Healing Meditation and Meditation Sickness: The Strategies of Sayagyi U Ba Khin (1899–1971)

This paper explores some of the particularities of the meditation-teaching models of the Burmese lay meditation master and first Accountant General of Independent Burma, Sayagyi U Ba Khin (1899–1971). While much scholarship has glossed over his and his students’ charismatic-healing modalities, I argue here that charismatic healing was at the center of U Ba Khin’s teaching practices. Because U Ba Khin’s experimentalist approach to meditation often entailed healing modalities that called for intensive approaches to meditation, he also dealt with many cases in which his students encountered serious difficulties and found themselves in states of unwellness that had to be negotiated in various ways, both medical and meditative. Through an analysis of several anecdotes related by U Ba Khin in his oral discourses, I bring to light a range of meditation challenges—and context-specific solutions to those challenges—encountered by those coming to learn vipassanā from U Ba Khin.