Sayadaw U. Pandita - The State of Mind Called Beautiful

Sayadaw U Pandita was a brilliant light of wisdom, whose precise and clear guidance profoundly illuminates our own path to inner freedom.

TARA BENNETT-GOLEMAN , author of Emotional Alchemy

Sayadaw U Pandita is one of the foremost teachers of the insight meditation method taught by the Burmese Master Mahasi Sayadaw. His instructions are essential for a meditator in retreat but they are also useful to the working Buddhist with a few minutes to spare.

Buddhadharma

I n The State of Mind Called Beautiful, meditation master Sayadaw U Pandita lays out the breadth, depth, and wealth of the Theravadan tradition of Buddhism. U Pandita begins with the basic guidelines of Buddhism and moves on to various practices: those that can be done for one minute a day, those that sweeten and strengthen the mind, those that heal societies and families, and those that lead to liberation.

This book features complete teachings on vipassana or insight meditation, including how to do it; how to refine it; how to deal with difficulties; and how to develop mindfulness, wisdom, patience, and practice itself. A helpful questions-and-answers section provides an invaluable resource for newcomers and established practitioners alike. Lastly, both Pali-to-English and English-to-Pali glossaries are included, ensuring that readers easily master the meanings of important terms.

Sayadaw U Pandita was one of the greatest meditation masters of modern times. This book is an enriching and inspiring collection to guide us in our own practice.

MU SOENG , author of The Heart of the Universe

The depth of Sayadaw U Panditas understanding and the breadth of his knowledge have profoundly influenced the transmission of Dharma in the West.

JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN , author of Mindfulness

Foreword

S AYDAW U P AITA AND H IS I MPACT
by Jake Davis

When Saydaw U Paita came to the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, in 1984, most there knew him then only as the successor to the Mahsi Saydaw, who had passed away two years earlier. Yet for many of those who are the most senior teachers in the West today, that retreat provided a singular opportunity to do long-term intensive practice with one whom they came to regard as a true master.

When I was training with him decades later, U Paita pulled out photo albums from that retreat. I remember his joyous smile as he showed me pictures of Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, and others, glowing from months of intensive practice and of course looking a good bit younger than I remembered them. Over the course of this and subsequent retreats held in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere, many of these Western teachers describe not only training in satipahna (mindfulness meditation) practice with a level of energy and precision beyond what they had previously imagined possible, but also for the first time engaging in intensive long-term practice of the brahma vihras: mett, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. The profound impact of this pairing U Paitas precise energetic style of mindfulness practice with brahmavihra practice on the way in which Buddhist meditation is taught in the West is abundantly evident. However, it is not always clear to newer students how many contemporary Western presentations are in large part a legacy of U Paitas formative guidance of a generation of Western teachers.

U Paita was born in Burma in 1921. Losing his mother at age four and his father at ten, he began his primary education in the traditional way, at a monastery, and ordained as a novice monk when he was twelve. At eighteen, he went to study with the great Saydaw U Kelasa of the Kyauk Tan Mahabodhi Monastery near Bago and ordained as a bhikkhu there at twenty. U Paita would go on to become a distinguished scholar of the Pi texts in his own right, teaching textual studies in Rangoon, earning the preeminent title of Abhivasa, and eventually participating, when he was thirty-three, as both reciter and corrector of Pi in the Sixth Sangha Council of 1956.

While teaching Pi in Rangoon in his late twenties, U Paita also studied English with Saya-gyi U Hpe Thin, and the two of them made an agreement that whoever came to see Dhamma first would tell the other. Saya-gyi U Hpe Thin later went to practice at the newly established center run by the Mahsi Saydaw and, becoming satisfied with his practice and inspired by the teaching there, U Hpe Thin encouraged the young U Paita to go along as well. Thus it was that at twenty-nine, U Paita took up the practice of satipahna as taught by the Mahsi Saydaw. He too became inspired by the practice and eager to share this taste of Dhamma with relatives, friends, and others. Through his own experience, U Paita had also become firmly convinced that textual study of the Buddhas teachings needed to be complemented by practical application of meditation practice.

On the strength of this realization, when he was thirty-four, U Paita left his post teaching Pi textual studies to take up the duties assigned to him by the Mahsi Saydaw. He guided yogis for over three decades at the Rangoon center, including many of the Burmese monks who would go on to become leading teachers of the Mahsi method in their own right. In addition, a handful of young Westerners such as Alan Clements and Steven Smith came to the center in the early 1980s and practiced under the guidance of U Paita. It was in large part on the strength of the recommendation of these young Westerners that U Paita was invited to the Insight Meditation Society in 1984 to conduct that historic retreat, which would prove to be a major watershed in the training of Western teachers of mindfulness meditation.

In 1979, at age fifty-seven, U Paita was appointed as a guiding Nayaka teacher at the Mahsi center and with the passing of the Mahsi Saydaw in 1982 was appointed to the lead role of Ovadacariya at the center. He served in that role for eight years, then left to found the Panditarama Shwe Taung Gon Center. The new center flourished, and many branch centers were eventually established under his guidance in Burma and around the world. In addition to training many thousands of meditators in his precise, rigorous style of practice, U Paita dedicated himself to the training of female Anagarika nuns from Nepal, Burma, the United States, and elsewhere, in both textual study and meditative practice to the highest standards. The immense potential of this contribution to the strength of the Buddhas teachings in the West is only beginning to be felt.

While his mastery of meditation practice is widely recognized, it is less emphasized in the West how U Paita embodied and insisted on the purity of ones morality as a foundational and essential means of avoiding suffering for oneself and others. One Burmese monk, now an elder, recalls that when he lived as a young novice under U Paita, the novices did not dare to so much as look at the nuns, much less chat with them. Yet this strict observance of sla, which U Paita held himself to as well, was motivated by a compassionate understanding of the suffering that can follow from a failure to do so. As the American teacher Michele McDonald relates, it was the great strength of U Paitas sla that made her feel safe enough to trust him as a guide through very difficult aspects of practice.

For all his many personal strengths, U Paita tried to include in his teaching as little of himself as possible. American nun and longtime student Daw Vajiranani recalls U Paita telling her that the Buddhas teachings recorded in the Pi texts should be given first priority, next the commentaries, and after that the lineage of teachers down to the present; ones own views and innovations should carry the least weight. For this reason, U Paita emphasized that in order to guide others skillfully, a meditation teacher needs careful study of the Pi texts, just as textual study must also be completed by practical application of these teachings in meditative practice. Throughout his own teaching career, U Paita never forgot his great debt to his own teacher, the Mahsi Saydaw. And he emphasized Mahsis immense contribution in making clear how the Pi suttas, beginning from the Buddhas first teaching in the