The Meditator and His Meditation

On SN Goenka, the Vipassana guru who passed away this week

A lesson for the current Government from the life of SN Goenka, the Vipassana guru who died last Monday, would be to universalise the Right to Food. In the initial days of his teaching, Goenka went from town to village conducting ten-day courses of the meditation technique he had learnt in Burma. As they became popular, a trust was formed by his disciples and permanent centres were established, the first coming up on a hillock in Igatpuri, Maharashtra, in 1976.

The trustees initially wanted to charge meditators for food and stay. They felt that otherwise, in a poor country like India, every hungry person would turn up until it became unmanageable. Goenka insisted that it should be free. He said it didn’t matter who came as long as they were willing to abide by the rigorous meditation schedule. Almost 40 years later, there are now centres dotting India and the world. No one is turned away; you just need apply in advance. Generosity can work.

As a conservative Hindu householder with a large family, Goenka was an unusual guru teaching Buddhism. His story reads like a Jataka fable—a rich merchant with an incurable ailment arrives at meditation for pain relief and finds a path to enlightenment laid before him.

He had been an industry doyen in Burma in the 50s and a leader of the local Hindu community. Prone to severely painful headaches, which doctors diagnosed as psychosomatic, he’d had his fill of medicines and morphine. He took a friend’s advice and went to a Vipassana meditation centre run by a retired Burmese bureaucrat. He kept returning, and soon embraced it completely. After the Burmese government nationalised industry, he had more time to spend on spiritualism. He came to India in 1969 on a short stay visa to teach the technique to his mother, who was suffering a mental disorder. After he conducted a 10-day course in which she and few others participated, word got around and he found himself repeatedly invited, at first by friends and then by strangers, until this was all he was doing in India. It would be decades before he returned to Burma again. The spiritual empire kept expanding in India.

In the form of meditation he taught, all experience could be broken down to physical sensations, even death. He believed in a form of rebirth in which the body perished, but the mind, fuelled by its cravings and aversions, jumped on. The way out of this was to condition the mind to become inert. Constant practice would lead to total equanimity, even during death, when the mind would be cravingless, and aversionless, thus breaking the chain forever.

It is interesting to imagine what Goenka felt as he breathed his last. It would have been a moment of truth. He was living a theory floated 2,500 years ago and it was, all said and done, blind belief. Any rational mind could punch a hundred scientific holes in it.

There were irrational elements in the community he created. As the mind becomes concentrated, Vipassana meditators start to identify everything with sensations, for which they use pseudoscientific labels like ‘vibrations’, ‘waves’ and ‘wavelets’. It is common to hear them say, ‘That place had good vibrations.’ But essentially, what they experience is a play of the brain. To assign attributes like ‘vibrations’ to concrete external objects is a leap of faith.

There are numerous studies that show meditation helps reduce stress, improve health and change one’s temperament. Extreme meditation might even cause organic changes in the brain. But it is not magic. As Harvard neuroscientist Stephen Kosslyn observed in a New York Times article on meditation, ‘If you do something, anything, even play Ping-Pong, for 20 years, eight hours a day, there’s going to be something in your brain that’s different from someone who didn’t do that. It’s just got to be.’

Goenka had the certainty of the convert but the missionary part of him also understood how to package the teaching. One of the things he told non-believers was to set aside theory and just practise the three main pillars of Buddha’s teaching—ethical living, honing concentration and developing an insight into the impermanent nature of things. “Who can have an argument with that?” he said. To that extent, he was right.

SN Goenkavipassana