Saturday, January 16, 2016

Vipassana, Bootcamp Nirvana: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly


Satya Narayan Goenka’s brand of Vipassanā meditation "in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin" stems from Burma (today Myanmar), where Goenka was born, raised and trained. Vipassanā was supposedly lost by most of the Buddhist and Indian world and maintained only in the lineage of Yangon Burmese monks.

Since the 1980s, the Vipassanā movement has grown into a worldwide organisation that organises 10-day meditation retreats - free of charge to new students, sustained by donations accepted only from those who have already completed at least one 10-day course. Basic needs - food and accommodation - are provided for and students are asked to focus on nothing more than their work of meditation. A student wakes up at 4AM, begins meditating at 4.30AM, and continues throughout the day with intermittent breaks according to a strict schedule until bedtime at 9PM.

The first Vipassanā meditation centre outside of India was set up in Massachusetts in 1980, and the organisation now boasts 227 locations in 94 countries.

Beginning 22 December 2015, I signed myself up for one of these meditation retreats, after hearing endless praise for the beneficial effects of the course. A full disclaimer: I did not complete the course. I left on day 7 of the course, for reasons that I will explain below. Though I did not complete it, there were nonetheless some surprising and good takeaways that I discovered about meditation, myself, and the effects of voluntary confinement.


1. Bootcamp Nirvana is Hard Work.

Meditation is not easy - it is challenging both for the mind and the body. Sitting for 11 hours a day in some variation of the lotus position means you will have a lot of cramping in your legs, and you will want to move your posture a lot especially during the first three days. And then there’s the matter of trying to still your mind, trying to focus on your breathing and instead only being able to think about what’s on the menu for lunch.

Make no mistake - anyone who tells you that meditation is easy just because you're sitting there "not doing anything" has certainly never tried meditation before.

2. The first 72 hours will be the longest 72 hours of your life.

You are asked to focus on your breath coming in and out of your nostrils and pay attention to your breathing. Never mind 11 hours a day - after the first two hours you’re likely to start seriously questioning what you’re doing here. I mean, seriously guys, I’m breathing through my nose. Left nostril, right nostril, both nostrils, I get it. How long do you have to practice focusing on your breath?

3. Your mind is far stronger than it seems.

For the first three days, the course teaches Ānāpāna meditation, which is the practice of focus and concentration. At first it seems impossible that you are supposed to be doing this for three days, which is mindnumpingly boring and makes you want to quit almost immediately. But then you realise that it’s just a matter of bending your mind to your will, and slowly the focus starts to kick in - you start thinking less about lunch, less about the ASOS sale, and less about all the other things you could be doing with your time rather than being here for 10 days.

S.N. Goenka says several times that the untamed mind is your biggest enemy, like a ranging stampeding elephant, and that the tamed mind is your biggest friend. I am inclined to agree with him in this regard. Certainly if nothing else three days of Ānāpāna and the subsequent Adhiṭṭhāna (strong determination) sittings will prove to you that the mind is a malleable thing, and with enough focus it is most certainly possible to bend it to your will.

The website for Vipassana meditation, dhamma.org

Now that being said, although Vipassanā is hard work it is very doable. It’s not exceptionally difficult by any means - it does require mental strength and determination, but no more than the average human being should possess. But Vipassanā does have dropouts - myself being one of them - and just like everything else in life, Vipassanā isn’t for everyone. There were several things I felt uncomfortable with at the centre that led me to leave on Day 7 of the course.

4. Vipassana is undoubtedly a Buddhist tradition.

While Vipassana International (VI) claims they are non-sectarian, simply because your beliefs are non-conflicting do not make them any less Buddhist - make no doubt, this is a Buddhist meditation.

One of the first things you are told in the course is that “These are the teachings of Gautama Buddha”. That the practice of these beliefs does not require belief in a deity or god of any kind is irrelevant: to claim that you are non-sectarian and then preach Buddhist texts is false advertising, even if their advertising does not claim to lead to profiting revenue.

Now if VI had said from the start that they were going to be teaching and chanting Buddhist texts, then I would have been less bothered by this. But as it is, the entirety of Vipassanā’s foundation is Buddhist, relies on Buddhist metaphysics and is based on Buddhist ideology.

This is not nonsectarian meditation - this is clear and pure Buddhist meditation.

5. The practice of Vipassana is based on Buddhist metaphysics. 

This includes (but is not limited to) a belief in the reason and motivation for Vipassanā practice as being clearing Saṅkhāras (a kind of mental habit that leads one to behave in certain manner) to be for the reincarnation of a being’s next life. If you accept that and came to the course knowing that Vipassanā is Buddhist in nature, then this would be all fine and well - but for those who go to Vipassanā coming from a more critical mind, having previously been told that this is supposed to be "scientific" in nature, the metaphysics on which the practice is based are more than a little dubious.

To be fair, S.N. Goenka does say multiple times that a belief in reincarnation is not strictly necessary to the practice of Vipassanā, and that one can practice Vipassanā without believing in reincarnation. However, if this is true, then it becomes no different from the churchgoer who prays for show rather than because of a true belief in worship: if one does not believe in reincarnation, Saṅkhāras, past lives or any of the related Buddhist metaphysics, then what is the reason for true Vipassanā practice?


The Dhama Giri meditation centre in Igatpuri, India.

6. Spurious claims to pseudoscientific quantum theory.

In the course, Goenka makes constant and repeated claims to the ever-changing nature of atomic flux as well as the phenomenology of kalapas. Kalapas in the Theravadic Buddhist tradition are defined as
the smallest units of physical matter, tiny units of materiality, tens of thousands of times smaller than a particle of dust, coming into existence and disappearing in as little as a billionth of a second or a trillionth of the blink of an eye.
Goenka claims that “Everything in the universe, all the subatomic particles, are made of just vibrations” and that “Western scientists come to the same conclusion as Gautama Buddha, but yet the Western scientists are not enlightened.”

Now superficially one might indeed see some resemblance between the notion of kalapas and the Uncertainty Principle in quantum mechanics, and indeed Goenka often uses this superficial similarity to describe "matter wave" - where all matter can also behave like a wave. However as we have seen multiple times before in all manners of New Age pseudoscience, this is merely cloaking unscientific thought in scientific language in order to garner some form of authority and repute.

Here is Wikipedia's first-line definition of science:
Science is a systematic enterprise that creates, builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
None of which Vipassanā fulfils.

I do not doubt that Buddhism is one of the world’s few major organised religions where ontological core beliefs and modern science do not necessarily conflict. By this I mean that there is no fundamental conflict between the existence or non-existence of certain core beliefs of each camp; contrast this against, for example, several monotheistic religions where the world's creatures were either "created by an Intelligent designer" or "became as they are after millions of years of evolution".

However simply because there is no conflict, one cannot simply claim the achievement of the other. Science and scientific theories, unlike the ones made by S.N. Goenka, has been checked, peer-reviewed, and repeatedly proven to hold consistent under a variety of circumstances. They are superficially similar in the same way that water and hydrochloric acid are both clear liquids. They are not the same, and Vipassanā cannot piggyback on the advances of scientific achievement to say that they are as universally true as they claim.

7. Blind faith.

A recurring theme I have heard from those who claim to have seen beneficial results from Vipassana is that “After you do it you will see results” or “They tell you do something a certain way so you just do/follow/obey”, or that I should “just surrender”. Goenka insists from Day 1 that as long as we follow his method, things “Will become so clear.” Unfortunately for me, things did not get any clearer as the course progressed.

I was told several times that rather than questioning the intellectual integrity of the method or why a method works, I should just see the course through to its end, and then and only then make a decision. While I can accept that we are asked to give the method a ‘fair trial’, it seemed contradictory to me that we are both (1) on day one asked not to accept anything blindly, and (2) asked to simply follow the method without questioning why things are.

8. Chanting of Buddhist texts in Pāli.

Expect chanting. A lot of chanting - morning, afternoon, and evening. It came as a shock to me the first time I heard the chanting come over loud speakers and completely filling the entire meditation hall - especially given that in all of my research and in everything that I had been told by friends who had completed the course, not once had the subject of chanting come up.

The disclaimer outside the meditation hall tells us that the chanting consists of “Truths and good wishes”, but it fails to convince that their proclaimed truths are in fact so. At times it can feel very cult-like, with the constant repetitions of Buddhist texts and “Bhavatu Sabba Mangalam” and the crowd’s “sadhu, sadhu, sadhu” response. Goenka’s droning voice and his constant “May all of you find real peace, real happiness, real peace, real happiness” felt like some form of brainwashing; I did not have a good reaction to it.


9. Saṅkhāras.

Quoting from Wikipedia because it's easiest, Saṅkhāras are:
In the first (passive) sense... conditioned phenomena generally but specifically to all mental "dispositions". These are called 'volitional formations' both because they are formed as a result of volition and because they are causes for the arising of future volitional actions.
In the second (active) sense of the word, saṅkhāra refers to that faculty of the mind/brain apparatus (sankhara-khandha) that puts together those formations.
Beginning on day 4 of the course, one is introduced to Vipassanā meditation proper, and the concept of Saṅkhāras. Each physical sensation in your body is claimed to be a Saṅkhāra rising from your ‘backlog’ of accumulated Saṅkhāra, and through constantly merely observing these sensations and not responding to them one is able to clear their mental backlog of accumulated habit and trauma. One is encouraged not to confront or face these Saṅkhāras, but merely to let them arise, observe, pass, and slip away in accordance with the law of nature, the Dhamma, in which “everything is constantly changing”.

Of course, in order for this to actually happen, one must accept that merely observing sensations (which has been the ultimate goal of the course) is enough for one to learn to not react and clear a backlog of habit. It is this non-reaction that helps to achieve liberation and freedom from the condition of suffering; observing a physical sensation somehow brings peace to the mind.

The problem, once again, is that this physical-to-mental chain just isn't obvious, and when I asked further about this problem I was told to "just do it" and that I would understand the more I practiced. See point 7 above.

10. The meditation teacher is just that: a meditation teacher.

Do not expect your guru to hold the answers to why aspects of the method are a certain way - his/her role is that of a meditation teacher and nothing else. He/she is not a philosopher and will not give you philosophical answers. He/she can give you tips on how to improve your posture, how to make meditation more comfortable, how to meditate and clear your mind better, but he/she is not trained to tell you how any of the methodology of Vipassanā works.



Now, maybe some of these doubts I have are clarified in an old-student’s course, or maybe they are more robustly defended by other traditions and scholars of Buddhism and purposely watered down for ease of consumption to a more general audience. if this was the case, it certainly did not show during the 7 days that I spent before leaving. In the end, I felt uncomfortable accepting charity from others while not buying their pitch; I felt morally inclined to leave rather than continue accepting their charity in food and accommodation while knowing I did and could not believe their methods.

In the end, I decided that Vipassanā wasn’t for me. Not because of anything wrong necessarily that the centre was doing, but because I felt uncomfortable being a part of a course where receiving charity is necessary to the fulfilment of the course objectives, while at the same time not subscribing to the same ideals and objectives that S.N. Goenka claims.

My experience has been that with the growing popularity of Vipassanā there has been a stark divide and almost a sense of moral superiority between those who are "ready" (those who have completed the 10-day course) against those who are "not ready" (those who did not complete or have not been on the course).

The Vipassanā experience is something profoundly individual. I do not doubt that those who practice and serve Vipassanā courses are well-intentioned, if a little misguided. It is the prerogative of every person to find out what methods lead them best to happiness. If Vipassanā is not the universal road to happiness that it claims to be, is that then just the overenthusiastic failing of yet another mere human?

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