Episode #245: Barry Lapping
“When I was in eighth grade, my mother asked me, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ And I remember saying clearly, ‘I just want to be happy.’
Although this memory was from many decades ago, Barry Lapping still recalls it vividly, and it remains a key piece of the story that led to his life of spiritual practice. Now the Center Teacher at Dhamma Dharā, the Vipassana center in the S.N. Goenka tradition located in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, he joins the podcast to discuss his lifetime practicing—and teaching—meditation.
Barry’s journey is not very different from his friend, Michael Stein, who told his own story last year, both something of a 1960’s counterculture snapshot. Barry attended the famous Woodstock concert, indulged in any manner of intoxicants and psychedelics, and traveled throughout the US. Strongly opposed to the Vietnam War, he went to Israel, where he had aspirations of living out his days on a kibbutz. But the threat of conscription had followed him, as he was told that if he were Jewish and living in Israel, he must serve a stint in the army.
Right around that time, he happened upon an edition of Life magazine that changed everything for him. “I saw a two-page black and white picture of a young American, sitting in the mountains of New Mexico, watching the sunrise come up. He was sitting in full lotus position. Absolutely beautiful picture and alarms just went off in my head, ‘You got to go to India!’ I knew nothing about India. But I saw that picture, and I was determined.” With this newfound interest, he educated himself on yoga and was particularly struck by its promise of complete psychosomatic purification.
So Barry set off with two college friends, traveling overland through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan before reaching India. His arrival felt like a homecoming, marked by an immediate comfort he felt in the country. After some traveling, he settled in Kathmandu, where he met a woman heading back to India. Although they were going to different places, they decided to travel together as far as Bodhgaya. As the story would have it, she became ill, so they stopped at the Burmese Vihara… where he became acquainted with Munindra, Grahame White, and Joseph Goldstein (along with his mother), among others. It was fortuitous, to say the least. Munindra introduced himself as a vipassana meditation teacher, and Barry was enthralled. “This is just exactly what I needed to hear! So all of those travels were leading me at that time to Bodhgaya. I spent about two and a half months practicing exactly what Munindra-ji taught me. He was my first teacher. But then one night, he came up to the up to the meditation hall and he said, ‘Tomorrow, my friend S.N. Goenka is coming to teach a 10-day course I want all of you to sit that course.’”
Barry explains how Goenka came to conduct courses in English. The story starts with an American hippie couple who left the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco to learn how to meditate in Asia, but they had no idea who could guide them. They traveled to Dalhousie, in India, and wrote a letter to several teachers about the possibility of learning from them. One was Sayagyi U Ba Khin, who responded that Goenka was his representative in India; he also sent a letter to Goenka telling him to travel to Dalhousie to meet them. It was there in Dalhousie that Goenka taught his first course in English, to a total of 12 or 13 students. However, Goenka was initially hesitant, as he was unsure about his ability to speak English well enough, but he gained confidence as the course stretched on. Soon after, Goenka taught led four more courses in English at Bodhgaya, the first of those being the one Barry joined.
It was on one of those course, in January, 1971, that Goenka heard the fateful news that his teacher, U Ba Khin, had suddenly passed away. It came as a total shock, and Goenka was quite shaken. He chose to sit a self-course, which involved a period of all-night meditation at the Mahabodhi Temple. “That is when he said that he was going to devote the rest of his life to the teaching of vipassana meditation,” Barry recalls. “Keep in mind that U Ba Khin himself is the one that wanted to go to India,” he adds. “His dream was to teach himself outside India, but due to the political situation in Burma, even back then, he was never able to get out.” But because Goenka was in India at the time caring for his ailing mother, he was in a position to conduct courses in his teacher’s place.
To Barry, the characteristics that would come to define the Goenka tradition were evident in the person of Goenka from the very start. “More than anything, it was his ability and his skill set to communicate to large groups of people, and his deep understanding of the essence of the Dhamma, not just the tradition of what he grew up in himself, but the very essence of Dhamma.” Contrasting Munindra and Goenka as teachers, Barry notes that with the former, “you start with the observation of breath, but whatever else is arising, whether it be a physical sensation, a thought, emotion, whatever it happens to be, you observe that and when it's not there, you come back to the breath.” With Goenka, however, the breath is not the practice baseline; rather, a set period of concentration on the breath is used as a means to sharpen the mind in order move to attention towards the continual observation of physical sensations. “No matter what happens, the student of the teachings of the Buddha has to reach a stage where they are feeling the arising and passing away of physical sensations,” he states, describing the methodology as taught by Goenka.
From these first courses, Goenka’s mission started gaining momentum. Barry recalls how Goenka had a unique ability to connect with people from vastly different backgrounds, most notably those young hippies who were then flooding into India in droves. “All of a sudden, he sees people from all over the world, knowing… that these people were coming to him to get the Dhamma. So even though he may not have understood their background or their culture, he knew what they needed to get, and he was able to communicate with them in such a way that they did not have to call themselves Buddhist, or Hindu or Jewish, or Christian, or Muslim or anything else. These were all people! A great majority of them were only looking for something to clean up their own minds.” And as for Barry, he was certain that he found his path. “I knew I had a practice that was going to help me… That was 52 years ago, and I haven't stopped.”
Along with other young disciples, Barry would spend half the year following Goenka around and attending his retreats, and half the year pursuing his own practice in the mountains around Dalhousie, where the temperatures were cooler. He recalls how transformative the practice was from the moment he began engaging with it. “It so quickly and so directly goes to the heart of the issues, the deep-rooted cause of our own misery inside,” he says. “I knew I was quite miserable looking for happiness.”
Later, Barry returned to the US, where Joseph Goldstein’s mother hired him to maintain her bungalow in the Catskills. After his father had a stroke in 1975, he stayed home for many subsequent years to take care of him. Once Dhamma Dharā was built in 1982, he married his wife, Kate, and they dedicated themselves to overseeing its management, a responsibility that continues into the present day. Barry notes that Kate actually played a critical role in the development of a defining characteristic of Goenka courses. He explains that Goenka, concerned as to how courses could operate in the West, initially thought he would have to charge students for the food and accommodation, but Kate stepped in, offering to personally pay any shortfalls so that the course could be purely donation-based… and since that time, no course in the Goenka tradition has ever charged for admission, food or lodging! Instead, if they so desire, students may leave dana (a donation) towards supporting future courses after they have completed at least one course. “We live in such a crazy, economic world!” he says. “And [here] somebody is actually giving something without expecting anything in return. These centers in Goenka-ji’s tradition exist only to give something!”
Beyond sharing his own personal story as a yogi on the path, Barry speaks about the tradition as a whole, in particular addressing various concerns and criticisms he’s heard over the years. The first of these is the charge that the organization is too insular. Barry begins with an examination of this particular technique, arguing that it incorporates the full range of human experiences which manifest as physical sensations, thereby connecting the mental, emotional, and sensory dimensions, and reflecting the interdependent nature of reality as taught in the Buddha’s discourses. “So the reality is that this approach, which to some may appear to be narrow, is actually completely open, completely wide, and completely inclusive of everything that's happening: physical, mental, internal, external; because all of those things manifest with physical sensations on the body.” To Barry, those meditation practices which do not ultimately observe physical sensations are missing the essence of the Buddha’s teachings. “Whether we adhere to this approach of the teachings of the Buddha or another approach, if you read the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, every one of those approaches lead to the same thing, the arising and passing away of all phenomena,” he says, “and how will you really know the arising and passing away of phenomena unless you directly experience them by feeling those phenomena? Like I said before, everything that arises internally or externally manifests with a physical sensation on the body.”
Continuing on this theme of insularity, Barry reveals that back in 1982, around the time of that Dhamma Dharā was founded, Goenka learned that his students were discussing their meditation with practitioners from other traditions, and he instructed them to put an immediate stop to it. And because Goenka also stressed the dangers of mixing techniques, yogis in this tradition were encouraged to associate with those following the same practice. This was something of a contrast to the 1970s in India, when Barry recalls that students of different traditions and practices lived together and exchanged thinking about their different paths, including Goenka students. He adds, “I do want to say that I loved all those people [who practiced in other traditions], and I still consider them my friends.” Moreover, Goenka gave guidance as to how his Centers were to engage—or rather, to not engage—in worldly causes. “There are gender issues, there are race issues, you name it, there's an issue about anything! We are not going to get involved publicly in those issues, the Center does not exist for that purpose,” he states simply, adding that it is his belief that by practicing this particular technique alone, the world’s ills can be resolved. “This technique has a very unique place in society. It is not political,” he says. “These courses exist only to teach people this law of nature, so they can come out of their own particular conditioning.”
Another criticism that Barry addresses head on is Goenka’s frequent use of the term “pristine purity,” which some have pointed out indicates a kind of spiritual superiority. After acknowledging that English was not Goenka’s first language, Barry feels this was meant “more in terms of the purity of Dhamma, not necessarily just the purity of this tradition. This tradition to me is extremely pure, because it is only a vessel that holds this practice, and the practice itself holds the very essence of what the Buddha taught.” In addition, he feels their tradition can claim “purity” based on its policy of “not getting involved in all kinds of other things, not being active socially, and not engaging with other traditions.” This notion of purity is also predicated on working with a “technique that takes you to the level of feeling sensation, and developing equanimity with sensation,” and that any other practice that brings the student to an observation of physical sensations can also rightly claim this “pristine purity.” Finally, he references the use of this term in describing the Burmese lineage from which it was derived, noting that the technique “was kept in, let's say pristine purity, for any tradition to make use of. And for that we are eternally grateful.”
Barry tackle another sensitive issue: the concern about quantity over quality. In other words, some claim that the tradition has grown too fast to be able to effectively teach the large and diverse numbers of students now hoping to enroll in a course. In response, Barry emphasizes the remarkable spread of this technique around the globe while discounting the concern. “Knowing that every human being is different, our job is simple: Just give everybody the Dhamma as we understand it, and let them progress as they are able to progress in the world,” he says. “The hope is that there will be people in the world who will take this technique and develop it as much as they can, according to their own ability, and pass it on to the next generation. I think that's all we can do. Are mistakes made? Certainly, mistake are made, but everywhere mistakes are made.”
The final criticism that Barry addresses concerns the audio and video instructions and discourses that Goenka recorded in 1990, and which continue to be used on all courses today, in lieu of a live teacher presenting the teachings or chanting (though assistant teachers are present to oversee the course and answer questions). “If the time comes where these recorded materials are no longer fulfilling the need of the society, and of the people who want to learn Dhamma, well, I think they're going to have to change, and that's going to be up to the teachers of that day how it is done,” he says, adding, “but you know, Goenka-ji is a very tough act to follow! There are not many people, and I don't know anyone, honestly, who can do what he did in such a skillful way.” He then connects these recordings to the idea of “pristine purity,” noting that “it does ensure that the ‘purity’ of the technique is maintained exactly the same all over the world.”
Barry closes by reflecting on the Burmese origins of this tradition that has since spread around the world. “One of Goenka-ji’s strongest qualities was his gratitude,” he says. “He had the Global Pagoda [in Mumbai] built for the purpose of showing his gratitude to U Ba Khin, to Burma. And so that example of that kind of gratitude was instilled in us.” He remembers his own journeys into Burma, the first trip being in 1973 when he was ordained as a monk at International Meditation Center (IMC). And Barry holds a particular reverence for Shwedagon Pagoda, remarking that it is a “reminder of, ‘Look what these people in this country have done for us!’” Indeed, he feels that Burma as a nation holds a special place for the yogi in his tradition, adding, “When we practice every day, when we generate mettā for all beings, we should remember Burma… Because if it wasn't for them, we would not have this Center, we would not be doing what we're doing now. So that gratitude becomes an essential and critical part of our own practice.”