Theravada reinvents 

meditation
Posted on July 7, 2011 by David Chapman

Vipassana meditation is the most Buddhist thing in “Consensus Buddhism.” This post starts to
ask how Buddhist vipassana is, by tracing its history.

It appears that, in the early 1800s, vipassana had been completely, or almost completely, lost in
the Theravada world. Either no one, or perhaps only a handful of people, knew how to do it.

Vipassana was reinvented by four people in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They started with
descriptions of meditation in scripture. Those were vague and contradictory, so the inventors
tried out different things that seemed like they might be what the texts were talking about, to see
if they worked. They each came up with different methods.

Since then, extensive innovation in Theravada meditation has continued. Advocates of different
methods disagree, often harshly, about which is correct. I am not a Theravadin, and don’t
practice any of these methods, so I have no opinion about that.

I’m also not trying to prove that modern vipassana is “inauthentic.” Coming from Tibetan
Buddhism, this rapid innovation, based on practical experiments, is slightly shocking for me. But
as a scientist and engineer, it’s also inspiring. I am happy to regard all of it as terma—the
Tibetan term for a valid new religious revelation.

What I want to explore is the context in which modern vipassana developed. Two things stand
out:

 Asian Theravada repeatedly reinvented meditation under the influence of Western

ideas.

In my last post, I described how Thai Theravada was Westernized under the kings of the late
1800s and early 1900s. Similar Buddhist modernization occurred in Sri Lanka and Burma, the
other two places meditation was reinvented. In the case of Thailand and Sri Lanka, there’s
evidence that meditation was first reinvented because of Western influence. It’s known definitely
that Asians, influenced by Western ideas, extensively revised vipassana methods during the
1900s.

Based on that, we can ask: how have Western ideas about meditation affected the new methods,
and the ways they are explained?

 Theravada meditation was reinvented by guys who were into extreme asceticism.

Knowing that, we can wonder whether it’s the best practice for people who aren’t ascetics.

How do you invent vipassana?

Perhaps many people were trying to figure out how to do vipassana in the late 1800s. Only four
succeeded. They all started from descriptions in the Pali scriptures. The most detailed are in the
Satipatthana Sutta, the Visuddhi Magga, and the Anapanasati Sutta.

In the mid-1800s, these texts were revered because supposedly they showed the way to nirvana.
However, the way they were practiced was for groups of monks to ritually chant the text in
unison. This is like a bunch of people who don’t know what a computer is reading the manual
out loud, hoping the machine will spring to life, without realizing you need to plug it in.

The people who reinvented vipassana tried to actually do what the scriptures said. That wasn’t a
possibility seriously considered before; no one was seriously attempting to reach nirvana. The
idea that you could read scripture and try to figure out what it meant was one of the Western-
influenced 1800s Protestant Buddhist innovations.

Reinventing vipassana was difficult. It took each of the reinventors many years of trial-and-error
experimentation before they came up with methods they considered worked. Their biographers
emphasize what a hard time they had.

The vipassana scriptures are vague, and they contradict each other. Proponents of different
vipassana systems consider different suttas authoritative. They disagree strongly about which is
most important, and how to interpret it.

If you read the Satipatthana Sutta, the most-used one, and if you know how to meditate, you can
say “yeah, parts of that are a pretty good description of what we do.” (Other parts are nothing
like what people do now. I think that’s important, as I’ll explain in a later post.) If you had no
idea what meditation was, the Sutta would not seem like much of a guide.

The methods the various reinventors came up with were different from each other. Quite
possibly they are all unlike the way vipassana was practiced before the method was lost—in
ways that probably reflect Western influence. I return to that point in a later post, too.

Historical uncertainties

Records from 1800s Thailand, and especially Burma, are sketchy. I’ll try to be clear about what I
do and don’t know, and what sources I’ve used.

Some of the questions I’d like answers to may not have answers. I’d especially like to know why
people made innovations in meditation; and that’s probably mostly unknowable.

Anagarika Dharmapala in Sri Lanka

Anagarika Dharmapala was born in 1864, the son of a wealthy Sri Lankan businessman. Sri
Lanka was a British colony them, and he was educated at British Christian mission schools.

As a teenager, he was interested in Western occultism. In 1884, at age 20, he met Helena
Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, a mystical “philosophy” that borrowed heavily from
German Romantic Idealism. He was much taken with her, and vice versa; he regarded her as his
principal teacher for the rest of her life. He wanted to study Western occultism with her, but she
told him to learn Pali instead, because in the Pali scriptures he would find everything he was
looking for.

Dharmapala, at Blavatsky’s instruction, set up the Sri Lankan branch of the Theosophical
Society. Both considered that its job was to reinforce Buddhism against Christian missionary
influence.

This is highly ironic. With Buddhism in Sri Lanka mostly dead, Dharmapala looked to a
Westerner for answers to his spiritual issues. But Blavatsky had come to Asia because she
imagined the secret to solving the spiritual crisis of Western culture was there. Blavatsky had no
idea what was in the Pali scriptures, but she “intuited” that they must have the answer.
Particularly, she imagined that “meditation” was the practical key. But what was “meditation”?

In the 1880s, there is no evidence that anyone in Sri Lanka knew how to meditate. One
biography of Dharmapala says flatly that “the practice had been neglected and then forgotten.”
It’s possible that there were a few monks somewhere who still practiced vipassana, but there is
no evidence for that. We do know that he travelled extensively in Sri Lanka, and “in spite of all
his enquiries he never succeeded in finding even a single person, whether monk or layman, who
could instruct him in… meditation practices.”

Eventually, he decided to start meditating anyway. He based his practice on texts he had found,
mainly the Satipatthana Sutta and Visuddhi Magga. Presumably his ideas about meditation were
influenced by Blavatsky’s, however, and by the methods of Christian prayer he had learned at
school. Later, he received some brief instruction from a Burmese teacher in India.

“Dharmapala’s advocacy of meditation practice and the availability of modern translations of

these three texts did much to foster Sri Lankan interest in meditation.”

However, his method is probably extinct, or insignificant. Since the late 1950s, the Mahasi
method (discussed below) has been dominant in Sri Lanka. And, Sri Lankan Buddhism has not
had much influence on the West.

Sources

Gil Fronsdal, “Theravada Spirituality in the West.”

Gombrich & Obeyeskere, Buddhism Transformed.

Bhikkhu Sangharakshita, Anagarika Dharmapala: A Biographical Sketch. (Presumably this is the

same Sangharakshita who founded the Triratna Buddhist Community, but I haven’t checked
that.)

The Maha Bodhi, Volumes 98-99 (available on Google Books).

Tricycle, “Anagarika Dharmapala.”

The Thai lineage

King Mongkut was the major reformer of Thai Buddhism (as explained in my last post). His
reforms were based on Western ideas. He believed that meditation was important, but was
unable to find anyone who could teach him a method he found plausible.

The only meditation methods available then were “called vichaa aakhom, or incantation
knowledge; [they] involved initiations and invocations used for shamanistic purposes, such as
protective charms and magical powers.” This seems to have been a mixture of tantra (Hindu
and/or Buddhist) and Thai folk animism. “They rarely mentioned nirvana except as an entity to
be invoked for shamanic rites.”
Mongkut rejected this “meditation.” The Pali scriptures—to which he insisted everyone should
return—say that the goal of buddhism is nirvana, attained through the practice of vipassana.
Vipassana was, as far as Mongkut could find out, lost in mid-1800s Thailand.

He and his students tried to reinvent vipassana based on scriptural explanations, but he
considered that they had failed.

Mongkut founded a monastic movement called Dhammayuttika, which emphasized strict

adherence to vinaya (the code of conduct for monks).

It was Ajahn Mun Bhuridatta, born in 1870, who developed the Thai vipassana method. Mun
was a Dhammayuttika monk. I suspect it was Mongkut’s insistence on the importance of
vipassana that led Mun to his discoveries, but I don’t have direct evidence of that.

His main teacher was Ajahn Sao Kantasilo. Sao taught a meditation method that consisted
simply of repeating the word “Buddho.” I have not been able to discover who his teacher was, or
where he got this method. I don’t know if it has any basis in Buddhist scripture; I haven’t found
any. It is certainly found in Hinduism, however. It seems possible that Sao learned it from a
Hindu teacher; there definitely were some in Thailand. That would be embarrassing, which could
explain why no one talks about his lineage.

Ajahn Mun remained devoted to Ajahn Sao throughout his life, but Sao was unable to answer
most of his questions about meditation, and Mun had doubts about the “Buddho” method. Sao,
according to Mun’s foremost student, was “not a competent teacher.” Mun set off on his own,
looking for someone who could actually teach him vipassana. He spent nearly two decades
wandering around Thailand, Laos, and Burma, but never found anyone.

Ajahn Mun gradually developed his own vipassana method, starting in the 1890s, with the main
breakthrough apparently between 1911 and 1914. He experimented with various techniques,
developed what worked, and dropped what didn’t. According to his biographies, some key ideas
came to him in visions (described in detail). Presumably his method was also based partly on his
reading of scriptural explanations.

Ajahn Mun had two main students, Ajahn Maha Bua and Ajahn Chah. Both had Western
students, but Chah was far more influential.

Ajahn Chah actually only spent one week with Ajahn Mun. He developed his own style of
practice that is more Westerner-friendly.

Ajahn Chah was the primary teacher for Jack Kornfield, among many other well-known Western
vipassana teachers.

Sao, Mun, Maha Bua, and Chah all practiced an extreme form of asceticism called dhutanga,
which goes beyond even strict adherence to vinaya. They considered that dhutanga and
vipassana were closely linked. The point of both was to violently destroy all desires through
extreme effort and austerity.

Although the Thai method is still taught, the “easier” Burmese Mahasi method (described below)
is more popular in the U.S., and even in Thailand.

Sources
Phra Ajaan Phut Thaniyo, “Ajaan Sao’s Teaching.”

Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “The Customs of the Noble Ones.”

Ajahn Maha Bua, The Biography of the Venerable Phra Acharn Mun Bhuridatta Thera.

Ajahn Maha Bua, The Venerable Phra Acharn Mun Bhuridatta Thera: Meditation Master.

Brooke Schedneck, “Comparing Forest Masters’ Techniques and Implications for International
Meditators.”

Brooke Schedneck, “Meditation Techniques of the Masters: Luangda Maha Bua.”

The Mahasi (“New Burmese”) method

The “Mahasi method” is the most-practiced vipassana nowadays. It is considered faster and
easier than the Thai method, and than the other Burmese method I describe later. Proponents of
those methods consider it bogus, however.

It was developed by Mahasi Sayadaw (1904-1982), but does have antecedents.

Mahasi’s teacher was Mingun Sayadaw (1868-1955), also known as U Narada. Many sources
count Mingun as the originator of the lineage.

Mingun’s teacher was Ale-Tawya Sayadaw, whose teacher was The-lon Sayadaw. According to
Strong Roots, cited below, “The-Lon Sayadaw… put this textual guidance [the Visuddhi Magga]
into practice without a personal teacher to guide [him] in mindfulness practice” (p. 110). This is
based oral history from a traditional Burmese monk in The-lon Sayadaw’s lineage. I can’t find
dates for The-lon or Ale-Tawya.

It appears that The-lon Sayadaw developed some method based on the Visuddhi Magga, which
was learned and then substantially modified by Mingun, which was learned and then
substantially modified by Mahasi.

As background, in the late 1800s, Burma, under King Mindon, tried to follow the same path of
modernization that successfully held off the British in Thailand. It failed, and the British seized it
in 1885, and ran the place until 1948. So Western ideas were common in Burma throughout the
period the Mahasi lineage developed.

Mahasi made several innovations. The most important was skipping samatha and the
development of the jhanas (concentration states) and going directly to vipassana. He thought that
samatha would take care of itself, if you practice vipassana correctly. The jhanas are not ends in
themselves, so bypassing samatha is a practical shortcut.

Mahasi taught that one should aim directly for sotapatti, a first taste of nirvana. Experiencing
sotapatti guarantees you cannot be reborn other than as a human or in heaven, and no more than
seven more times. He said that sotapatti could reached by newcomers in a month.

Mahasi aimed his teaching particularly at lay people, rather than monks. He imported from the
West the “meditation center” idea (not a traditional Asian institution). He eliminated ritual and
minimized textual study.
Mahasi’s best-known Asian student was Anagarika Munindra (1915-2003). Munindra was also a
student of S.N. Goenka, from the other Burmese lineage. Munindra therefore joined the two
Burmese vipassana systems. Munindra was the teacher of Dipa Ma.

Many influential American teachers, including most of the main figures in what I call
“Consensus Buddhism,” were students of Mahasi, Munindra, and/or Dipa Ma. They include:

 Joseph Goldstein
 Jack Kornfield (who first studied Ajahn Chah’s Thai method)
 Lama Surya Das
 Sharon Salzberg
 Sylvia Boorstein

These Western teachers have, of course, further modified the combined vipassana systems.

Sources

Jake H. Davis, Strong Roots: Liberation Teachings of Mindfulness in North America. Much
useful history here.

Robert H. Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience.”

Mahasi Sayadaw, “Satipatthana Vipassana: Criticisms and Replies.”

Joseph Goldstein, One Dharma: The Emerging Western Buddhism. Has some information on
Mahasi by his best-known Western student.

Brooke Schedneck, “The Role of Samadhi in Meditation Centers and the Forest Tradition” and
“Book Review: The Experience of Samadhi by Richard Shankman.” On samatha vs. vipassana,
and differences between the various vipassana methods.

Gil Fronsdal, “Theravāda Spirituality in the West,” “Insight Meditation in the United States:
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” and “The Treasures of the Theravada: Recovering
the Riches of Our Tradition.” Insightful articles on the ways vipassana has been adapted in the
West. Gil Fronsdal is a student of Jack Kornfield, but not afraid to point out problems with the
Consensus approach.

The Ledi lineage (also Burmese)

This lineage begins with Ledi Sayadaw (1846-1923).

Little is known about how Ledi Sayadaw began to practice vipassana. The Wikipedia says that
“he learned the technique of vipassana still being taught in the caves of the Sagaing Hills,” and
this line has been copied all over the internet. As far as I can tell, it is wrong. I can’t find that
information in any reliable source. It is contradicted by Strong Roots, cited above, which quotes
a traditional monk from the Sagaing Hills as saying Ledi Sayadaw developed his method on his
own, based only on texts.

Ledi Sayadaw’s biography on S.N. Goenka’s site says “although we do not have any definitive
information, it seems likely that [1882-1885] was the period when he began practicing Vipassana
in the traditional Burmese way: with attention to Anapana (respiration) and vedana (sensation).”
S.N. Goenka is the main teacher in the Ledi linage now, and presumably if he knew of a source
for Ledi Sayadaw’s method, he would say so. “The traditional Burmese way” was probably lost
sometime long before 1882, and reinvented by Ledi Sayadaw.

The Ledi method was extensively revised by his grand-student U Ba Khin (1899-1971) in the
1950s. U Ba Khin was a lay man, and the head accountant for the Burmese government.
According to Sharf (cited below), “U Ba Khin apparently experimented with different techniques
throughout his career, all of which focused primarily on bodily sensations.” The resulting
differences from Ledi’s method are large enough that many sources refer to “the U Ba Khin
method.” Like Mahasi, he removed most traditional aspects of Buddhism in order to teach lay
people, and aimed directly for transformational experience.

S.N. Goenka teaches U Ba Khin’s method.

Lama Surya Das, one of the main founders of “Consensus Buddhism,” was a student of Goenka
(among many others).

[Important update, November 2013:] I’ve found a recent journal article that traces the Burmese
revival of vipassana back to the mid-1700s. This paper confirms that vipassana had been entirely
lost prior to then, but provides earlier history than I had previously known about. Ledi Sayadaw
learned vipassana from “U Hpo Hlaing (1830–1883) who was notable for his avid interest in
western science and efforts to reconcile this new perspective with abhidhamma.” Before that the
exact lineage is unclear, but it appears that from-scripture reinvention began with Medawi
(1728–1816) who published his first vipassana manual in 1756.

Sources

Jake H. Davis, Strong Roots: Liberation Teachings of Mindfulness in North America.

Gil Fronsdal, “Theravāda Spirituality in the West.”

Patrick Pranke, “On saints and wizards: Ideals of human perfection and power in contemporary
Burmese Buddhism.”

Robert H. Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience.”

Later developments
The four lineages I’ve described above originated independently, and around the same time.

Later in the 1900s, several other meditation methods were invented within Asian Theravada.

One of these, due to Buddhadasa Bhikkhu (1906-1993), has had some influence in the West. He
developed his meditation method based on the Anapanasati Sutta (rejecting the Satipatthana
Suttas as vague and muddled) and extensive personal experimentation.

Buddhadasa was a classic Protestant Buddhist modernizer, emphasizing rationality,

universalism, scriptural authority, and meditation, eliminating ritual and supernatural beliefs. He
actually dissociated himself from Buddhism altogether, preaching “No Religion”: the idea that
the mystical core of all religions is the same, and found in meditation. This idea is common in
Consensus Buddhism now.
Two methods seem to have had no influence on the West as yet. They are the quasi-tantric
methods of the Dhammakaya movement, and the idiosyncratic teaching of Sunlun Sayadaw.
These are quite different from any of the others.

Theravada, apparently, remains open to major innovations in meditation technique.

Sources

Gil Fronsdal, “Theravada Spirituality in the West.”

Robert H. Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience.”

Suchira Payulpitack, Buddhadasa’s movement : an analysis of its origins, development, and

social impact.

Brooke Schedneck, “Buddhadasa Bhikkhu and Modern Buddhism” and “Meditation Techniques
of the Masters: Ajahn Buddhadasa Bhikkhu.”