Changing Buddhist Practice in Burma - Online Burma Library

listening to a discourse on vipassana meditation given by the Sayadaw and
observing the Sayadaw's serene and noble demeanor, Sir U Thwin had no
difficulty in making up his mind that Mahasi Sayadaw was the ideal meditation
master he had been looking for" (Mahasi Sasana Nuggaha Organization 2002).
Later in 1949, on behalf of the lay organization, Sir U Thwin and U Nu, then
the prime minister of Burma, invited Mahasi Sayadaw to come to teach insight
meditation at the newly established centre in Rangoon. His teaching became
very popular among Buddhist laity; and hence the centre became known
popularly as the Mahasi Meditation Centre, bearing the personal name of
Mahasi Sayadaw. The teaching of this form of meditation was introduced by
the Sayadaw to a group of about 25 meditators at the centre later in the same
year, and the technique became so popular that "[w]ithin a few years of the
Sayadaw's arrival in Yangon [Rangoon], similar mediation centers sprang up
all over Myanmar (Burma) until they numbered over one hundred... These
were the consequences of opening the meditation centre in the Buddhist
Retreat of the Buddha Sasana Nuggaha Organization. The next result was that
the same centers were opened in the East and in several western countries too"
(Mahasi Sasana Nuggaha Organization 2002).
Contemporary Mahasi Meditation Centre
Of the Mahasi Thathana Yeiktha Jordt (2000:1) observed "The first impression
striking the observer is the industrious preoccupation of hundreds of sangha
(monks) and lay yogis (men, women, and in the months of April and May,
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