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Dharmette: Gil's Story Pt 2 (2 of 5) Meditating in Burma

Today will be the seventh talk that I'm giving on my Buddhist practice history. I talked a little bit about my discovery of Vipassanā^[1] in Thailand, doing a 10-week retreat. It became important for me to return to continue Vipassanā. So, as I said yesterday, I went back to San Francisco to earn the money to go back. In the end of January of 1995^[2], I went back to Thailand, and I applied for a visa to go to Burma.

Again, I was back waiting for a visa, which I had done about a year before in Thailand to go back to Japan. What I didn't know was that Burma was closed to Westerners, or for most people from abroad to come there, and they weren't issuing visas. I didn't know that. I had applied for a visa, and I had to wait about 9 months to get it. So, during that time, I traveled around Thailand to practice with different teachers. I did month-long retreats with different places, different teachings, including month-long self-retreats. It was an important time for me doing this kind of practice.

One of the reasons I wanted to go to Burma to practice was that I felt the teacher I had in Thailand was good, but I wanted to go to the source of where this particular form of Vipassanā, called Mahasi^[3] practice, came from. It was named after the teacher who formulated this particular technique, Mahasi Sayadaw. It became the most popular form of Vipassanā in much of the world in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. When I was there, there were something like 400 Vipassanā centers in this tradition in Burma alone. So I wanted to go back to the source.

I had learned the source was a particular meditation center in Rangoon, Burma. Because I couldn't get a visa there, I learned that the main teacher there, whose name was U Pandita^[4], was going to be in Nepal. You could get one-week visas to go to Burma, but that was it, so I went for a week to study with him in Burma on the way to Nepal.

Then I went to Nepal to practice with him there for a month. The wonderful circumstance in Nepal was that, unbeknownst to me—I didn't even know where the retreat was supposed to be, I just went there trusting that things would work out—I did have an address for someone maybe I could stay at. I went wandering through the streets of Kathmandu and through this little alley towards where I thought his address was, and this Westerner came walking down the alley. I asked him if he knew this person, and it was him! I asked, "Could I stay with you?" And he said no.

I went on and found a hotel. That person who said no to me ended up, over the years, becoming one of my best friends, kind of my brother. His name is John Travis, and he's also a Vipassanā teacher, more or less retired now. But the first encounter with my good friend was him saying, "No, you can't stay with me." The reason, I found out years later, was that the leading American teachers of Vipassanā—Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, and some other colleagues and friends—were coming to sit the same retreat with U Pandita, and they were staying in John's house, so there was no more space.

So during my first month-long retreat with U Pandita, I had the good fortune of meditating with, getting to know, and becoming friends with Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, and others. I also got to sit in on their practice discussions with U Pandita and hear how they reported their practice. It was really a wonderful way to practice. U Pandita, who is a fierce teacher, was on his best behavior in Nepal, maybe because he was outside of his monastery, so it was a wonderful time to sit there.

Joseph and Sharon were a little bit ahead of me in getting a visa to go to Burma. They got a three-month visa about three months before me. I got my visa in September. I was back in Thailand and I was so happy to be able to go practice in Burma. When I got this visa, I left the Burmese embassy in Bangkok and started skipping and dancing down the street, singing the best lyrics I knew of: "You can get it if you really want, but you must try, try and try." I was just so happy that it finally came through; it was so important to me.

I made it to Burma, to this Mahasi center. There was quite a gathering there. We overlapped about a week because Joseph and Sharon were on a three-month visa. I didn't see much of Sharon because she was in the women's quarters, but I was there with Joseph.

One of the big surprises was that the American spiritual teacher named Ram Dass^[5], a friend of Joseph and Sharon's who wrote the book Be Here Now, was there practicing with U Pandita as well. So it was very special. The other person who was there was the husband of a woman named Ruth Denison^[6], one of the pioneering Vipassanā teachers in the United States. His name was John Strong Denison, and he was in his 70s or 80s, but he could have easily been the strongest person in Burma. He was big and powerful, yet such a kind and nice man. So it was quite a gathering there that first week.

I settled in to be there. When I arrived the first day, I was surprised by what I came to. This meditation center was unusual because it was run by laypeople; it was not a monastery. There was a lead Vipassanā teacher, U Pandita, but he wasn't really the abbot. There was a lay board, a group of people who took care of it and administered it. It's quite unusual in Burma to have this lay-centric retreat center model, which kind of represents a little bit how strong the Vipassanā tradition is in the West, that it's so strongly lay-oriented these days.

I was surprised by this compound that looked more like an American junior college than it looked like a monastery. There were quarters for the Westerners, which was a long one-story building with an enclosed, covered walkway all the way around it, and probably four or five rooms in each half with a bathroom in the middle. When I got there, I was told, "Oh, we just installed a shower for the Westerners because Westerners wanted to take showers." Showers didn't exist very much back then in Burma.

I was given a room, and it had a wooden bed with just a little straw mat—not a mattress, but a mat that you would take to the beach—that goes on top of the wood. That was supposed to be my bed for the time I was there. I was also given a cassette recorder with a tape that was about 40 minutes long, which had all the instructions I needed. The main instruction was given to me in English on that cassette. I listened to that, returned the cassette, and then I was ready to start.

I mostly meditated for 8 months in that room. I did sitting meditation and then walking meditation in that enclosed area around it. At some point, I learned that there was more excitement going on than I realized. The Burmese government, then as it is now, was a military government, very much in control of everything and mistrusting of people. One of the most powerful sources of challenge to the government is the monastic institutions. To have Westerners come and stay for months was quite unusual.

I was told that there was a government spy spying on us Westerners as we sat and meditated. I sat in sitting meditation for easily 9 hours a day, and then spent probably 6 or 7 hours a day doing walking meditation. I'm sure it was quite exciting for this "James Bond" to be watching us Westerners meditate!

There was a little bit of that on the edges, but it was a wonderful 8 months. I'll talk a little bit more tomorrow about that 8-month retreat that I sat in Burma. It became a very important part of my life, my practice, my teaching, and my whole orientation to life.

I will continue tomorrow. Thank you.