Silent retreats have become increasingly common in the United States in recent years.
To calm down and reset their nervous systems, people relinquish their phones and reading materials and commit to speaking at a bare minimum to learn practices of self-awareness.
Silent meditation and silent prayer have shaped spiritual lives within a variety of religious traditions for thousands of years. Today, however, those practices are often being offered in secular settings.
One particular form of meditative silence, the 10-day mindfulness retreat, has had an outsized impact. Research I have carried out over the past two decades sheds light on the role of the Burmese meditation master Sayagyi U Ba Khin in popularizing mindfulness meditation. The term “sayagyi” means “respected teacher.”
Ba Khin was one of a small number of prominent Buddhist lay meditation teachers in late colonial and early postcolonial Burma. His silent, 10-day retreat became a model for a wide range of intensive meditation traditions. Three of Ba Khin’s students were instrumental in bringing his teaching to the United States.
The emergence of mass meditation
Mindfulness meditation practices can be traced to ancient India. The clearest historical evidence of such practices comes from the teachings of the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, and his contemporaries.
Most of these practitioners were monastics or ascetics. Historical questions remain, however, regarding whether such practices were primarily reserved for monastics or widely practiced among laypeople.
The monk and scholar Bhikkhu Anālayo argues that the oldest historical sources provide evidence for widespread lay meditation practice beginning in the fifth century B.C.E. Other scholars suggest that laypeople had access only to teachings on devotional practices, such as reflections on the qualities of the Buddha, that would encourage offerings and lay support for the monastic community.
A striking development in the mid-20th century was the emergence of mass Buddhist meditation movements in Southeast Asia. Countries such as Myanmar, Thailand and Sri Lanka promoted meditation among lay people to build national identities in the face of colonialism.
In post-colonial Burma – Myanmar’s name until 1989 – being an ideal citizen meant being an ideal Buddhist; meditation was seen as a visible expression embodying that ideal. With the globalization of such meditation practices in the latter half of the 20th century, such meditation practices expanded beyond the borders of these countries.
The Burmese silent retreat
Following Burma’s independence in 1948, Ba Khin became its first accountant general – a role in which he developed a close relationship with the first prime minister, U Nu.
With the blessing of U Nu, Ba Khin began teaching meditation to his employees. At the time, many of his students were neither Burmese nor Buddhist; they were civil servants originally working for the colonial government.
The context of teaching was therefore both lay-oriented – taking place in work contexts – and religiously pluralistic, involving Buddhists and non-Buddhists.
Ba Khin had learned meditation from Maung Po Thet, who was born in colonial Burma in 1873. A farmer by profession, Thet learned meditation from teachers who believed that lay people, and not just monks, should practice meditation.
To make practice accessible, Maung Po Thet introduced a seven-day retreat for lay people. At the time, meditation typically involved longer periods of retreat.
Following his teacher’s approach, Ba Khin started teaching 10-day retreats in 1952. He later authorized students to carry his teaching abroad – to North America, Europe, Australia and India.
Globalization of the silent retreat
The most famous of these students was S.N. Goenka. Born in colonial Burma in 1924, Goenka was a wealthy businessman and leader of the Hindu community in Rangoon.
He initially sought out Ba Khin for relief from severe migraine headaches; Ba Khin was known as a healer. Despite reservations about Buddhist practice, Goenka enrolled in a 10-day retreat after experiencing relief from his headaches in an initial encounter with Ba Khin.
The experience proved transformative.
From 1969 until his death in 2013, Goenka devoted his life to spreading Ba Khin’s teachings globally while retaining his Hindu identity. Like his teacher, and his teacher’s teacher, Goenka taught practices of meditation that focused on the cultivation of continuous concentration on a single object of focus for sustained periods of time.
This was done through the observation of the breath, leading to a comprehensive awareness of bodily sensations in all postures and at all times when not sleeping.
Along with his wife, Ilaichidevi Goenka, he taught hundreds of 10-day retreats and trained assistants to facilitate retreats at roughly 200 meditation centers worldwide.
Millions have participated in these retreats, and many influential meditation teachers in India, Europe, Australia and North America first encountered meditation under Goenka’s guidance.
Roots of techno-mindfulness
One particularly consequential aspect of Goenka’s work was his use of audio and video recordings, beginning in the 1980s. In the face of increased demand for his courses, Goenka recorded teachings and instructions and established a highly structured retreat format.
This innovation allowed retreats to be facilitated worldwide in his absence, dramatically accelerating the global spread of the practice and foreshadowing later developments, such as meditation apps.
Goenka was also skilled at using the language of universalism to secularize Buddhist meditation, presenting himself as a committed non-Buddhist who nevertheless accessed its benefits.
This approach echoed that of Ba Khin, who spoke of teaching meditation without interfering in his students’ personal faith. Such rhetorical tactics proved crucial in making meditation accessible to global audiences.
Two lesser-known figures
Two other students of Ba Khin, rarely mentioned in historical accounts, also catalyzed the study of mindfulness in the U.S.: aerospace engineer Robert H. Hover and Leon E. Wright, a Black Christian theologian.
Robert H. Hover played a crucial role in initiating the scientific study of mindfulness and in the founding of the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts, one of the first U.S. centers dedicated to Southeast Asian Buddhist meditation.
Hover’s work helped bring mindfulness into mainstream medicine and society. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who created the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, a program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School to help patients cope with chronic pain and stress, credits Hover as one of his primary teachers.
From the 1970s through the ’80s, Hover taught 10-day silent retreats across the U.S., Europe, India and Australia, helping to build communities of meditators through newsletters and informal networks.
Leon E. Wright began teaching Ba Khin’s meditation techniques in the U.S. in the late 1950s, well before any of Ba Khin’s other students.
Wright’s work remained largely unknown because he was working primarily in the Black community. Until quite recently, very little attention has been paid to the role of Black practitioners in the modern history of Buddhism. Over the course of the past decade, however, scholars have begun to fill that gap.
Wright taught Ba Khin’s techniques for decades at Howard University and organized silent retreats for the broader public. He was also a spiritual healer with interests in extrasensory perception and psychic experience.
His universalist teachings influenced generations of Black theologians. The Covenant Christian Community, a church in the Washington, D.C., area, continues to practice his meditation teachings in silence as well as gather for communal rituals on Sundays.
When people come to silent retreats today, they rarely learn about the networks and the individuals who made the teachings they receive possible to access, or whose work is seen and which voices may have been silenced.
An awareness of this history enriches the silence of a silent retreat.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Daniel M. Stuart, University of South Carolina
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Daniel M. Stuart does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
