Episode #253: Jonathan Crowley, Part 4
This is the fourth installment of a multi-part discussion with Jonathan Crowley. A long-time, devoted, vipassana meditator and Assistant Teacher, Jonathan has since left the S.N. Goenka tradition. In Part One, he shares how he came across the meditation; in Part Two, he explores his growing dedication with the tradition and his work around social justice; and in Part Three, he describes his experience being a teacher and his developing struggles with the organization’s messaging. Today’s conversation focuses on the time that he and his wife Carolyn spent in Myanmar, and how it impacted his spiritual journey. While the experience there inspired them and greatly enriched their understanding of the Dhamma, it also contributed to his growing concerns with the tradition.
Jonathan starts by reflecting on how his preconceptions of Myanmar had been strongly shaped by Goenka’s characterizations of the country. As a result, he initially viewed it almost as an idealized place, where this tradition’s technique— described as the one, pristinely pure iteration of the Buddha’s teachings— had been safeguarded over the centuries. Jonathan’s first visit to the Golden Land was a 1997 pilgrimage to lineage sites connected to the Goenka lineage, during which he basically experienced the country within the context of those sites. While he was vaguely aware of the other manifestations of Dhamma all around him, they remained on the periphery, while his framework for interpreting his Myanmar experiences drew from that somewhat mythological “pure Dhamma land” of Goenka’s lineage narrative.
Jonathan’s perspective feeds into the concept of “Orientalism,” a term coined by Edward Said, who criticized the West for exotifying non-Western cultures without really trying to understand them on their own terms, and then using that warped view to derive further interpretations. Myanmar, because of its relative isolation over the years, has been particularly susceptible to this exotified view, and so Goenka’s creative license in describing the country gave rise to even greater distortions.
When Jonathan and Carolyn went to Myanmar in 2011, the country was on the cusp of big changes. Though Aung Sang Suu Kyi was being released from house arrest when they arrived, it was still dangerous to speak about her in public. Yet around the time that they left, little more than a year later, she was elected to Parliament! Jonathan talks about the sea change he felt in the air during this initial, enthusiastic period of opening up. He was also struck by the rich Dhamma atmosphere that seemed to emanate from a variety of directions… including those that weren’t associated with the Goenka tradition, as he began to open to other influences. For example, he recalls meditating at Shwedagon Pagoda, and visiting sites containing relics. And while they did attend a course at Dhamma Joti, the Yangon vipassana center in the Goenka tradition, they found themselves much more affected by Sayagyi U Ba Khin’s center, IMC. “It just knocked our socks off to sit there!” he exclaims. Jonathan also speaks about how he was somewhat taken aback to learn that Saya Thet, the teacher of U Ba Khin, taught much stronger concentration than is encouraged in Goenka’s teaching. Jonathan says, “There's a kind of a conflation [between the Buddha’s teachings and this lineage] that happens within this tradition…. But coming to Burma showed me there was a much broader scope of the Dhamma than just Goenkaji’s tradition.”
As these dissonant experiences steadily added up, they began to reinforce the unease he had already been feeling about the messaging around the supposed “purity” of the tradition. Another area of dissonance for him was the tradition’s relationship with the Sangha. On the one hand, Jonathan describes the tradition as distancing itself from monastics, in part because of its self-identification as a lay tradition, but also because of the belief that some teachers and yogis have that most monks don’t meditate anyway, they’re just caught up in rites and rituals; and even if some do meditate, Jonathan describes a condescending attitude that they are not practicing in this “pristinely pure” lineage. On the other hand, while in Myanmar during his first visit, Jonathan attended many monastic donation events with Goenka himself, and he recalls the genuine, deep reverence that his teacher had for those who put on robes and followed the discipline.
After their year in Myanmar, Jonathan and Carolyn returned to the US, where more dramatic shifts happened in their life. First, they were expecting a child, and the life changes that that brings. Then, even as Carolyn was training as an Assistant Teacher, they found themselves seriously grappling with the emotional and personal compartmentalization they felt was required to remain fully engaged with the tradition when they continued to confront information, attitudes and beliefs that flew in the face of what they had experienced and learned in Myanmar. It was causing quite a strain. Reflecting on the fundamentalism, rigidity, spiritual by-pass and lack of emotional integration that he saw as rife in the organization, Jonathan came to think, “Wait a second, how can this practice which [is ascribed] to such a pure and pristine practice—how can it be resulting in these kinds of outcomes both inside myself, and in others…?”
Besides the purity narrative itself, Jonathan describes some of these problematic attitudes and beliefs as stemming from the tradition’s stripped down approach to practice: the exclusive attention to body sensations (what Goenka asserts is the accurate definition of the Pāḷi word, vedana) with equanimity, presented as the one, true teaching of the Buddha. Besides that restrictive approach leading to what Jonathan sees as spiritual by-pass in many Goenka meditators, he was learning that the Buddha quite explicitly taught many different methods for facing negativity and cultivating positive qualities. He also began to see how the tradition treated cognitive engagement as an inferior kind of Dhamma engagement, just an “intellectual game” in Goenka’s words. Yet again, in the suttas he was now reading more diligently, he found that there were, in fact, many ways the Buddha recommended that one attend to the cognitive side of things as a critical part of one’s practice.
As Jonathan’s awareness of systemic racism and white privilege in American society grew, he increasingly—and tragically— saw manifestations of this in the organization as well. When he brought these concerns to organization leadership, he explains how they either rejected his observations, or insisted that adhering carefully to the meditation practice would ultimately resolve these conflicts, as racism was like any other human defilement, which ultimately could be transcended through the equanimous observation of bodily sensations. This concerned him, because many of these teachers had themselves spent decades of practice with this technique, yet were still manifesting the very unwholesome behaviors and attitudes they insisted would automatically melt away through the practice. He realized that understanding these social conditionings needs directed attention and engagement that sitting in silence cannot resolve on its own.
There are common counter-arguments that he encountered. One goes like this: “Well, racism is bad for sure, and all power to those who work to combat it, but my time on Earth is limited, and what better way to spend it than practicing towards liberation?” Another is: “By practicing, I will be dealing with any negativity, and so I address racism that way.” Indeed, Jonathan says that he himself once thought in exactly those same ways. But he realizes now that it is a false dichotomy to distinguish between either the priority of addressing racism in oneself and society, or working towards personal liberation; it is ideally both-and. And again, Jonathan was increasingly finding that the meditation practice was simply not reaching those deeper levels of social conditioning… evidenced by the unexamined racism and bias existing within the very organization that claimed their practice to be the cure-all! Moreover, Jonathan found some of his experiences in anti-racism trainings as transformational as anything he ever experienced on the cushion, which helped him regain “part of my humanity.” He believes that using meditation practice as the reason to not engage in issues is just avoidance or by-pass.
“I mean, this sounds maybe very esoteric, but I just felt that living in Yangon, it was like a vortex of Dhamma vibrations that the Shwedagon Pagoda was responsible for,” Jonathan says in closing. “It certainly was extremely inspiring to me to be there on that level.”