You may not know the name of S.N. Goenka, who died Saturday at the age of 90. But if you've counted your breaths to relax in a hospital, or if you've ever tried to eat, walk, or speak "mindfully," you've felt his influence. He might even have changed your life.
Satya Narayan Goenka did not set out to be a meditation guru. He was an Indian businessman who happened to come across the teachings of a then-radical Burmese Buddhist tradition which had adapted Buddhist meditation practices and taught them to laypeople, like me and (probably) you. That may not seem so radical today, but one hundred years ago, it absolutely was. These techniques had been monastic traditions only - imagine what it would have been like had medieval monks suddenly taught peasants to read the Bible.
Goenka was one of many laypeople whose lives were changed by meditation - but he had the widest influence. He was a core teacher for the first generation of "insight" meditation teachers to have an impact in the United States, and through them, to popularizers like Jon Kabat-Zinn, whose Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program (MBSR) is now taught across the country in hospitals, schools, even prisons.
Indeed, the very notion that meditation may be practiced in a non-religious, non-sectarian way owes much to Goenka himself. Basically a rationalist and a pragmatist, Goenka emphasized that meditation was not spirituality and not religion, but more like a technology - a set of tools for upgrading and optimizing the mind. These are my terms, not his (I discuss this fascinating story of secularization and popularization in my book Evolving Dharma), but the gist is the same. You don't have to believe anything, wear special clothes, or chant special words in order to calm the mind, improve memory, and attain the various other benefits of meditation.
At the same time, Goenka did work within a specific Buddhist tradition, and created a very rigorous format designed to attain certain levels of mental understanding on ten and twenty day silent retreats. To Westerners, he can indeed seem like the very image of the Indian sage, talking about enlightenment while insisting on a very demanding (and inflexible) set of contemplative exercises. Goenka retreats are austere - not only no speaking, but also no reading or writing, and with arduous schedules of concentration and meditation.
Huffington Post blog, The Third Metric, Jay Michaelson, September 30, 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment