Episode #259: Dr. Jenny Ko Gyi
When Dr. Jenny Ko Gyi followed her military husband to a remote posting in rural Gangaw, she had no idea how profoundly the experience would affect not only her own spiritual life, but also go on to impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of meditators across the country.
Several decades ago, Jenny’s husband was transferred to a station in a small village surrounded by forests just at the edge of the Chin Hills. He was now the commander of the 58th Burma Regiment, and would occasionally be called on to venture out to the front lines when conflict developed; Jenny was charged with running the household and raising their children. The rural setting was pleasing to them, and although Jenny’s family was Buddhist and most of the local community was Christian, they quickly developed strong friendships there. Her husband even developed a somewhat of a following, as he was a musician, and many villagers came to hear him play his guitar.
“We enjoyed everything,” Jenny recalls. “We loved all the people. We loved every day, every moment…. the people, the place, the winters, the cherries, the pine trees, the oranges, the apples. But in the end, it was the people. I loved the people.”
Then one afternoon, someone told Jenny about a meditation retreat that she had attended deep in the forest. There were just a handful of local villagers, mainly Chin Buddhists who had likely been there since precolonial times and had resisted the attempts by a previous generation of American missionaries to convert them. The monk taught sporadically, as residents were only able to attend after the rains, following the period when the rice paddies had to be harvested. Rarely were there more than a dozen attendees at any given time.
Jenny was keen to visit, although it was not an easy trek to the monastery; in fact, she might have been the first outsider to ever set foot there. “In those days, we didn't have a bridge, so we had to whistle for the boat to come pick us up. And then we crossed the sesamum fields, went up a small hill, and then beyond that, we walked through the paddy fields, and then only then we got to the Monle hillock.”
Jenny eventually managed to visit Monle Sayadaw, so-named after that small piece of geography and soon made plans to return for his next meditation course. Yet the initial results were not exactly what she had hoped.
“When I concentrated on inbreath-outbreath, the most I could do was five times, and then my mind would start wandering. On the about the fifth or the sixth day, I decided, okay, I can't concentrate at the nasal tip.” That very night, Monle Sayadaw gave Jenny a Dhamma talk about temperaments, and said that people who are unable to focus on this subtle reality should instead switch to the “contemplation of feelings.”
So Jenny switched to observing arising and passing away. “And from the next day onward,” she recalls, “while I was walking, I would contemplate when I set foot on the ground, ‘This is hardness.’ And then I raised the foot, I lifted the foot, ‘Oh, the hardness has passed away.’”
Monle Sayadaw’s timely teaching presaged a series of encounters in which Jenny saw the great monk display amazing mental powers, from being able to give nuanced, individualized advice to meditators based on their mental states, to reading the minds and intentions of others, to predicting the future. Jenny knew that at last she had found her teacher!
Jenny explains that from childhood, she had harbored an inner desire to one day meet a fully enlightened being. Like many educated Burmese at that period, she attended a Christian school, where she read about the lives of the saints. She was fascinated to consider what an encounter with a perfected being, an Arahant, might be like. Thus, she viewed Monle Sayadaw as the fulfillment of a deep aspiration she had held for so many years.
Jenny came to learn that Monle Sayadaw’s own story was very compelling. A struggling ruby miner in Mogok, he was neither developed in practice nor learned in the scriptures. Yet one day he came across a passage by Mogok Sayadaw describing Wrong View that affected him so deeply that he left the mines then and there to study under the great teacher, himself, in Mandalay.
Jenny became Monle Sayadaw’s dedicated disciple, making more frequent trips to his forested abode in which she learned about his teachings more deeply. He encouraged students to carefully study the Law of Dependent Origination, and apply it in life by discriminating between concepts and the ultimate reality. Monle advised Jenny to establish a daily practice, not only during formal meditation retreats, and to continue her contemplations during such mundane activities as eating a meal, or finding herself caught in some emotion like anger.
Her husband also became a devoted follower of Monle Sayadaw. Jenny describes how despite his being a Bamar commander in ethnic regions which might otherwise be a source of friction, he had the respect of many local villagers. He stayed in local homes when traveling, with an implicit understanding that weapons would be hidden on his arrival. He spent mornings in meditation before going out on military missions, and then delivered Dhamma talks based on Monle’s teachings in the evening.
Jenny soon realized that because the journey to the Monle Hillock was too arduous for most to manage, she should do her best to make Monle more accessible to them. “[From] the first time, I knew that my master was someone definitely not ordinary,” she says. “So I brought him [to Yangon] because there was no one to come listen to the Dhamma talks. During the Water Festival days, I would go to all the neighbor's houses, and ask them to come listen.”
Eventually she organized a meditation retreat in her own family home in Yangon. (Coincidentally, one of her neighbors happened to be the Goenka family, and of course SN Goenka would later export a Burmese version of vipassana practice around the world.) That one-week retreat brought together a variety of elements from Burmese society. One of the attendees of the inaugural course was Aung San Suu Kyi, who had recently been released from house arrest. Military intelligence began to swarm around outside the house as a result, eventually prohibiting the future leader from attending past a few days. Because of this connection, Jenny’s husband was later barred from any further promotions.
From this small first course, Monle Sayadaw’s renown began to grow, and eventually he became widely known in Burma. More retreats were organized in Yangon and throughout the country, and even in the United States. An enormous meditation center was built in Mandalay, and Jenny estimates that hundreds of thousands ultimately came to learn his technique.
Ironically, although her husband was reprimanded for hosting Monle’s first course in their family home, many important generals came to generously give dana as the Sayadaw’s fame grew, likely in hopes of counteracting the enormously bad karma they were generating. “They wanted to be near the Venerable all the time,” she remembers. “We were at the back, kind of pushed away. But they knew we were the pioneers.”
“I am not even sure I should say this,” Jenny notes in closing, “there are many who can recite what they hear. But it is not my level of knowing who can know whether they really grasp it in their wisdom, or insight, or in a level of knowledge. It is only within the scope of the great arahants who know what others don't know. Only the Venerable would know. Out of the thousands there is… only one who has this penetrative knowledge.”