Myanmar takes moment to pay tribute to guru
S.N. Goenka, whose meditation courses won him a worldwide following, had asked that his ashes be scattered in his homeland
Downtown Yangon’s famously snarled traffic came to a halt Tuesday morning to let a truck wreathed in flowers pass.
It was carrying the ashes of S.N. Goenka, the noted meditation guru who died last week in Mumbai, India, at age 90.
Goenka, whose signature 10-day silent retreats drew tens of thousands of people each year, spent much of his life in India. But he was born in Myanmar, also known as Burma, and this is where he began his spiritual path. He had asked that on his death his remains be brought home and scattered in the Irrawaddy River.
Goenka believed that anyone of any faith could benefit from meditation. He was one of the first to teach people from all religious backgrounds that peace could be attained by tuning in to the subtleties of the body and the mind.
“The Buddha did not teach Buddhism,” he said. “He taught a way of life.”
Born to ethnic Indian parents in Mandalay, Goenka was a successful businessman when he visited a local Vipassana meditation teacher who a friend said might be able to help cure Goenka’s migraines.
The teacher, Sayagyi U Ba Khin, said Goenka should go to a doctor for the headaches but offered lessons on meditation that changed the course of Goenka’s life. He turned to studying meditation full time after the military took over Myanmar and nationalized its industries.
After 13 years as a student, Goenka moved to India to teach. His nonsectarian meditation courses, in which he coached students to pay close attention to the breath, grew in popularity. Among his early students were Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg, two Americans credited with introducing a similar breath-focused, light-onritual breed of Buddhism that has become popular in the West. Goenka was greeted like a rock star during a 2002 RV trip across North America that included a stop in Los Angeles.
His method focused on free meditation retreats, supported by donors, at more than 150 centers around the world. Along with hours of daily meditation, the retreats incorporate DVDs of Goenka teaching, including his emphasis on Buddha’s message that everything in life is impermanent.
Goenka’s ashes will be scattered by his family at three sites in Myanmar, including one near his birthplace. Yangon was the first stop.
Before Tuesday’s funeral procession, Goenka’s followers gathered at the center he had founded in a shady compound near the city’s famous Buddhist landmark, the Shwedagon Pagoda. In a quiet meditation hall, about two dozen people sat cross-legged, with eyes closed, as others came to pay their respects at an altar that held a large bronze urn.
There were students old and new.
Kerstin Adamle, a traveler from Germany, finished her first 10-day retreat only last week.
Saw Mya, a Yangon doctor, has been following Goenka since the 1970s, when she heard him speak about the potential of meditation to increase concentration.
“I thought, ‘That sounds reasonable,’ ” she said with a laugh. Now a senior teacher at the Yangon center, she also leads an initiative of Goenka’s to provide meditation training to children.
She watched as the urn was carried out and placed in the bed of the floweradorned truck, which also held a large portrait of the guru, round-cheeked and smiling and with perfectly coiffed white hair.
With much shouting and arm gesturing, a dozen men helped guide the truck off the property and down a narrow alley. Long poles were used to help lift lowhanging electrical wires and a tree branch that almost knocked the picture to the ground.
The procession made its way to the waterfront with a police escort. A recording of Goenka chanting in Hindi was broadcast over a loudspeaker. At the jetty, dockworkers and tourists watched as Goenka’s sons walked the urn to a boat and then pushed off. Nobody cried. “What for?” said Phyu Wint Yee, a longtime follower of the guru.
“Life is always changing,” she said. “If you’ve followed Goenka’s teaching, you know the art of living is the art of dying.”