Episode #190: Grahame White, Part 1
Grahame White’s spiritual journey kicked off in a rather unlikely manner. The year was 1966, and Australia was just beginning to conscript young men to serve in the increasingly bloody Vietnam War. Hoping to escape the draft, he flew to South Africa with his surfboard in hand, where he rode the waves and worked intermittently for fifteen months. He then left for England, and still looking for good coastlines, ended up on a holiday in Biarritz, off the Basque coast of France. One day, he happened to notice a copy of Hermann Hesse’s 1922 book, Siddhartha, that someone had left behind. Grahame picked it up, but didn’t get a chance to read it then.
He moved to England, where he got a flat with some Australian friends. One night, they were out carousing in a local pub, while he was home and freezing cold, since they only had a pay-by-the-hour radiator which they used sparingly to save money. He picked up Siddhartha and began reading. “I remember on the second page, there was a stanza,” he recalls. “‘Breathe in and breathe out, and all will be revealed,’ or something like that.” Feeling silly, he sat cross legged for the first time in his life and tried to follow the instructions. What happened next blew him away. “The mind became very bright and luminous after about five minutes and I said, ‘Oh, this is better than drugs!’ Because we're in the hippie era at that time, of course.”
Sharing the experience with a co-worker, Grahame was told about an Edwardian building in downtown London that had formerly been a Spiritualist house, but was now owned by the Thai Embassy and used by Buddhist monks to teach meditation in the Mahasi style. Grahame committed to attending weekly sessions, and he practiced daily in the small flat he shared.
After a while doing this practice, in 1970, Grahame set his sights on Asia, where he hoped to go deeper. The monk who had been teaching him presented a letter to him to bring to the Thai monastery in Bodhgaya, and Grahame was off on his next adventure. Just twenty-two years old, he suddenly found himself at the very spot where the Buddha had become enlightened many centuries before! Soon after arriving, he ordained as a monk, and began following the instructions of the Thai monk overseeing the monastery. “At that time, there were no foreigners in Bodhgaya, and the place was absolutely beautiful,” he says. “It was still a village, no fences around, no security around the buildings, and you could walk to the Bodhi tree every afternoon. I'd do my puja and meditate at the Bodhi tree. I was lucky enough to actually receive my robes underneath the Bodhi tree, which is a really nice thing to do.”
He also made the acquaintance of a Vietnamese monk who told Grahame about an Indian vipassana teacher named S.N. Goenka, who had just conducted his first ever course, and was soon going to do another at a Tibetan monastery in Ladakh. Excitedly, the two traveled there together, and attended the course with fifteen other yogis. Although Grahame initially had difficulties switching over from his Mahasi training to this new Goenka practice, he eventually did so, and found great benefit.
After returning to Bodhgaya, one day he encountered a “very tall American” walking around, and the two began talking. The foreigner introduced himself as Joseph Goldstein, and explained that he had come looking to meet Munindra, an Indian ascetic who was also staying in Bodhgaya. Grahame was so intrigued that he ended up joining Joseph at the Burmese vihara, and remembers how he “had quite a presence about him,” laughing that Goldstein would likely have become a standup comedian if he hadn’t been a Dhamma teacher. Together with other Western students who began to show up, such as Barry Lapping, Sharon Salzberg, and Maria Monroe, they would listen to Munindra’s talks every day and discuss practice.
Grahame found that Munindra didn’t teach courses like the other teachers, but engaged in long discussion sessions. He remembers the Indian man as “this little bird-like figure, wandering around, but very friendly. He was such a mind! Absolutely anything you would ask him, he would know the answer… He was very ordinary, but totally un-ordinary as well! No pretenses about him.”
But soon Grahame’s life, and the atmosphere of Bodhgaya itself, went through a dramatic transformation: Goenka announced his intention to come there to conduct a series of courses. “There was to be a massive retreat, and everyone came! It was like there was an attraction of vibration,” he recalls.
Grahame sat and served many of these courses, and continued to benefit from the practice. Even among all the other spiritual teachers he was encountering at the time in India, he found that Goenka stood out in a remarkable way. “I feel as though Goenkaji just had a presence about him from his meditation practice, but I also remember that Goenkaji had a really strong personality. He also had the gift of oratory, because he used to be a Shakespearean actor in Burma,” he says. “He had such a strong practice, and his vibration was so powerful, that I think he could just attract people. His personality, his voice, and the nature of the courses, which were different in those days.” Grahame describes how a casual nature defined the retreats back then. Noble Silence was only enforced within the meditation hall, and yogis would drink chai and talk to Goenka daily about their practice.
“It was quite relaxed, but it wasn't slack at all. It was intense, but relaxed, just great,” he recalls. Grahame spent many hours in Goenka’s presence before he became a world-famous teacher, and remembers him as supremely dedicated, enormously funny, and always selfless, ready to serve others. As an example, he tells how Goenka would personally serve him food when Grahame was a monk; Goenka’s humility deeply impressed the young Australian. He was also a fly on the wall for many of the extended conversations between Goenka and Munindra, which he still remembers with relish. “They looked fantastic together,” he says. “Two buddies if you like, but Goenka would treat Munindra like the guru, which he was, and would learn from him. So they would spend a long time talking about the Dhamma and Munindra would teach him Pāḷi.”
Ultimately, the rapid growth in the Goenka movement that Grahame was witnessing before his eyes made him increasingly uncomfortable. “I thought [the way it had been, intense yet relaxed] was much nicer, actually, to tell you the truth. But of course, it grew too big.” He saw an emergent “fundamentalism” in the organization, and a desire to label other teachers, traditions, and even places (such as the Maha Bodhi Temple and even the Bodhi tree) as “impure,” meaning they should be avoided. Additionally, he saw a growing rift between Joseph Goldstein and Goenka, who both were developing something of a following due to their charisma as teachers, and ground started to be staked out on both sides. Grahame’s last encounter with Goenka’s teachings came when a course organizer chastised his girlfriend at the time for maintaining her Mahasi practice, and told in no uncertain terms that she had to stop her Mahasi meditation for good if she wanted to attend the retreat. Interestingly, in the same vein, Grahame convinced his brother to take a Goenka retreat, and his brother eventually became the Goenka organization’s Area Manager for Indonesia… but even all these decades later, his brother refuses to meditate with Grahame because he no longer practices within that tradition.
After deciding to leave the Goenka tradition, Grahame spoke with Munindra about Goenka’s warnings concerning the dangers of learning under different teachers. Munindra encouraged him to see the value and wisdom in all traditions, so Grahame continued to seek out and learn from various monks and teachers. Ultimately, however, he found himself going back to his original Mahasi teachings. “Once you've done a particular practice, as your first practice… that always stays with you.” He also found more resonance in the Mahasi style of observing mental states than in observing sensations, as Goenka taught.
In 1973, Grahame made his first visit to Burma. With visas hard to come by and foreigners watched with suspicion, he was given only seven days to practice at the main Mahasi monastery. There he studied under Sayadaw U Janaka, who would later start his own tradition and establish Chan Myay Myaing Monastery.
“My impressions of Burma was that there was a certain underlying fear,” he recalls of the trip. “In Burma, you had to be careful, that's for sure. You’d walk around the streets a little bit, and there'd be soldiers with guns standing at various places, so you had to be careful with what you're doing. But the thing that was the most impressive was from me, and really embedded in me, was their saddhā, their faith. You’d go to Shwedagon Pagoda or the meditation center, and the faith, that generosity, just the interest in the Buddha's teachings, it was phenomenal! And I loved sitting there.”
Grahame later had the privilege of supporting Mahasi Sayadaw’s pilgrimage to Bodhgaya in 1979, and he still remembers many incidents from the great monk’s visit. One such memory is just the simple determination he showed. “He used to go to the main temple at night and he'd sit inside. He would just sit there, and it was like he wasn't there! He wasn’t too zealous about it all, he would just sit there and bow, pick a few bits of dust off his robe, and then walk around slowly and look at things. He was quite amazing.”
Just as the Goenka tradition was taking off, so too did Mahasi find a growing interest among Westerners. Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield made pilgrimages to Asia to learn from Mahasi-trained teachers, and began to look how to bring these techniques back to America. So when Grahame eventually made it back to Australia some years later, he began to involve himself with supporting Mahasi courses there.
He contacted the main Mahasi center in Yangon, requesting them to send teachers to lead the courses he wanted to offer in Australia. Eventually Burmese monks did come, with Sayadaw U Lakkhana and Sayadaw U Janaka being among the first, along with a number of Western instructors such as Joseph Goldstein, Alan Clements, Carol Wilson, and Steve Smith, who all took turns leading the early courses. Before a proper center was established, courses were held at a Thai monastery in the tradition of Ajahn Chah, and at an old Victorian building that had been a Catholic seminary.
Eventually Grahame stepped into the teacher role himself. He was well aware that Burmese monks went through a minimum of 20 years of training before they could even consider teaching others, but understood this model wasn’t necessarily appropriate for the West. Feeling that scriptural study is less of a priority in this context, Grahame thinks that the baseline requirement there is for a teacher to have constant mindfulness of arising and passing.
And this transition into becoming a teacher, and helping spread the Mahasi tradition to other parts of the world, becomes the subject of our next talk with Grahame White.