ABSTRACT
We know where we are only when we understand how we got here. As a teacher and student within the contemporary insight movement, my understanding of this movement, and of my own place within it, emerges from a history. So I begin this chapter with the story of my lineage, that of Mahasi Sayadaw and of the modern insight movement of Burma. Then I look at the similarities and differences between the modern insight movement in Australia and in Burma and, through this analysis. locate my own place as a teacher within the insight movement. The Burmese insight movement represents a transition from tradition to modernity, through its empowerment of the laity and its reorganization of meditation practice. It can be seen as an attempt to democratize enlightenment itself. This movement began in the mid-nineteenth century in the royal court of Mandalay, stimulated by the twin traumas of military defeat and colonial occupation. In 1911 Mingun Sayadaw (1869-1954) opened the first Burmese meditation centre devoted to the teaching and practice of vipassana (insight) meditation for laity as well as monks and nuns (Houtman 1999: 7-8). Venerable U Sobhana, later known as Mahasi Sayadaw (1904-1982), went there for training in 1932 (Silanandabhivumsa 1982: 35-41). In 1947 Mahasi Sayadaw was appointed the head monk (ovadacariya sayadaw) of a new meditation centre in Rangoon, the Mahasi Thatana Yeiktha, designed to promote the practice of vipassana meditation both nationally and internationally. The Mahasi Thatana Yeiktha is owned and operated by the Buddha Sasana Nuggaha Apwe (BSNA). The BSNA is an example of a kopaka apwe (guardian association), a new kind of lay Buddhist organization. These lay associations operate the new meditation centres, which, unlike traditional forest monasteries controlled by monastics, are predominantly lay and urban (Jordt 2007: 26-7). Through them, the laity have become regulators of the sangha (community of ordained monastics), a role that in traditional Burma was reserved for the king. Mahasi Sayadaw, for example, was able to function as the head of the centre
named after him only because he had been appointed by, and retained the confidence of, the BSNA. One of his successors, Panditarama Sayadaw, left the Mahasi Thatana Yeiktha after difficulties with the BSNA and went on to found his own centres (Jordt 2007: 226).1 Mahasi Sayadaw brought meditation practice to a mass following by systematizing both its practice and its teaching. Any person with normal physical and mental health can expect to succeed in this previously esoteric activity by following a standardized technique. The teaching of meditation was also systematized, to the extent that ordinary individuals who cannot demonstrate any unusual powers or charisma, but who have been appropriately trained, can transmit vipassana practice (Jordt 2007: 31-2). Meditation practice has become democratized, in that it is now available to the laity to a degree unknown in traditional Buddhism and internationalized, in that the same method can be applied across cultures. Houtman (n.d.: 15-16) lists a number of ways in which practitioners in the modern Burmese vipassana movement understand Buddhism. There are interesting parallels with the insight movement in contemporary Australia. The following lists Houtman’s observations and a comparison with my own regarding the Australian situation:
●● Burmese vipassana practitioners, according to Houtman, distinguish between an inherited customary Buddhism and an authentic Buddhism reconstructed from authoritative texts and experienced individually through meditation. I find a correspondence in the Australian insight movement to the distinction made between an Asian Buddhism of ethnic custom and a western Buddhism found in meditation practices based on a return to the original teachings of the Buddha.
