Episode #380: On Vipassanā and Authenticity
RELEASE DATE: AUGUST 17, 2025
“I started meditation at a fairly young age,” says Daniel Stuart, recalling the decision that set him on a lifelong path of practice and study. At nineteen, he traveled to India, disillusioned by the social world he grew up in, searching for an alternative. What he ultimately found was vipassanā meditation as taught by S.N. Goenka. This practice was to become the foundation of both his personal life and professional research. “It was for me a quite revolutionary experience,” he explains. In the intervening years, Stuart has published two books about the Goenka tradition: Emissary of Insight and Insight in Perspective.
But it was that first course which opened a world of questions for Stuart: Where did the technique come from? How had it changed, if at all, over time? What does it mean to call a practice “authentic”? This curiosity drove him to study Pāḷi and Hindi, live in India, travel through Burma, and eventually become a scholar who bridges a genuine practice and historical research.
Stuart affirms he is a “die-hard student” of S.N. Goenka, a Burmese-born meditation teacher of Indian descent; however, his loyalty to the tradition and its practices is paired with a determination to see the lineage in its full historical and cultural context, regardless of the repercussions that have affected his participation in the Goenka community as a result. He says there’s “a long history of people like me” who have asked similar questions, and who quickly found themselves at odds with the community, “not finding a place, and, in fact, often being explicitly pushed out or excluded.”
A pivotal moment that prompted this interest occurred in the early 2000s, while Stuart was living at Dhamma Giri, Goenka’s main meditation center in India. He and his twin brother produced a video about Burma’s Sixth Buddhist Council, an event Goenka often praised. Their video included images of Mahasi Sayadaw, another prominent Burmese meditation master who was present at the event. But when they screened it for one of Goenka’s main assistants, he recalls being told, “Nope. You can’t include the image of Mahasi,” adding, “They’ve got a lot of faith in Burma… but we have the true Dhamma here in India now.” Stuart says this contradiction startled him: Goenka himself had spoken repeatedly of both Burma’s importance and his teacher, Sayagyi U Ba Khin with profound reverence. He felt compelled to better understand what contributed to the gap between Goenka’s words and the institutional message. Over time, this led Stuart to a central realization—the claim often heard in the Goenka tradition, that the method is exactly what the Buddha taught, in its “pristine purity,” cannot be taken literally. “Surprise, surprise,” he says, “there’s not a perfect correlation between what we read in the earliest teachings of the Buddha and what Goenkaji teaches.”
For Stuart, however, this fact does not undermine the validity of the practice. Rather, it invites a richer, more realistic understanding of how Buddhist traditions have always evolved. He describes how the Buddha’s world was highly diverse; he taught in a context where Brahmins, Jains, and many other ascetic groups interacted and debated. Out of this pluralistic environment, different interpretations and approaches to Buddhist practice emerged. After the Buddha’s death, these and other differences sharpened, the genesis of centuries of doctrinal debate, cultural exchange, and textual development. By the time Buddhism took root in Burma, it was already the product of all those dynamic processes, including the Commentarial literature, Abhidhamma scholasticism and later reform movements. Vipassanā, as Goenka taught it, emerged out of this long, complex and dynamic history—not from some fixed, unbroken, singular line stretching back 2,500 years to the historical Buddha.
As an example, he points to Goenka’s teaching about kalāpas— often described as “subatomic particles.” He notes that when you check the earliest texts, “that idea is not there, [and] that term’s not there,” explaining it comes from a later scholarly tradition that reinterpreted earlier sources, became central to meditative traditions in the first centuries of the Common Era, and stayed relevant into the modern Burmese context. Likewise with the pāramīs: the general idea of cultivating virtues across lifetimes appears early, but there is no list of pāramīs in the earliest texts; the enumerated scheme comes from the later commentarial tradition that Goenka draws on. For Stuart, the point isn’t to dismiss such teachings but to situate them historically—he says he “always found connections,” and took “contradictions and differences as just part of my practice.”
For many Western meditators, however, authenticity is often measured against the earliest texts. Stuart contrasts this with what is referred to as “the Protestant tradition,” which “says … the true teachings can be found in this one holy book,” and where one is urged to “find the earliest texts and prove this based on a historical analysis.” In Burma, he explains, other criteria commonly establish legitimacy—relationship to a teacher and continuity of paramparā/lineage— alongside even supernatural validation; he cites U Ba Khin’s disciple Venkataraman, a jhāna master whose psychic experiences included direct contact with “the guardian deities of the Sāsana.” Stuart stresses that this worldview fundamentally shifts the very grounds for judging authenticity: “If you are in a world in which that is all very concretely real, and your psychic student has direct contact with deities who knew the historical Buddha, what sort of authenticity of the early textual tradition matters?”
What is more, the dissonance between a “Protestant approach” and a cultural-historical reading of authentic Buddhist practice becomes less stark when Goenka’s teaching is viewed in the contexts in which it arose. Effective teaching is always shaped by its audience—specific people with specific needs in specific places at specific times. In Goenka’s case, he was navigating the worlds of Burmese Buddhist culture and a post-colonial India, with a modern, rationalist interest on the part of early Western spiritual seekers. Seen in this light, his emphasis on universality and preference for secular language were not only philosophical stances, but pragmatic responses to these environments. As Stuart notes, there is a “triangulation … between the global, the scientific modern, the Indian cultural identity, and the Burmese tradition.” While Stuart resists treating the technique as an abstract, free-floating entity, he calls attention to a tangible lineage of body-oriented practice from Ledi Sayadaw, through his students, which eventually came to U Ba Khin. “If we want to understand our tradition,” Stuart says, “we have to understand who Goenkaji really was… and there are multiple understandings even of who he was, within different communities.” Any attempt to fit him neatly into one category risks flattening the complexity of the teacher, the teaching, and the tradition itself.
Living with all this complexity, he insists, is not a threat to practice; but is an enrichment of it. Over time, he has learned to move beyond the certainty he once clung to as a young meditator. That shift, he believes, reflects the natural maturation of both scholarship and meditation, and has allowed him to see his teacher and his lineage more clearly, but not less reverently.
Even now, after decades of study, Stuart’s commitment to the practice as taught by Goenka remains unwavering. His historical inquiry has not replaced his devotion; instead, it has deepened it by showing him how a living tradition can hold both continuity and change.
For Stuart, the value of this approach extends beyond his own experience. He hopes his work will help other meditators navigate the same questions that once unsettled him. Instead of offering a single, definitive answer, he invites students to accept the complexity of their tradition and to see that complexity not as a flaw but as a sign of its vitality. “We live in this space in between,” he says, “like ancient tradition and modernity… and that’s where the whole game is.”