supernatural, they integrated it fully into their work. When Goenka expanded the tradition beyond Burma’s borders, those more esoteric and magical elements were suppressed in public discourse but continued to be woven into its structure and ethos. Indeed, Stuart says, “we have very good examples on the ethnographic record of Goenka making many of his decisions based on consultation with nonhuman forces.” Stuart argues that Goenka was not dissimulating in his public-facing discourse, and sincerely believed that the rational and the magical could coexist without contradiction. Stuart also emphasizes that simplifying the story of the tradition’s meditation origins was not manipulative or deceitful, but pedagogical. “That’s what everyone does,” he says, agreeing with a point that anthropologist Gustaaf Houtman made on a prior episode, that teachers must select the story their audience can absorb. The real question, Stuart adds, is “What did Goenka believe himself?”— and in his judgment at least, Goenka’s sincerity is beyond doubt.
Yet this coexistence of rational presentations with supernormal beliefs and experiences can be difficult for students unfamiliar with the history or unprepared for the level of challenge that may emerge from practice; for example, a person trying out meditation to seek stress relief might find themselves encountering disorienting mystical phenomena. Modern scholarship on “difficult meditation experiences” increasingly recognizes the rather widespread nature of these kinds of challenges.
The discussion then circles back to the role of colonialism. Stuart accepts its centrality to the unfolding of events that led to the insight meditation movement, but again critiques its dominance within the Buddhist modernist perspective. He argues that Braun over-relies on Ledi Sayadaw’s Manual of Insight to buttress his thesis, because that was a text written mainly for Western readers, and therefore not representative of Ledi’s broader corpus, which includes a large number of writings that engage traditional cosmology and local religious practices. To see Ledi purely through the colonial lens, Stuart argues, is to miss how his ideas of healing, protection, and divine agency shaped— and continue to shape— everyday Buddhism in Burma. As an example, he highlights Ledi’s Rogantara Dīpanī, a treatise on epidemic disease. In it, the monk prescribes protective recitations and rituals to repel invisible forces. Such practices, he notes, remain part of Burmese religious life, where spirits and deities “run through a lot of the daily practices that are going on.”
This raises the question of “erasure.” Stuart distinguishes between deliberate suppression and the subtler process by which elements become illegible to outsiders. Western scholars, he suggests, often “thin out” the richness of non-Western traditions, not through malice, but because certain ideas “don’t fit into a simple story.” He says his goal is to restore the complexity, highlighting figures like Leon Wright, an African American Christian who studied under U Ba Khin and whose story defies categorical boundaries.
A similar reframing applies to the Abhidhamma, the intricate philosophical system of Theravāda Buddhism. Stuart contends that Braun and others overstate its role in shaping Ledi Sayadaw’s work with the laity, as well as the vipassana movement in general. While Ledi was a master of Abhidhamma scholarship, his lay successors— Saya Thet Gyi, U Ba Khin, and Goenka—taught from the suttas and direct experience. Abhidhamma served as intellectual backdrop and as occasional proof of authority, but not as the living foundation of practice. “They rarely actually deployed it in their teachings of meditation,” he says. U Ba Khin, in particular, “was very experimental… just trying to figure stuff out.” His approach relied more on intuition, personal verification, and sometimes the guidance of psychic intermediaries, than on scholastic reasoning.
Stuart stresses, though, that the Abhidhamma is not just understood as abstract religious doctrine in Burma, as Western scholars might be prone to categorizing it: rather it is part of the lived, Burmese religious experience, often used as a form of protection. Reciting the Abhidhamma texts is believed to summon benevolent deities and repel malevolent ones— a “cosmological battle” between forces of light and darkness. This belief survives in the Goenka organization’s continued use of protective chants such as the Patthāna, which is played on tape before every course worldwide.
For Stuart, such continuities force a redefinition of the concept of “modernization.” Modernity in the Burmese context does not mean a stripping away of the less “rational” aspects of religious belief and practice, but a reorganization; the mythic, mystical and rational still coexist. Goenka’s own methods illustrate this, such as through the physical arrangement of meditators in the hall (i.e., the more advanced students in the front), which is based on the concept of “magnetic fields,” echoing Burmese cosmological theories about the transmission of spiritual energy. This so-called “modern” meditation movement, in other words, still rests on an unbroken chain of traditional and folk religious, metaphysical and cosmological beliefs and practices.
This continuity also extends to hierarchy. Within the Goenka organization, knowledge remains structured by seniority, with deeper or more esoteric discussions and understandings shared mainly among long-time practitioners. Stuart links this dynamic to traditional Buddhist hierarchies in which most people require learned guidance, while only a rare few with exceptional “karmic maturity” can discern truths independently. Yet, as he notes, this view should not be mistaken for pessimism. For example, Ledi Sayadaw shared a conviction about the need for guidance but was unusually hopeful about the spiritual potential of lay followers. Modern mindfulness rhetoric then, Stuart argues, often presents itself as radically democratized, yet still carries traces of these older assumptions about spiritual hierarchy and selective access.
Ledi Sayadaw himself doubted that most ordinary people could achieve profound insight without support, believing many struggled even with basic morality and required direction from qualified teachers. At the same time, he broke precedent by training lay disciples such as Saya Thet Gyi, a bold step that widened access and laid the groundwork for later developments under U Ba Khin. Whether Ledi envisioned anything like today’s mass meditation centers is unknown, but his optimism about lay potential clearly anticipated U Ba Khin’s outreach to non-Buddhists and Goenka’s eventual global dissemination of Vipassanā practice.
Stuart notes an interesting transformation over time within the U Ba Khin lineage regarding the teaching of meditation to non-Buddhists. While Ledi’s thoughts on teaching non-Buddhists generally are still somewhat unclear, he likely regarded cities like Rangoon as spiritually challenging precisely because of their diversity— “filled with non-Buddhists,” as Ledi put it. But U Ba Khin deliberately created an “International Meditation Centre” (IMC) that taught across religious lines and welcomed foreigners in particular. By teaching English-speaking civil servants and non-Buddhists, he converted what Ledi viewed as a challenge or even potential threat into an opportunity for universalism.
The conversation concludes with the notion of the “birth of insight.” To Stuart, this cannot be traced to a particular event, but an evolving genealogy that reflects both rupture and continuity. Each stage contributed different elements: scriptural systematization, lay teaching, institutionalization, and global transmission. The synthesis of all these, he argues, occurs in the Goenka lineage, where doctrinal tradition, colonial modernity, and cosmological belief finally converge.