On Meditation

"Life is really about suffering. Only through suffering can compassion be developed and impermanence be known."
— Tuan Tran

Peony flower
in spring
winter is over

Hoa mẫu đơn
Xuân đã đến
Mùa đông đã đi qua

— Poem #17, Tuan Tran

"The present moment is all we have."
— Tuan Tran

"Breath awareness is easy the moment effort becomes effortless."
— Tuan Tran

"Observe the breath at the touching point continuously, without attachment or expectation."
— Tuan Tran

"What is the use of meditation if it can't be applied to real life?"
— Tuan Tran

I was parking in the loading area at Costco. A white American couple didn't want to take the crosswalk next to where I was parking. The woman started swearing at me. I observed my breath and didn't react. Afterward, I wrote the following poem.

See Poem #73 from my archive regarding this incident.

Letter to a Friend: The Danger of Seeking Bliss

Sorry it took me a while to respond to your email. I'm not familiar with Turiya state so I can't comment on it. However, since the class reached that state through guided meditation then I would suspect it is achieved through the power of suggestion.

I'm skeptical of any meditation that is not observing the reality of the present as is, whether one is experiencing a pleasant or an unpleasant mental state, with full acceptance. True happiness and compassion arise from experiencing suffering and letting it go since everything is impermanent; thus in essence there is no self as it is also impermanent and subject to change.

Suffering is caused by the attachment to anything at all. Since all things are impermanent, therefore attachment to anything at all will lead to suffering. For example, a rose is beautiful and fragrant while in full bloom, yet it will not last and the attachment to that state in its development will lead to suffering. The greater the attachment, the greater the suffering.

Trying to reach a Turiya state for its blissful effect will hinder one's progress in meditation. The goal of meditation is to move beyond suffering, which is not the same as trying to experience bliss. One can take drugs to feel good but it doesn't lead to greater wisdom and compassion, only more suffering.

Sincerely,
Tuan Tran

My Spiritual Journey: From Saigon to Myanmar

I have been drawn to meditation since I was a boy. At twelve years old I tried to meditate on the breath by myself, without instruction, without a teacher.

In 1986, at twenty-six, I attended my first Goenka course and reached bhanga during that retreat. It transformed my life. I traveled to Dhamma Giri in India seeking deeper guidance from S.N. Goenka himself.

I met with him and expressed my desire to deepen my practice through intensive meditation in solitude to work with what I had experienced. I asked if I could use one of the meditation cells at the center to practice alone, without the recorded instructions and group schedule.

He told me: continue with the ten-day course and the recorded instructions, or leave.

I left. I did not find what I was looking for then.

At Dhamma Giri, I had brought the question of bhanga directly to Goenka's tradition and found no answer — only the same recordings, the same ten days, the same warning not to be attached. But bhanga was never the problem. It is the fruit of practice. Ajahn Brahm makes the same point in Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond: the calm and bliss the suttas describe are what practice ripens into, not what it must guard against.

The Goenka organization had no place for what came after bhanga. The instructions end where the dissolution begins. In the tapes, bhanga is mentioned at the close of the Vipassana teaching, as though it were an endpoint instead of a checkpoint. When the body dissolves and the meditator sits in a state no recording has addressed, there is no teacher to ask. Continue the ten-day course, or leave. Those were the options. I chose the only one that was mine.

Centers in the Mahasi tradition work differently. A meditator is interviewed by a teacher daily. The teacher listens, assesses where the practice is, and adjusts the instructions accordingly — before bhanga, after bhanga, wherever the meditator actually is. The practice continues under guidance instead of circling a fixed curriculum.

The beauty of the breath method I later found in Webu Sayadaw is that it needs none of this. There is no observation except the breath at the touching point. No stages are promised, so there are no expectations. No teacher is needed, because the instruction on the first day is the instruction on the ten-thousandth.

I did not understand any of this in 1986. What I lacked was not sincerity or effort. It was a method without a gap in it.

In 2010, at fifty, I became a samanera at Pa Auk Forest Monastery in Myanmar. I woke each morning to the sound of the temple bell. Fourteen hours of meditation a day. I wanted to stay for the rest of my life.

Even there, Goenka's claim followed me. Pa Auk teaches the breath at the touching point, but I had spent twenty-four years believing the body scan was the Buddha's technique, preserved "in its pristine purity" by an unbroken chain of teachers (S. N. Goenka, "The Purity of Dhamma," Vipassana Newsletter, Vol. 20, No. 3, March 2010). So I kept switching—breath, then scan, breath, then scan—as though I had to choose between the method of the monastery and the method of the Buddha. The belief outlasted the teacher.

I do not want another person to have to go through the confusion that I did. Goenka didn't need to make a false claim. The truth would not have diminished the body scanning method, although his organization would need to support meditators after bhanga like Mahasi Sayadaw's organization.

My stay was not long enough to reach jhāna, or even the nimitta. A message arrived from my wife. Our son needed his father. The Buddha taught that attachment is the root of suffering, but he also taught that compassion is the highest virtue, and compassion is not a feeling. It is packing your bag when you want to stay.

In 2026, I found what I had been looking for in a book about the origins of the Goenka method. Anāgām Sayāgyi U Thet and His Teaching documents how the body-scanning technique arose from one lay farmer's own meditative experience in early twentieth-century Burma, a discovery of a sincere practitioner, not a technique handed down unchanged from the Buddha. Body scanning is not a method handed down "in its pristine purity," as Goenka claimed. Understanding this freed me. The breath method I had found at twelve had been complete all along.

I now meditate daily on the breath. I carry that awareness through the day.

A Brief Biography of Anāgām Sayāgyi U Thet and His Teaching is available as a free PDF from Pariyatti's Treasures page: Pariyatti Treasures →

The Webu Sayadaw Method: Direct Path

Webu Sayadaw (1896–1977) was one of Burma's most revered meditation masters, renowned for the uncompromising simplicity of his teaching. While others emphasized extensive scriptural study, he insisted that liberation could be reached through one thing alone, unwavering attention to the breath. He is widely credited with preserving mindfulness of breathing as a living practice at a time when it had nearly disappeared from the tradition, and among his admirers were some of the most influential teachers of the modern era.

I believe Webu Sayadaw's method, mindfulness of breathing (ānāpānasati), is the most direct path. It is a complete method for developing both concentration and wisdom: observe the natural breath at the nostrils, where the air touches, without controlling it, and with continuous awareness.

Know that you are breathing in while breathing in; know that you are breathing out while breathing out; and be aware of the spot at the nostrils where the stream of air touches as you breathe in and out.

The mind has a tendency to wander, either thinking about the past or the future. Accept that at this moment the mind is wandering and patiently bring the mind back to being aware of the breath at the touching point. This is the process of training the mind to be in the present moment.

When the breath becomes so subtle that it seems no longer to touch, it is in fact still touching. Keep your attention fixed on the spot whether or not you can perceive the sensation of contact.

This is the complete method. Follow it precisely and practice diligently. Any question you have will reveal its answer through your own sustained practice.

Those who wish to hear his teaching in his own words can read his discourses, collected in The Way to Ultimate Calm: Selected Discourses of Webu Sayadaw (Buddhist Publication Society), and freely distributed by the International Meditation Centre in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin: IMC Publications →

Webu Sayadaw and Sayagyi U Ba Khin were close Dhamma friends from their first meeting in 1941. It was Webu Sayadaw who, upon examining U Ba Khin's practice, urged him to begin teaching, even though the method U Ba Khin had learned from Saya Thet Gyi was not the method Webu Sayadaw himself taught. He taught only this: the breath at the touching point, continuous awareness, nothing else. The Buddha taught forty methods of meditation, and body scanning is not one of them.

Modern scholarship supports the same conclusion. In The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Erik Braun traces how Ledi Sayadaw, responding to British colonialism's threat to Burmese Buddhism, took meditation, traditionally a monastic practice, and made it accessible to lay householders, launching the mass lay meditation movement that would eventually spread worldwide through Mahasi Sayadaw, U Ba Khin, and S.N. Goenka. The distinctive techniques that became fixed as "the" Vipassana method took shape within this modern movement, formed by the circumstances and innovations of twentieth-century teachers. Braun also notes the striking absence at the tradition's root: the claim of a direct transmission from the Buddha through the lineage is something Ledi Sayadaw himself never made. What the tradition presents as preservation, the history reveals as adaptation.

Bhikkhu Anālayo, a scholar-monk trained in the early Pāli texts, addressed the question directly in his article "Buddhist Antecedents to the Body Scan Meditation" (Mindfulness, vol. 11, 2020). Tracing the body scan through the Burmese Vipassana tradition, he concludes that the body scan as such "would presumably have been unknown in early Buddhism" — that the practice developed out of a particular modern interpretation of the third step in the canonical instructions on mindfulness of breathing ("experiencing the whole body"), rather than constituting a technique the Buddha himself taught. His earlier book, Satipaṭṭhāna: The Direct Path to Realization (Windhorse, 2003), reaches the same conclusion through study of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta and its parallels: the Buddha's instructions describe the breath, postures, activities, anatomical parts, elements, and decaying corpses, but nowhere a systematic sweep of attention through the body. Two researchers working independently, one through history and one through textual study, arrive at the same finding. A third, working through the surviving meditation manuals of precolonial Southeast Asia, confirms what they found.

Kate Crosby's Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia (Shambhala, 2020) confirms this. She documents the boran kammatthana ("traditional" or "old" meditation) systems that prevailed across Southeast Asia for centuries before the modern reforms: elaborate practices built around the breath, its nimittas, and the whole body's signs of refinement. These were the methods displaced, not preserved, by the twentieth-century movements that gave us the body scan. The breath method of Webu Sayadaw and the lineage of U Ba Khin simplified what remained of an older, richer curriculum, but the breath itself was never the innovation. Webu Sayadaw gave us the pure, stripped-down breath method. Crosby shows us that this method wasn't invented in the twentieth century; it was the core of an older and broader tradition that the modern body-scan movement bypassed.

The Buddha himself arrived at the breath by remembering it. Before his awakening, he sought out the most celebrated meditation teachers of his day. With āḷāra Kālāma he mastered the dimension of nothingness, and was honored as an equal; with Uddaka Rāmaputta he mastered the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception, and was honored as a teacher. Both times he asked the same question: does this lead beyond aging, sickness, and death? Both times the answer was no, and both times he walked away. The methods were genuine, attainable, even rarefied — and they were not liberation.

Abandoning the teachers and their attainments, he recalled something from his childhood. Sitting in the shade of a jambu tree while his father worked, unbidden and untaught, he had entered the first jhāna — the seclusion-born joy of a quiet mind settled in stillness. Reflecting on that memory, he recognized: this is the path to awakening. Not the attainments of the two teachers, but the natural, uncontrived absorption of a mind settled in seclusion under a tree. The suttas do not say the boy was watching the breath; they say he entered the first jhāna. But the same tradition that preserves this memory preserves the Buddha's own instructions on mindfulness of breathing, and the two converge on the same point: no elaborate apparatus, no teacher-made technique, is required.

I read that story and I recognize myself in it. At twelve, without a teacher and without instruction, I sat with the breath. Decades of borrowed methods followed — the scan, the confusion of two traditions pulled against each other. The breath had been complete all along. The Buddha's method did not come down to him through a lineage of transmission; it was remembered, returned to, trusted. I only wish it had not taken me more than fifty years to do the same.

"When the practice is correct, it becomes effortless. When one is struggling then something is wrong. Meditation is supposed to help, not to create more stress."

— Tuan Tran