Episode 8: Swe Win
Practicing vipassana meditation is never easy, no matter what one’s circumstances. But it is another order of magnitude altogether to carry on a practice when one’s very freedom, liberties, and personal safety are at risk. This was the case with Swe Win during his seven years in a Burmese jail cell, a political prisoner advocating for democracy in his country. And this is his story.
We began our conversation by reminiscing about two places we remember meeting over ten years ago—somewhat diverse in nature, perhaps, one being the American Center (a cultural and educational extension of the US Embassy), and the other at a local group sitting at Dhamma Joti, a meditation center in the S. N. Goenka tradition.
Then Swe Win talked about his background. He described his early love of 19th century British literature, noting that his poor Yangon neighborhood shared more in common with Charles Dickens’ novels than any contemporary town in England. He attended university in Yangon in 1996, but soon became disillusioned not only with his studies, but with the general state of education in his country. Instead, he was drawn to the democracy movement that was gathering strength in Burma, in which Aung San Suu Kyi played a central role. However, this involvement quickly led to his arrest, which resulted in a harsh, 21-year jail sentence. His early imprisonment was brutal, characterized by near-starvation, beatings, and suicidal thoughts. To try and save his mind amid those horrific conditions, he decided to try meditation for the first time in his life, and all on his own, without any direction, as access to teachers and books were not allowed in prison. He merely sat cross-legged in his cell…and immediately experienced the dissolution of body and mind. Despite warnings from fellow prisoners that meditation would drive him crazy, Swe Win began to practice mettā, or loving-kindness, throughout every activity of the day, which provided him a release from the toxic hatred that had begun to plague him. After two years, the Red Cross got permission to distribute Dhamma books to prisoners, so he had greater access to Buddhist teachings. From those, he taught himself ānāpāna, or concentration on breathing, and then later learned how to scan the bones in his body.
After seven years, Swe Win was granted an early release. Although he relished his return to a freedom, he was initially uncertain about returning to the speed, intensity and complexity of the “real world” after so many years of conforming his life to mastering the basic simplicities of confinement. But once outside, on the advice of his brother, he enrolled in a vipassana meditation retreat at Dhamma Joti, as taught by S.N. Goenka in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin. He immediately took to it, which in retrospect should not be a surprise, since it added structure and sequential training to what he had pretty much already been practicing in prison.
Although he may have hoped to become a serious long-course student with less of a focus on worldly matters, Swe Win described not being able to remain silent amid so much social and political injustice in his country. So he pursued a career in journalism at Myanmar Now (while also marrying and having a daughter).
We ended our talk by discussing how to best integrate the inner cultivation of meditation with the outer work of being an agent for change, as well as pondering how Myanmar can have produced such a wealth of Dhamma teachers and practitioners on the one hand, and such a difficult, recent history of bloodshed and corruption on the other.
Later, Zach comes on to discuss not only what is clearly a hero’s journey, but the portrait of an actual hero. Zach was particularly moved by Swe Win’s realization that the real reason for his suffering in prison wasn’t because of the beatings, but rather that he had no access to the usual stimuli found in the outside world. This discovery led Swe Win on a quest for an “internal” freedom, which cannot be taken away. Joah reflects on how, while Swe Win paints a portrait of himself in his youth as a kind of yogi not dissimilar to many in the West—a sensitive and idealistic young man searching for truth and integrity—the dire situation he soon found himself in was one few Western meditators can even imagine. This caused his Dhamma path to be shaped by very different factors. Finally, Joah and Zach discuss Swe Win’s ability to combine an outer, social activism with an inner, spiritual practice, in the face of what continue to be extremely adverse conditions.