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
— Poem #17, Tuan Tran
"The present moment is all we have."
— Tuan Tran
"What is the use of meditation if it can't be applied to real life?"
— Tuan TranMeditation is not an escape from reality. It is the practice of living harmoniously within it.
I was parking in the loading area at Costco. A white American couple didn't want to take the crosswalk. The woman started swearing at me. I observed my breath and didn't react. Afterward, I wrote a poem about it.
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. The experience transformed my life. I quit my teaching job and traveled to Dhamma Giri in India, seeking deeper guidance from S.N. Goenka himself.
It was during the one-hour private interview time after lunch that I finally got my chance. I waited until it was my turn. Goenka was reading some correspondence as he talked to me, his eyes moving between the letter and my face. I 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 did not ask why. 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 a stage of insight, the knowledge of dissolution, and the classical maps place it in the middle of the path, not at its end. After it come the knowledges of fear, of danger, and of disenchantment. Those are the stages where a meditator most needs a teacher.
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. A teacher is needed when a method leads the meditator somewhere its instructions do not reach. This method has no such place. 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.1 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. I am not against the body scan. It brought me to bhanga. What I was against was being left alone there, and being told the method I was holding had come unchanged from the Buddha. Those two things cost me forty years.
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. The book is not vague about this. It describes the morning it happened. Practicing ānāpāna meditation before dawn, U Thet's awareness "spread throughout the body kāya," sensing "heat (hot or cold), and movements (bold or minute)" at any point he attended to. Then, at the top of his head, he noticed distinct sensation (vedanā) and confined his attention "to the size of a kyat-coin at the vertex," where the reality of impermanence revealed itself (p. 122). From that spot, the awareness "slowly spread out till the vibrant movements covered the whole body from head to feet" (p. 123). The book then states plainly what he had been doing for the previous thirteen years: he had traveled "going in and out of one forest after another, in search of the 'immortal way'," and "quite unexpectedly, found it from that spot at the top of his head. The way of wisdom was sought everywhere, but found in one's body" (p. 123).
The book also records what he did next, and this matters to the question of lineage. Having no teacher at hand, "the only thing he could do, therefore, was to read the Ledi treatises in place of the Sayadaw, and check up his works" — the Anatta Dipani and Bāvanā Dipani of Ledi Sayadaw — verifying his findings against texts he had encountered years before (p. 124). His method was validated after the fact, not received through transmission. It was the discovery of a sincere practitioner working within the framework of Ledi Sayadaw's lay meditation movement, exactly the movement Erik Braun traces in The Birth of Insight. Not a technique handed down unchanged from the Buddha. Understanding this freed me.
I now meditate daily on the breath. I carry that awareness through the day.
"Observe the breath at the touching point continuously, without attachment or expectation."
— Tuan Tran
Anāgām Sayāgyi U Thet and His Teaching is available as a free PDF from Pariyatti's Treasures page, where it is listed as A Brief Biography of Anāgām Sayāgyi U Thet and His Teaching: 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 kept mindfulness of breathing at the center of practice at a time when other methods were becoming popular, 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 Sayāgyi U Thet was not the method Webu Sayadaw himself taught. He taught only this: the breath at the touching point, continuous awareness, nothing else. The commentarial tradition, in the Visuddhimagga, lists forty methods of meditation, and body scanning is not one of them.
The scholars I have read agree on one thing. The body scan is a modern development. Anālayo concludes that the body scan "would presumably have been unknown in early Buddhism," while tracing its development to an aspect of mindfulness of breathing. His article follows the thread through the vipassanā meditation taught in Myanmar in the early twentieth century — the same lay movement that Erik Braun's The Birth of Insight documents beginning under colonial rule with Ledi Sayadaw, who made no claim to a direct transmission from the Buddha. The breath was there first, and it was there all along.
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 say he entered the first jhāna, not that he watched the breath — but the same tradition that preserves this memory preserves the Buddha's instructions on mindfulness of breathing. 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 forty years, from my first course in 1986 to the book that freed me, to do the same.
"Meditation is not something that has to be done. It's simply something that one is doing."
— Tuan Tran
Further Reading
- Erik Braun, The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (University of Chicago Press, 2013). How Ledi Sayadaw brought meditation to lay people under British rule, starting the movement that led to Mahasi Sayadaw, U Ba Khin, and S.N. Goenka. Braun notes that Ledi Sayadaw never claimed a direct line of transmission from the Buddha.
- Bhikkhu Anālayo, "Buddhist Antecedents to the Body Scan Meditation," Mindfulness 11 (2020). Concludes the body scan "would presumably have been unknown in early Buddhism," while tracing its development to an aspect of mindfulness of breathing. See also his Satipaṭṭhāna: The Direct Path to Realization (Windhorse, 2003).
- Kate Crosby, Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia (Shambhala, 2020). The older meditation systems of Southeast Asia, where the breath and its nimittas held a central place before the modern reforms.
Notes
- S. N. Goenka, "The Purity of Dhamma," Vipassana Newsletter, Vol. 20, No. 3, 30 March 2010, translated from the Hindi Vipassana Patrika: original · archived copy · excerpt. ↩
