Daniel M. Stuart - S. N. Goenka: Emissary of Insight

I T IS A DIFFICULT task to write a historical and critical book about ones own meditation teacher. It is an even more difficult task to write about a personality like S. N. Goenka, one of the most influential meditation teachers of the twentieth century.

Like many, I first met Goenka by way of video and audio recordings, on one of his ten-day courses in the North Indian city of Jaipur in the state of Rajasthan. Though it took place more than two decades ago now, it was an encounter that I will never forget. It set me on a path to study the teachings of the Buddha, and I find it unlikely that I would be a professor of Buddhist studies today were it not for that first remote encounter with the man I now think of as my teacher.

I feel lucky that I encountered Goenka and his teachings in India and that I felt the urge early on to understand the Asian contexts from which his teachings emerged. This led me to study Pali, Hindi, Sanskrit, and a number of other traditional languages in which the teachings of the Buddha have been transmitted. It also led me to want to spend time in Asia and look as deeply as I couldwith my limited capacitiesat the sociocultural dynamics at work in the various contexts in which I found myself.

This book is based on more than a decade of formal historical and ethnographic research, as well as an additional decade of personal engagement with practices and communities around the globe that owe their inspiration to this great teacher of vipayan meditation. I began a formal, ethnographically informed, historical study of Goenka and his movement in 2008. Since that time, I have spent a combination of more than four years in India carrying out fieldwork and many more years working on archival material relevant to the history of the tradition. Since I have worked on a number of other projects during this time and have published several other books, this research material has had to wait for publication.

But it has also had to wait because I have, at times, found it painful to analyze the actions and identities of Goenka and his close disciples in the light of historical perspective. These are people whom I love and respect. It is a challenging thing to write critically about a living community of which one is a part. It is even more difficult when this community is built on cherished spiritual ideals that many feel are inviolable. I have taken up the task of writing this short work primarily because of my great reverence for S. N. Goenka, but also because I feel that he has been misunderstood and misrepresented by many, including some of his own students. My hope is that a critical and informed perspective on the life of this great master, and the role he played in the dissemination of the Buddhas teachings in modernity, will prove helpful to anyone interested in those teachings.

My sense is that many will find this book strange. There is no genre in which it fits. Is it a hagiography of a great saint? A historical biography of an influential man? Is it a critique or a sympathetic account of the man at the center of the story? In carrying out research on Goenka and his organization over the past decade, and also in looking more broadly at a range of historical occurrences that developed in parallel with him, my sense is that to capture what has gone on requires us to write and think both within and above such categories. This means, however, that many will find this nongenre biography and collection of writings and teachings somewhat puzzling, perhaps even alienating. I encourage readers to investigate that puzzlement. This is where we may find S. N. Goenka as a man and S. N. Goenka as a community.

Since I am quite critical in the following pages of those who have chosen to overlook certain aspects of Goenkas life and legacy, I would be remiss if I were not to acknowledge that much has been deliberately overlooked in this book as well. While I try to show that Goenka was a complex person with a complex story, many of the more problematic issues of his identity, his mission, and his organization cannot be addressed in a short, schematic book such as this. These include issues of caste and untouchability in India; gender bias and conservatism; powerful strains of homophobia within the organization; cult dynamics and group behaviors; the specifics of meditative experiences induced on the courses Goenka taught; Goenkas personal relationships with individual students, as well as those individual students roles in supporting his mission; many episodes and formative moments of Goenkas life that simply could not fit; and meta-level questions about ontologies and metaphysical commitments. These issues and many more must be addressed in other contexts, and I hope they will be.