Birth of Insight

Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw

Braun Erik

Insight meditation, which claims to offer practitioners a chance to escape all suffering by perceiving the true nature of reality, is one of the most popular forms of meditation today. The Theravada Buddhist cultures of South and Southeast Asia often see it as the Buddha's most important gift to humanity. In the first book to examine how this practice came to play such a dominant – and relatively recent – role in Buddhism, Erik Braun takes readers to Burma, revealing that Burmese Buddhists in the colonial period were pioneers in making insight meditation indispensable to modern Buddhism.

Braun focuses on the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw, a pivotal architect of modern insight meditation, and explores Ledi's popularization of the study of crucial Buddhist philosophical texts in the early twentieth century. By promoting the study of such abstruse texts, Braun shows, Ledi was able to standardize and simplify meditation methods and make them widely accessible – in part to protect Buddhism in Burma after the British takeover in 1885. Braun also addresses the question of what really constitutes the "modern" in colonial and postcolonial forms of Buddhism, arguing that the emergence of this type of meditation was caused by precolonial factors in Burmese culture as well as the disruptive forces of the colonial era. Offering a readable narrative of the life and legacy of one of modern Buddhism's most important figures, "The Birth of Insight" provides an original account of the development of mass meditation.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: Ledi Sayadaw and the Gifts of the Buddha

1. The Best of Times and the Worst: Ledi Sayadaw's Formative Period
2. The Great War of the Commentaries: Ledi Sayadaw's Abhidhamma Controversy
3".In the Hands of All the People": Ledi Empowers the Laity
4".In This Very Life": Lay Study of the Abhidhamma
5. The Birth of Insight

Conclusion: The Death of Ledi and the Life of Insight

Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Erik Braun is assistant professor in the Religious Studies Program at the University of Oklahoma. He lives in Norman, OK.

Reviews

"'The Birth of Insight' represents an important addition to current scholarship on modern Burmese Buddhism, which has broader implications for our understanding of contemporary Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia and global Buddhism generally. Engaging and challenging, it restores the study of 'texts' to the repertoire of tools at our disposal for the critical examination of Burmese tradition" – Patrick Pranke, University of Louisville

"Insight meditation (vipassana) is increasingly central to the modern practice of Buddhism, worldwide; mindfulness practices (sati) are ever more widely used in contemporary western psychotherapies. Tracing the genealogy of these developments takes us to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Burma, and Erik Braun's fascinating and lucid account of Ledi Sayadaw provides a detailed and illuminating historical context, notably in relation to colonialism, for the beginnings of the whole process. A final chapter describes Ledi's influence on other teachers in Burma, and through them on the American disciples who brought the techniques to the West. A very fine book" – Steven Collins, University of Chicago

"Erik Braun's superbly researched, elegantly crafted, and eminently accessible book is the most authoritative study to date of Ledi Sayadaw and the origins of the modern Buddhist meditation revival in Burma. But its significance goes well beyond the confines of twentieth-century Burmese history. Ledi Sayadaw and his followers laid the foundation for 'Buddhist modernism,' and by the last quarter of the twentieth century their innovative – if sometimes controversial – approach to Buddhist doctrine and practice had spread to the rest of Asia, as well as to Europe, America, and beyond. Braun's account of their achievements should be required reading for anyone interested in the roots of modern 'insight' (or 'mindfulness') meditation practice" – Robert H. Sharf, University of California, Berkeley

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