A talk hosted by the Society for Buddhist Studies.

Even after his demise in 2013, S. N. Goenka’s vipassana meditation in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin continues to flourish as one of the most significant and influential meditation movements with a strong emphasis on non-sectarian, universal, and scientific Dhamma as an ideal way of life. However, Daniel Stuart’s recent biography – the only one available in English – challenges this emphasis, portraying Goenka’s life and teaching as coming out of clashing “identities” – between a global teacher of non-sectarian vipassana and a traditional guru of Burmese and Indian descent with cultic, conservative and devotional backgrounds and commitments. This talk critically examines these assertions and provides how best to understand a global meditation movement such as Goenka’s, especially when it comes to claims like secular, non-sectarian and universal practice in response to modern secular episteme. Furthermore, it argues that the failure to recognize religion as a discursive category and a lack of critical self-reflexivity in knowledge production inevitably leads to a complete misunderstanding of the movements, the Buddhist cultural logic, and its leaders in a typical Orientalist fashion.

About the Speaker:
Htet Min Lwin is a scholar of religion, social movement and revolution. Currently at York University in Toronto, he is writing a dissertation on the state's institutionalization of Buddhist monastics in Southeast Asia, for which he has been awarded the American Council of Learned Societies' 2024 Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in Buddhist Studies. He is also co-chair of Burma Studies Group under the Association for Asian Studies, and student director (2022-24) of EIR of the American Academy of Religion. He is a visiting scholar at Cornell's Southeast Asia Program for archival research during summer 2025.