The Erasure of Mindfulness

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“I was like, ‘Wow, this is an amazing figure! Like, it's pretty remarkable that he's been written out [of history]!’” With this reaction, Daniel M. Stuart, author and scholar of Buddhist modernism, rejoins the podcast to describe his recent research on Dr. Leon Edward Wright, a Black Christian theologian whose brief but powerful connection with the Burmese meditation master Sayagyi U Ba Khin has been almost completely erased from the standard histories of modern Buddhism and mindfulness.

This is Stuart’s third time as a guest on the platform. In his first appearance, he shared how his first Vipassana course, taken as a 19-year-old backpacker in India, set him on a lifelong path of meditation, Pāḷi study, and lineage research, and how these early experiences revealed cultural tensions, erased histories, and contradictions that shaped his understanding of the tradition. Then, more recently, he spoke on how revisiting the origins of modern insight meditation—through the overlooked roles of lay teachers like U Ba Khin, the supernatural and protective frameworks that informed their practice, and the misreadings of scholars—reveals a far more complex genealogy behind Goenka’s global movement than the standard colonial-reform narrative suggests.

In this discussion, Stuart shows how Wright’s story is situated within a world in which meditation practice, anti-colonial struggle, ritual therapeutics, and visionary experience were deeply entangled. By tracing Wright’s life and context, he shows how a lineage that would go on to present itself as rational, scientific, and universal actually emerged from a much more charged, political, and cosmologically complex environment.

Stuart explains that he had been familiar with Wright’s name for some time, but did not initially recognize his historical importance. He only began to look closely at Wright around 2017, when concerns about race within the Goenka tradition had come more sharply into focus. In addition to this, academic conversations and community discussions about ethnicity and representation prompted him to search out Wright’s extensive writings. What he found surprised him: articles, books, and traces of a distinctive theological and political voice. These materials revealed a figure who not only studied intensively with U Ba Khin in 1950s Burma, but who carried those experiences back to Howard University, in Washington, DC, where he developed a contemplative program he called “creative silence.” The more Stuart examined this material, the more striking it became to him that Wright had essentially vanished from the story told by Buddhist communities and scholars.

To better situate Wright’s story, Stuart reconstructs the broader anti-colonial landscape of the early and mid-twentieth century. Across Asia, movements for independence encouraged new solidarities: Indians and Burmese worked together, Muslims and Hindus cooperated, and religious identity often served as a vehicle for political unity against imperial rule. These anti-colonial struggles in turn inspired Black intellectuals and activists in the United States; later civil rights leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr., drew explicitly on these trends. Wright, already engaged with questions of race, empire, and religious resources for liberation, wrote about Islam as a possible political force for Black communities and looked to global religious traditions as sites of solidarity. In this context, his decision to travel to Burma and study meditation with U Ba Khin appears not as an eccentric detour but as part of a wider search for tools that could help oppressed communities.

For Stuart, this is precisely what later narratives have obscured. He remarks that “there are a lot of different kinds of conveniences and inconveniences,” and he sees Wright as an inconvenient figure for a narrative that prefers to frame Buddhist modernism and mindfulness mainly as neutral, psychological technologies. As regards U Ba Khin, Stuart sees anti-colonial thinking and national independence as deeply woven into his teaching mission. Wright in a way embodied this as well, a Black American diplomat and theologian in a newly independent Asian nation that had firmly placed itself outside both Cold War blocs. Yet those intersections of race, politics, and religion were gradually stripped away as the tradition globalized and sought a universal, depoliticized image.

Stuart then turns to Wright’s meditative experiences in Burma. The direct evidence is limited, coming mainly through a student’s later testimony, but it is vivid. Wright reportedly experienced strong visionary phenomena: light, fire, and the image of a hand offering a yellow rose, which he interpreted through Christ-centered symbols. That interpretive move, Stuart argues, is entirely consistent with Wright’s background. Before going to Burma, he had received a Guggenheim Fellowship to research healing miracles in the New Testament and their significance for modern life, and he was already deeply invested in questions of visionary experience and spiritual transformation in Christian scripture. In Stuart’s view, “it's not at all surprising if he had some of those experiences, that he would interpret them through the lens of his own tradition.”

Wright’s encounter with vipassana took place inside a cosmology shaped by earlier Burmese figures, especially Ledi Sayadaw. Stuart highlights Ledi’s manual on plague and pestilence, in which Ledi acknowledges the power of modern medicine, while saying that protective sutta recitation and ritual techniques for “warding off” disease also have their place. Within this framework, illnesses can be supernormal in origin, caused or intensified by hostile forces that resist removal, and healing can require the intervention of ritual specialists and meditative power. U Ba Khin inherited and adapted this world, framing certain afflictions in terms of obstructive elements and energetic blockages, and sometimes working through the crown of the head as a channel through which blessings or forces descend. When Wright practiced under U Ba Khin, he stepped into that living cosmology, even as he understood it through Christian categories.

This perspective allows Stuart to revisit the long-running theme of healing in the lineage. He traces a line from Ledi Sayadaw’s ritual therapeutics through U Ba Khin’s diagnostic and energetic work, to Goenka’s more rationally-articulated teaching. As in Ledi’s writing, where Western medicine and ritual practice coexist, U Ba Khin similarly saw modern medicine as powerful but limited, with meditation able to reach layers of experience that pharmaceuticals could not. Stuart uses the well-known story Goenka relates in 10-day courses about his chronic migraines. In Goenka’s telling, he goes to U Ba Khin saying his goal for meditation was to cure his headaches, but U Ba Khin stresses that his cure would be a by-product of meditation, and should not be the goal. In U Ba Khin’s telling of that same story, he diagnoses the problem not simply as a neurological issue, but as an imbalance in the elements (dhātu), and explains that once Goenka formally offered himself as his disciple—before any meditation course—his migraines disappeared through that act of faith and the protective forces associated with the teacher. U Ba Khin’s relational work with students resembles a doctor’s bedside manner, combining psychological support and technical intervention while the student has complete trust in and reverence for the teacher.

Stuart notes that these healing and energetic dimensions did not vanish completely when Goenka began teaching in India, but they changed form. Early instruction sometimes included practices like forming circles of mettā around sick individuals, or concentrating collective goodwill as a healing act. Over time, such practices were quietly discontinued or reframed, partly to avoid confusion about the purpose of the courses and partly to align with Goenka’s more rationalist, secular rhetoric. Yet Stuart emphasizes that there has been “this constant back and forth” about whether mindfulness and meditation can be for both healing as well as salvation. He says that the Goenka tradition has never resolved this tension completely; instead, it simply presents one side more publicly than the other.

In Wright’s later ministry, the Burmese influences reappear under new names. Back at Howard and in Black church contexts, he taught his meditation-inflected practice of “creative silence” and engaged in forms of healing prayer. Students reported sensations of energy moving through their bodies when he touched or prayed for them, which students later remembered in terms like “the overflow of your spirit” and “the overflow of this energy.” Stuart sees in this phrase a Christian rearticulation of something very close to U Ba Khin’s understanding of elemental or Dhamma power. The vocabulary shifts—from Pāḷi and Burmese cosmology to Black liberation theology and pneumatology—but the relational core, an exchange or intensification of force in the contact between teacher and disciple, remains.

The reasons for Wright’s disappearance from the Goenka narrative, Stuart argues, are multiple. They include the racial politics of American Buddhism, which has often sidelined Black religious figures; institutional desires to keep the lineage story simple, continuous, and non-political; and the unease of later teachers and communities with more esoteric elements that do not sit comfortably with the tradition’s messaging. Once the narrative stabilized around Goenka’s parallel re-framings—as the tradition entered new cultural spaces, cosmological language gave way to talk of “universal laws,” “science of mind,” and “non-sectarian technique” –there was little place for a Black Christian theologian whose experiences combined visionary imagery, anti-colonial commitments, and healing through touch. For Stuart, this is a classic case of what he and others call “erasure”: not just omission, but an active “violence” done to the past by removing figures whose presence would destabilize the preferred narrative.

Some may interpret the couching of the teaching as rational/scientific as being dishonest, since the actual lineage history belies this messaging, but Stuart insists that “these are just different frameworks for understanding reality.” He believes Goenka could sincerely inhabit both a Burmese cosmology and a universalist scientific vocabulary, depending on context, and that his changes were driven by a mix of strategic concerns and genuine reinterpretation. Goenka’s evolving positions on issues such as sexuality and gender—initially very conservative, but becoming less restrictive under pressure from students and broader social change—follow the same pattern of negotiation between inherited norms and new ethical demands.

Even in its secularized form, however, the movement retains structural traces of its earlier world, which make more sense when seen against the backdrop of Ledi’s plague rites and U Ba Khin’s energetic work with students. Stuart points to Goenka’s chanting and the cultivation of a “protective” atmosphere as examples of this. He also notes the teacher’s position at the head of the hall, which mirrors U Ba Khin’s and Mother Sayama’s teaching environment where the teacher’s physical position was not merely symbolic, but attached to a ritual-cosmological function. Recognizing those continuities does not require adopting the old cosmology wholesale, but it does beg a more honest appreciation of where modern mindfulness comes from and what it carries forward.

Stuart acknowledges an ethical tension in presenting this research. Some long-time practitioners worry that exposing these complexities may dissuade newcomers from taking their first course. He understands the concern but ultimately believes that withholding information is more problematic. In his view, practitioners deserve to know the historical and cosmological layers of the tradition they are entering, and an informed relationship to that tradition can support deeper engagement rather than undermine it. He accepts that greater clarity may cause some to step back, but he sees that as a legitimate form of discernment rather than a failure of the practice.

In closing, Stuart returns to Dr. Wright. What lingers for him, besides Wright’s historical role, is his embodiment of cross-racial and cross-religious solidarity. As a Black theologian and diplomat in 1950s Burma, studying meditation with U Ba Khin and then bringing those practices into a Black Christian context in Washington, Wright stood at a unique convergence of anti-colonial Asia and African-American struggles for freedom. His story complicates, enriches, and ultimately enlarges the narrative of Buddhist modernism and mindfulness. Stuart emphasizes that “I do think he's an important figure that deserves more attention,” and in telling Wright’s story, he aims not only to restore a missing person to the lineage but to remind listeners of the larger, more entangled world from which their contemporary practices arise.

Shwe Lan Ga LayComment