What is the Mahāsī method?
Although this interview was aired a few years ago, there is truly something timeless about it. It was amazing to hear Alan Clements tell his full story of how he got to Burma, where he would ordain under Mahāsī Sayadaw, and how these teachings have transformed and guided his life ever since. As the practice of mindfulness and meditation has since spread around the world and integrated itself into so many walks of life throughout the West, one sometimes forgets how different the experience was in the early days for Western practitioners, when it was exceedingly difficult to find access to qualified teachers and practice sites. Alan was one of the pioneers on this spiritual journey, and his story is relevant to any practitioner today.
“You can’t save up your mindfulness for tomorrow. You can’t save up the oxygen of your Dhamma for tomorrow!”
“To put the so-called ‘Mahāsī method’ into a box is impossible. The initial instructions are pretty straightforward, but listening to the diversity of the instructions and the experience, it’s impossible to define, other than the immensity of the Satipatthāna teaching.
You could have five hundred monks in a meditation hall, and over the course of a week, those monks and/or nuns, who see their teacher every other day, every one of their experiences overlap, but often the instructions differ yogi-to-yogi.
And of course, the deeper you go, the more dimensionality you find in your own mind and body. What you encounter, what you hear in the instructions six months in, it’s like Stephen Hawkings talking to a kindergarten teacher!
The dimensionality of these teachings cannot be pigeon-holed or boxed. There is no ‘Mahāsī system;’ it is these infinite teachings of the so-called Buddha, through the power of mindfulness illuminating the structures of nāma-rūpa, consciousness and physicality, in ways that none of us really understand. Even Mahāsī Sayadaw said, ‘I’m not an Arahant,’ and set aside being a Buddha. None of them, none of these people talk about their insights! No one really knows. ‘This is what mindfulness is; this is what it isn’t.’
This is the ‘Mahāsī system’ versus Sunlun versus U Tejaniya or Shwe Oo Min or any number of the other teachers in this country. And it’s just, in my experience, impossible to play that game! The beauty of these teachings, for me, is direct experience.
We’re breathing right now, and there’s no substitute for breathing. There’s no one who is listening to you or [me] who would say, ‘Listen, just save up your breath for tomorrow.’ You can’t save up your mindfulness for tomorrow. You can’t save up the oxygen of your Dhamma for tomorrow! It’s an every-moment experience that requires the direct application of breathing, breathing well. You don’t just breathe to breathe and be mindful of breathing; it’s what it does - it animates consciousness. Mindfulness illuminates the nature of consciousness; it’s the wisdom of breathing. It’s the wisdom of the practice that really turns you into something different. And if people get the direct immediacy of that, it becomes a timeless, evolutional practice, and you’re in this wild lineage of a Buddha. A Buddha life. No one really knows, where that ultimately leads. Even Mahāsī, when I’ve asked him, and I’ve asked him many times, ‘Are you an Arahant?’ [He would say] ‘More work to do.’”