Episode #225: Jonathan Crowley, Part 3
This is the third interview in an ongoing discussion with Jonathan Crowley. If you have not done so already, you might want to first listen to the first part, in which he discusses his upbringing, and the second part, in which describes his deepening practice in the tradition, his experiences teaching vipassana meditation inside a maximum security prison, and his growing awareness of social justice.
This conversation starts with Jonathan reflecting on his appointment as Assistant Teacher, which happened just after his prison course work, and he found deeply moving. In describing how the Goenka organization makes these appointments, Jonathan explains that in addition to the need to have completed several Long Courses (i.e., any retreat of 20-days or longer), there is an unwritten “rule” that any student harboring an interest in becoming an Assistant Teacher quickly learns: “You almost have to pretend you don't want to be an Assistant Teacher.” He describes how would-be teachers are incentivized to act in self-deprecating ways in order to mask their desire for an appointment, which often creates a sense of “false ego” around the process. Jonathan acknowledges that he had engaged in that same kind false humility around his own aspiration to become a teacher as he grew more involved with Center work and his meditation practice
Before his appointment, Jonathan had a sense of awe and admiration for the Teachers he encountered, acknowledging a certain “mystique” that many students attribute to ATs. While he believed many to be selflessly devoted to their mission, he grew to seeing them as human who had their share of strengths and weaknesses, and realizing that the reality is far more complicated.
Jonathan describes the basic role of the Assistant Teachers as facilitating the ten-day courses with loving kindness and compassion. Because many students have challenges particularly on their first few courses, he felt that providing support and instruction was rewarding and inspiring. At the same time, he found part of the work quite “rote,” such as the many “stock answers” that Assistant Teachers are trained to give.
As Jonathan began to take on this role, he also realized that in representing the tradition in an official capacity, he had to unpack some of its deeper—and often unspoken—messaging. One of the more challenging issues was the organization’s tendency towards “gurudom.” He describes a paradoxical dynamic in which, on the one hand, Goenka strongly eschews the idea of being seen as guru… while on the other hand, the culture of the organization strongly encourages it. “His audience of students were certainly creating that role… relating to him in that way,” says Jonathan. “I had a wariness around gurudom in general, and so I did keep it at an arm's length when and where I saw that occurring in the organization.”
As a meditator, and then as a Pali student in India, he had been in fairly close contact with Goenka, and on one occasion even helped him establish a new meditation center. While he had great respect for Goenka as a teacher and as a person, he grew uncomfortable with the organizational dynamic that puts Goenka on a pedestal, and raises him to a position of unquestioned authority.
And Jonathan points out that in spite of how Goenka dismisses gurudom in his discourses, he, himself, was not a passive participant in his elevation to guru figure. Jonathan explains how Goenka promoted a mythos about the tradition and technique that reinforced his status as supreme authority figure and exalted place within the dissemination of the teachings. For example, Goenka emphasizes in the ten-day retreat discourses that his first course took place at the same time as the 6th Buddhist Council held in Rangoon, strongly implying that the timing was not coincidental. “He begins to position himself, in terms of that timing and in terms of talking about how he received this pure jewel of the teaching from Sayagyi [U Ba Khin],” and segues to his role in bringing these teachings back to their country of origin, India. Goenka then insinuates that this might well be connected to a prophecy that some allege the Buddha made about the resurgence of vipassana practice in the world 2,500 years after death, a mythology which carries an outsized weight within the organization. Goenka’s enhanced biography is, in turn, woven into an even more personal prophecy; one, however, that is shared only among serious Goenka yogis: that Sayagyi U Ba Khin will be the next Buddha, Metteyya, and Goenka will be his attendant.
For Jonathan, this narrative—a belief system that animates and informs the meditation practice —has very serious implications for a committed meditator in this tradition. It clearly signals that adherence to this tradition, alone, will guarantee significant involvement in the future of the Sāsana. It also suggests there’s a danger in even attempting to learn any other form of meditation, as that could put one’s hope of liberation at risk. And as yogis become more involved in the organization, part of the process of belonging is the strong expectation that they take on this package of beliefs. Jonathan found its weight a lot for him to bear as a student, but an even greater burden as an Assistant Teacher charged with supporting practitioners coming to the Center.
At the same time, Jonathan was trying to get a better perspective on where the Goenka tradition fit into the wider Buddhist landscape. “I was reading a lot of the Pāḷi Canon, and I was broadening my knowledge, trying to put everything—the history of the practice of this tradition, the other strains of vipassana that are out there—trying to put all that into context,” he notes. “There was this larger entity of the Dhamma. Going back to what Goenkaji was teaching, [it was but] one component of it, or one slice of it, with certain emphases that I was increasingly weighing and trying to understand and to integrate and make sense of, because it was a very narrowed-down version.”
Jonathan was also deepening his understanding of the modus operandi of the organization. For example, he realized that the ten-day course format actually functions as a kind of “Trojan Horse.” By this, he means that the practice is presented publicly as non-sectarian and scientific, casting a very wide net to attract many prospective students. Indeed, even during a course, this non-sectarian and scientific messaging is heavily emphasized, further enhanced by Goenka’s frequent statement that “you are your own master.” Although there is no overt pressure put on new meditators to stay with this tradition after their course is over, more committed yogis gradually become funneled into what Jonathan calls “narrower scopes.” He explains it like this: “You get into the fortress, and then it becomes a different ballgame, one that provides less and less questioning and examination as you go further. I began to experience that… I started to feel a certain level of dissonance, really, and the need to belong.”
An important component of belonging in the tradition is faith, which Jonathan calls a “valuable currency.” Of course, it is not that developing faith on the spiritual path is a negative attribute. He notes that the Buddha himself taught that faith is one of five important qualities that a practitioner needs to cultivate on the Path (along with effort, wisdom, concentration, and mindfulness), Jonathan also acknowledges that in the 10-day discourses, Goenka discriminates the right kind of faith from blind faith… yet at the same time—as with the organization’s relationship to gurudom—the actual practice and culture of the organization pulls in the opposite direction.
For Jonathan, it is problematic when faith in the Dhamma, which the Buddha encouraged in seekers to help them advance spiritually, is conflated with a kind of faith that manifests as fidelity to the organization, and which severely inhibits critical thinking. “The difficulty is that the faith and confidence that one has in one's own practice gets conflated with the necessity for some of the [Goenka organization’s] rules and regulations, and for some of the framework around the practice, and the practice itself, and the exclusion of other practices that the Buddha [taught]. But then it also becomes conflated with the way the organization is operating… There's some folks who feel like they cannot question at all what Goenka says.” So when meditators in this tradition express a faith in the Dhamma, Jonathan believes that quite often, what they really mean is an expression of faith just towards this particular technique—and often, the mythology behind it.
In Jonathan’s experience, faith and thinking critically are not mutually exclusive, and both have their value on the Path. In fact, the Buddha not only taught about the value of faith, he also famously told the Kalamas to not believe anything because someone tells them unless they can verify it for themselves, no matter who tells them, even an elder or a teacher. So for Jonathan, a key part of the practice is balancing the development of genuine faith with the ability to continue to think critically about what one is doing. Jonathan says he approached meditation as a critical thinker, so he had to learn how to soften that through developing a faith in the practice. But while he came to appreciate the role that devotion could play as a yogi, he nonetheless found the organization’s faith-orientation to be excessive, and more concerning, as squelching critical thought.
Much like the messaging around non-sectarianism and the scientific nature of the practice, Jonathan describes how the dynamic involving faith in the tradition starts off benignly in 10-day courses, when Goenka asks new students to give the technique a “fair trial.” Jonathan acknowledges that this is an important and sensible injunction for a new practitioner. “There is a place for just accepting instructions and practice, and trying it giving it a trial, seeing what emerges, going through that unknown process,” he says. However, he goes on to say that this “fair trial” gradually morphs into a more all-encompassing expectation for returning yogis, trapping the student in a kind of closed-loop system. This was certainly the case for Jonathan. “As I began to get more involved as an Assistant Teacher, I did become a little bit more critical. And I also got more messages around the resistance to examining and questioning things, and that I needed to not do that. So that became a concern for me.”
In further unpacking how faith manifests in this tradition, Jonathan refers back to the organization’s mythos, and the important role that storytelling plays in its dissemination. “[The tradition] is couched in these terms of pure and pristine, that it dates from this unbroken chain of teachers back to the Buddha. And again, we're speaking about the need to belong, or have faith or confidence in the practice, the tradition, and in Goenkaji, and how that gets conflated with this larger mythology.” To Jonathan, it is clear that embedded in that initial “fair trial” is the organizational belief that if the student really applies him/herself in the “right way,” meaning in line with Goenka’s instructions, it can only turn out that one sees the superiority of this technique.
However, as Jonathan began to realize, key elements of the tradition’s foundational narrative are not actually historically accurate. But if someone begins to inquire along those line, Jonathan says, “It becomes problematic, even while the practice may be having benefit… In order to continue to stay in, you find yourself compartmentalizing these pieces. And then to some degree, at least for me, and this was a big piece, I found that I was compartmentalizing parts of myself!”
Over time, it became increasingly challenging for Jonathan to balance his enthusiasm for the practice with unresolved and unanswered questions that continued to linger. “There were many things I was observing that I was excusing or saying, ‘Okay, well, let me put that aside, there's so much benefit here!’ I wanted to belong, I wanted just to be part of that whole thing. I was profoundly transformed by it. And yet, as time went on, I found myself needing to recover my critical voice and critical thinking.” This ultimately left him feeling as though the only way to continue the practice was to contort himself in a way that conformed to the organization’s expectations. “I started to feel like, my whole self is not able to show up. That increasingly became more and more difficult for me.” Not being able to bring this “full self” to the practice obviated the greater integration that Jonathan described himself as seeking in Part 2 of his talk.
In a similar vein, he began to see a sharp divergence between those who regarded the silent retreats (and by extension, the Center, itself) as a buffer from the world, and his own desire to apply the practice and inspire real change within society. Moreover, he saw a tendency towards escapism being reinforced by the retreat experience: the benefits that so many students do get, combined with the very admirable selfless service given by so many, results in a cocoon-like environment at a Center that is very comforting, especially when compared to the loudness and harshness of everyday life. As a result, Jonathan saw a number of meditators seeking greater involvement with the Center to avoid the challenges of life, such as finding meaningful employment or committing to a relationship. Jonathan even saw this tendency in himself for a time. Combined with the organization’s overall discomfort with any kind of societal engagement, it becomes an isolated, bubble experience for many serious yogis, creating a divide between their intensive meditation experience and everyday life.
And to complicate matters further for Jonathan, he saw that even the teachers who are most committed to that insular model have to navigate some complex and even contradictory objectives. For example, he would ask them, “[Are we] just distributing seeds for the masses to just get a taste of the Dhamma? Or is this really a tradition that is supporting students to attain the highest levels of liberation, nibbana? Both those messages are given right from the get-go.” But because the tradition continued to expand at such a rapid pace (the wide net cast by its messaging, as described above), Jonathan felt that there was simply never time to reflect on these essential (and for the organization, even existential) questions.
Jonathan concludes that, taken together, the mythmaking, the emphasis on unquestioning faith, and the inward-looking tendency of the organization unfortunately combine to promote a kind of anti-intellectualism. This became more apparent when some of Jonathan’s peers began to look askance at his interest in sutta study. “The ‘take home message’ I was getting was that Goenkaji essentially is the harbinger of the Buddha's second Sāsana, and that we're here to fulfill this message as a pure and pristine form of the Buddha's teaching,” he says. In fact, “it was almost as if Goenkaji, himself, was being elevated above the Pāḷi Canon in many students’ minds, as evidence of the Buddhist scriptural heritage, but even in some ways above the Buddha himself! I think that [it points to] a certain organizational arrogance and superiority, and, I would say, even supremacy.”
In addition to the way Goenka prioritizes his message of “pristine purity,” Jonathan believes there is another dynamic at play in Goenka centers, at least in the West. He sees a tendency towards superiority and arrogance about the tradition among many committed disciples, which he believes may be an outgrowth of neo-Colonial times, when the teachings were translated and given meaning from a more Western point of view. Taking this perspective a step further, it even has racial implications for Jonathan, in terms of who has access to attend vipassana courses, and how much the organization reflects the voices and perspectives of marginalized communities.
At the same time, Jonathan also owns the arrogance he took on in the process. He is aware it had always been within him, and the conditions of the organization simply triggered it. “Those pieces were inside me, all those seeds were in me! The organization gave shelter to that, and allowed those, unfortunately, to become insulated around all that.”
At the end of the day, Jonathan still has much gratitude towards the tradition, but also hopes that conversations like these can “engender more critical examination, and allowances and permissions without being [seen as] a threat.”