Protected by the Dhamma
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Insight Myanmar was very fortunate to conduct a series of interviews with Friedgard Lottermoser between 2023-2024, amounting to 45 hours in total, before she sadly passed away last year. Friedgard was one of the few non-Burmese who could speak about meditating extensively with Sayagyi U Ba Khin, life at the International Meditation Center (IMC), and what it was like to live in Burma at a crucial period of its modern history. In accordance with her wishes, these interviews could only be released after her passing, because of her concern that speaking openly about her memories of Sayagyi U Ba Khin, and how they might differ from the narrative of the Goenka tradition, could jeopardize her ability to attend Goenka courses in her final years.
In the first episode, she discusses her family’s arrival in the country from Germany after World War II, her introduction to meditation and the 1962 coup. In the second, she goes into more depth about her involvement at the IMC and her experiences being a student of U Ba Khin. In this, the third installment, she describes in more detail what her life as one of the only foreigners left in Burma around the time of 1962 coup, speaking about her years at Rangoon University, a unique German scholarship that allowed her to stay when nearly all other foreigners had to leave, the July 7 student massacre, her stepfather’s role with Fritz Werner, and her shift from expatriate life into Burmese society.
Friedgard’s unfolding story is like an intricate tapestry being woven; yet it’s not like when the weaver starts at the top and works row by row down to the bottom. Instead, she goes back and forth between the patterns of her life, speaking about one topic for a time, only to return to it later to add new details as old memories surface. In this episode, for example, she revisits her family’s arrival in the country and their “Chinese Palace” on Inya Lake, describing how the overgrown yard revealed a garden path as the long grass was cut back. She notes it also triggered a stampede of snakes and scorpions into their house as their hiding places were exposed, setting off what Friedgard calls a “killing spree” as the family fended off those dangerous intruders. In particular, she describes one morning when she was confronted by a snake in the sink, which she killed— an incident that one can tell still haunted her after all those years, especially after she took up meditation. “By then, the first precept of not killing came so strongly to mind,” she recalls.
Friedgard was the only member of her family to became deeply involved in Burmese culture. The impetus for this was related to her meditation practice. As was described in an earlier episode, U Ba Khin had advised her at one point to stop meditating because her home was not a conducive place to progress, given its location in a military compound and the fact that her family did not practice. She says she recalls her teacher telling her, “It is if two bullocks fight… I myself, I’m one bullock, and the other one is your home environment. And if they fight, then the grass suffers — and you are the grass!” Rather than stop meditating, however, Friedgard decided to move out of her family home.
As she was attending Rangoon University, the best option was to move into a student hostel, although there were no spaces at present. Fortunately, by chance, she met another university student during a meditation course at IMC who lived in one of the dorms, and when Friedgard shared her situation, the girl invited her to move into her own sparsely furnished room. Life away from the expat enclave gave Friedgard the chance to learn Burmese more fully and immerse herself in the culture, from wearing local clothes and sitting on mats instead of Western furniture, to forming friendships with Burmese classmates; and most important for Friedgard, it allowed her to continue meditating with Sayagyi U Ba Khin.
In an earlier episode, we learned about her stepfather’s position with the arms manufacturer, Fritz Warner, whose contract with the Burmese military had brought the family to the country in the first place. The company was tasked with building factories for the Burmese army to manufacture the “G3” battle rifle— which became the standard arm for Burmese soldiers— and sending military staff to Germany for further training. She notes that when her stepfather first took the position, the political situation in Burma was quite different, and her stepfather was convinced that they were doing good by supporting the country’s development. But he could not foresee the imminent military takeover, and sadly, the G3 was the very rifle that Burmese soldiers used to quell protests during the 1962 coup. [Note: The relationship between Fritz Warner and Myanmar deepened through the 1970s and 1980s, with Burmese officers and engineers continuing to be sent to West Germany for training. However, following the 1988 democracy uprising, when G3 rifles were again used in the army’s crackdown to murder innocent students, and the subsequent international sanctions, the collaboration collapsed. Although its Yangon office lingered on paper until 2019, Fritz Werner later insisted that its operations in Myanmar effectively ended in the late 1980s.] Although Friedgard remembers Fritz Warner as never being directly involved in the gun manufacture itself, the company’s direct connection to the military and that weapon rings an otherwise discordant note in her story of meditation, curiosity and cultural understanding.
A very compelling— yet also serendipitous— part of the story is her description of the day of the July 7, 1962 student massacre that followed the coup. Friedgard had seen posters at the university demanding democracy, and advertising student protests against the military takeover. She thought, “Well, students protest, and I’m a student, so I should join them!” But it was a Saturday. Friedgard went to IMC every weekend to meditate, going there Saturday morning and returning to the university Sunday evening. She figured there would be other demonstrations on weekdays, so she would join them then. That morning she also happened to be carrying milk powder to donate to the center, a small detail that cemented her decision to go. On that particular Saturday, after meditating for several hours, she heard a huge boom, like thunder. It had rained on her way to the center, and thought it must just be the continuation of a long thunderstorm… though the sound was unusually loud, and the Burmese meditators at the center were talking in hushed tones. In actuality, it was the sound of the military blowing up the Student Union building… where Friedgard would have been had she stayed at the university to protest.
Friedgard notes that the newspapers only mentioned four deaths in that incident, but that there were in fact hundreds. Historically, this attack on the Student Union is remembered as a turning point in the trajectory of the democracy movement: it destroyed not only the building that symbolized student activism but also signaled the start of the military’s ruthless suppression of dissent, setting the pattern for decades to come, with students in particular falling under suspicion. Friedgard also bemoans what happened to her classmates who graduated. Although they had gotten degrees and had been prepared to enter the professional workforce, because of how the military ruined the economy, they all ended up as “shopkeepers in a socialist system.”
Friedgard’s reflections about those events often circle back to meditation, which she saw as both refuge and compass during the upheaval and chaos of that time and place. “Of course, I listened to what U Ba Khin said, but it was reinforced by my personal perception through the development of Vipassana meditation,” she says. “That is why, actually, I followed it up in these early days.” The country’s struggles only deepened her resolve to establish herself in meditation, especially following the Student Union explosion. “During the reorganization, the university was closed and [it was] a good chance to meditate. After the shootings, I was at the IMC for several weeks because I couldn’t return to the hostel straight away. It was closed.”
For Friedgard, meditation was not just practice but the thread that allowed her to endure, make sense of and carry forward the experiences of those turbulent years.