SN Goenka, Sayagyi U Ba Khin, and the Italian monk
Before Buddhism and meditation became global, there were a select few important foreign men who became monks in Asia. These include such figures as Ananda Metteya, Asoka, Dhammaloka… and U Lokanatha. Living in an age of pan-Buddhism prior to the hardening of nation-states, the respective trajectories and lineages of these figures do not have any direct lines to locate today, and perhaps because of that, they are largely lost to history.
Yet, now history is re-locating them, with biographies about each of these unique monastics recently being released. The subject of this particular podcast is U Lokanatha. I speak to Antonio Costanza, who updates us on the research his team has put together on this Italian monk. The life and teachings of this monastic defy the imagination, although much about him is still unknown. In the following excerpt, Antonio discusses the likely influence U Lokanatha had on the develop of SN Goenka in to a meditation teacher.
“U Lokanatha was close to U Ba Khin. We suspect that Goenka had much to take from U Lokanatha.”
Host: You mentioned how struck you were by U Lokantha’s courage, how that was the thing that stood out to you, which has inspired or influenced in the way you look at your own meditation practice and study.
Antonio Costanza: When you have fear in normal life, or also during formal meditation, then you can just remind to yourself about history, or about impermanence. And when you have an outstanding figure, a person who went on foot from South Italy to India, was captured in Turkey by pirates, and later wrote to De Lorenzo, ‘I have nothing other than metta to give them. This is my life. There's nothing more you can take from me!’
When you have such examples to look at, then I think you feel inspired. Also, he was a scientific man, and he was very important for connecting science to meditation. We should not forget that U Lokanatha was one of the first monks who did this. It is also important that he had a degree in chemistry, and then later he joined to monkhood. So he knew what he was speaking about, and others looked at his figure for this kind, and other types of teachings.
One thing that maybe is also worth mentioning, I found in Goenka discourses some references, especially when he talks about signs, there are some examples that are very, very close in speech to U Lokanatha’s discourses. Goenka knew something about him. He never taught him, but we know that U Lokanatha was very famous during his lifetime. We have also sources attesting that he was close to U Ba Khin. We suspect that Goenka had much to take from U Lokanatha. Because at that time, there were not so many people speaking about both this meditation from a scientific point of view.