Beyond a Meditation Technique
In a recent podcast episode, Beth Upton emphasized the profound influence of Burmese Buddhist tradition on her teaching journey, acknowledging its depth and richness. Amid Myanmar's conflict, she highlights the loss of valuable knowledge and spiritual guidance inaccessible due to the crisis. Beth stresses the importance of immersing in Burmese culture for a holistic understanding of Buddhism beyond meditation techniques. She urges practitioners to reciprocate the teachings received by supporting Myanmar and embodying Buddhist principles in daily life. Beth warns against detachment from worldly issues, advocating for active engagement aligned with spiritual values. Ultimately, she underscores the irreplaceable wisdom embedded in Burmese Buddhist culture.
“When you live in that culture, you are immersed in the richness of that and how it shows up in little ways in all aspects of life. That can’t be encapsulated in a meditation technique!”
It's true that we don't have innovation in the Theravada tradition. It's not an innovative tradition; it is, by definition, one of preservation; literally, the words of the elders preserved the words of the Buddha and the commentators who recorded the teachings of the Buddha after his death; the idea is one of humility. And that is that we can't improve on the teachings of the Buddha; he was the Buddha!
The further we get away from the time of the Buddha, the more potential we have for people's defilements to distort the Buddha's message, all we are going to add is defilements and distortions; we're not going to add any great new invention, to how to make an end of suffering, the Buddha has already laid it down for us in the most elegant possible way. Of course, it's not that the Burmese culture has added nothing. I don't think it's possible for humans still with defilements to engage with the Dhamma and not distort it. However, the Burmese tradition has influenced and added some of its culture into the Dhamma.
But from the options that we have available to us in the world today, they're one of the countries that have done the best job in that work of preservation. Where they have added something culturally, for the most part, they have tried to bring awareness to that or declare it openly. There's a great respect for the commentaries because there's an understanding that if we engage with the suttas just through our modern-day cultural lens, then the only way that we are going to understand that sutta, the sutta being such a brief outline of the Buddha's teachings is essentially by inventing our own new commentary, our new interpretation of what that sutta means. There's this philosophy of whose interpretation of the suttas is likely to be more accurate, the ancient commentator, who was alive a few 100 years after the Buddha's death, or my commentary, and they fall back on the humility of relying on the commentaries, going back to the texts.
When you live in that culture, you are immersed in the richness of that and how it shows up in little ways in all aspects of life. That can't be encapsulated in a meditation technique! A meditation technique is excellent to have, but it's a very, very small part of the teachings of the Buddha. And if that's all that we've taken, just a meditation technique, then there's very, very much that we miss.I think, this has been felt by anybody who has gone to practice in Myanmar for some time, long enough to immerse themselves in the culture that we believe these teachings like faith, humility, generosity, and sila, so deeply embedded in the culture in a way that we can't carry away with us in a meditation technique.