Episode #167: Steve Smith, Part 1
Sometimes practitioners feel almost magnetically called to their teacher or spiritual practice. This is certainly the case with Steve Smith, who joins us in the first of several interviews looking back on his extensive experience in Myanmar and his practice in Burmese meditation lineages. Indeed, when he first heard the word “Mahasi” in 1974 at Boulder’s Naropa Institute, “it felt familiar,” he recalls. “It felt like home.”
Three years later, after managing the first Western teacher retreat in Bodhgaya, Steve was traveling with a group of other foreign yogis to Burma to meet Mahasi Sayadaw. On the way, they stayed with Dipa Ma for a week and met some of her relatives, who were also Mahasi practitioners, before continuing on to Mandalay with his two-year-old daughter, Chandra, in tow. A car picked them up to bring them to rural Seikkhun, Mahasi Sayadaw’s hometown. “It was going back in time,” he remembers. “The monastic compound and the ordained nuns and monks and lay people, it could have been the early centuries, in a time of the Buddha, 2,600 years ago. It just seemed ancient and powerful and pure.”
Although Mahasi Sayadaw was in the middle of a Dhamma talk when they arrived, he greeted them warmly and arranged for them to be shown to their rooms. Steve has never forgotten how the entire community embraced them for the duration of that stay. “They have this desire that we had to immerse ourselves in deep Dhamma practice and study and understanding.”
As he came to spend more time around Mahasi Sayadaw, he was moved by how the great teacher embodied centuries of monastic wisdom and discipline, while at the same time making great strides to spread the teachings beyond the monastic order—an unprecedented act at that time. “He had that stature of being a Superman,” Steve notes. “A super person of the Dhamma, and really interested in seeing it spread. The feeling around him was vastness and void. This radiating presence and emptiness at the same time. It was indescribable, but very powerful, kind of a goosebump energy.”
It was the first time that Steve truly understood the deeper meaning of a Dhamma community, a Saṅgha, and he vowed that if Myanmar ever opened up beyond the very short one-week visa available to foreigners at the time, he would return to ordain.
Several years later, the country started allowing longer stays for foreign meditators, so Steve could fulfill his aspiration. He undertook lower ordination under the renowned teacher, Taungpulu Sayadaw, in Bodhgaya. Once Steve’s visa came through, he went on to Rangoon, where he became a full bhikkhu under Mahasi Sayadaw, along with three other Western aspirants. “He was just as I remembered him, this incredible presence, sense of vastness and yet transparent personality, like no sense of self-centeredness or self-importance or anything but this pure transmission of these liberating teachings. That was an energetic field that he radiated.”
And with the Burmese government now opening ever so slightly, more foreigners flocked to Burma to learn to meditate under Mahasi Sayadaw’s guidance, and a dormitory block was made available to them on the grounds. Many foreign students became ill due to the hot weather and food, particularly in the rainy season. But other than a few, typical, traveler’s bugs, Steve managed to stay relatively healthy, as he was able to adapt relatively well to the similar climate and natural diet he knew from Hawaii.
Though devoted to the practice, Steve initially resisted the tradition’s recommended balance between sitting meditation and mindful walking. A senior meditation teacher at the monastery, U Thondhura, with whom Steve had a very good relationship, urged him to at least give it a try it for two weeks, after which they could evaluate how it went; Steve agreed, and was hooked. “I found that I could reach those same degrees of concentration by walking, and that the walking momentum and energy, along with a more fluid and flexible concentration, since it was meditation in motion, those combinations of a fluid concentration and the energetics of mindful movement would carry it back to the next sitting, until I began to feel the inseparable connection or interconnectedness in in those two, and later all four postures.” And as he developed further, he found the experience of walking with mindfulness opened the door for even greater wisdom. “It became exquisitely clear that it was all just the dance of the elements,” he remembers.
The following year, Steve visited Sydney, where Joseph Goldstein was teaching a meditation course. Steve disrobed at a Thai temple there, with plans to go “home to Hawaii to be a dad.” Yet the Dhamma was still calling, and before long, he was back again in Burma, this time to ordain under Sayadaw U Pandita, whom he had been drawn to from their first meeting. “I had a very immediate and obviously karmically close connection with him. It was like a recognition.”
Although U Pandita didn’t teach many foreigners at that time, he dedicated himself to Steve’s training, and the results were profound. “I felt like there was nothing he couldn't see about me. And so, it just made me completely relax, and be straightforward and honest about my life and my practice, and the ups and down, and the fears and courage and likes and dislikes. I trusted this person quite quickly, more than I had ever trusted anyone in my life.”
It helped that Steve still had both his youth and his health, and he was able to throw himself completely into practice, sometimes forgoing sleep altogether and having to be reminded to relax by his teacher. Above all else, he found U Pandita very attentive to balance, and carefully monitoring his students to see if they were over- or undercompensating in one area or another. He could then provide individualized guidance on where adjustments were needed. Once that balance was achieved, one’s practice thrived as “spiritual muscles were activated,” in Steve’s words. He himself experienced a “joyous interest that lifted the mind and body and gave it buoyancy and sustaining energy to balance with the calming qualities of tranquility, concentration and equanimity. With mindfulness as the central core quality of the practice, that initiates the awakening factors and balances and matures them, bringing them to fruition.”
Beyond U Pandita’s powerful meditation guidance, Steve also gained inspiration by observing his interactions in society. And U Pandita was not operating in just any society at that time, but one that was a military dictatorship; and not only was it a brutal one, it was actively trying to co-opt the monkhood to justify its oppression. Steve relates one, particular example that highlights the delicate circumstances U Pandita had to wade through.
The head of the Shwegyin order had just passed away. Senior monks were wary about the proceedings because some years earlier, when the great Mingun Sayadaw had died, monks were disturbed to find that senior generals had manipulated his funeral to put themselves front and center. For this reason, before his death, that senior Shwegyin monk had taken “great care to outline the exact procedure of what to do after his demise, what would be done with his body and remains and how and who, what monks would handle the remains, and the chanting. The whole procedure was meticulously written down.”
Steve had been sitting his own self-course at Kyaswa Monastery in the Sagaing Hills, and wandered into the funeral service, which looked like a gigantic film set. According to the Shwegyin monk’s plan, ten senior monks including U Pandita were seated on stage. However, against the expressed wishes of the deceased monk, ten top generals grabbed the opposite side of the platform in a shameless act of stagecraft and propaganda. When the ceremony ended, the generals stood to offer requisites to the monks, one by one. The donor who approached U Pandita was none other than Khin Nyunt, the dreaded chief of military intelligence. Steve never forgot what happened next: without saying a word, U Pandita turned his back on that very dangerous, high-ranking official, got in his car, and told the driver to leave. While Steve rarely heard U Pandita speak overtly about politics, such a brave action—which resulted in a number of negative consequences for U Pandita in the years that followed—spoke to how his teacher chose to make his ethical stand. “This was his poignant way of expressing his dissatisfaction with the government. He clearly was not happy with how they were treating people of Burma, or those in the Sangha that did protest.”
That U Pandita was unwilling to provide any legitimacy to the military may have also been a reason why Aung San Suu Kyi chose him as her primary meditation guide. Since they shared the same teacher, Steve developed a close friendship with her and her family during those years. Over tea, they would discuss politics and Burmese history, although Steve would often work to bring the conversation back to practice. Aung San Suu Kyi’s own preferred method was developing the brahma viharas: metta (loving kindness) karuna (compassion) mudita (sympathetic joy or empathy) and upekkha (equanimity).
A kind of full circle moment occurred in April, 2016, when Sayadaw U Pandita passed away at the age of 95. For many years, Steve had been prohibited by the military regime from setting foot in the Golden Land, a “punishment” for his association with Aung San Suu Kyi and other emerging democracy leaders. But with many of those same people now in charge, he was allowed back in. Steve joined a small handful of foreign disciples who traveled to Yangon for the ceremony. It was no small affair, as Aung San Suu Kyi was State Councilor at the time, and had ordered an official state funeral. “Even though I had forgotten most of my Burmese,” Steve recalls, “the speeches given, I could feel how stirring they were, and how they went deep into the hearts of the thousands of people who came to came to honor the last rites and rituals of Sayadaw U Pandita.”
The gifts of Myanmar have filled Steve’s life in ways he never would have anticipated. “Dropping into Burma was like a huge plunge into the power of this dispensation of the Buddha's Dhamma,” he notes. “I think Burma's great gift to the world has been the Dhamma, either directly through these ordained monastics, or in the way it's influenced nearby Southeast Asian countries. It's inspired this Western surge of interest in Dhamma practice and training.”