Changing Buddhist Practice in Burma - Online Burma Library

particularly oneself, through the Buddhist moral, cosmological, and conceptual
framework. The aim of the meditator is to attain the spiritual stage of non-self
involving understanding the changing and impermanent nature of things,
including oneself. 16 Meditation practice is popular among many Buddhist
Burmese as well as non-Buddhists inside and outside Burma. In Burma, the
Mahasi meditation centre in Rangoon is world-renowned and many thousands
of meditators have been trained there. In the Mahasi tradition, a person who is
practising the meditation is called yaw-gi, which can be translated into English
as 'meditator'. In this thesis the term meditator is generally used but yaw-gi
may be used in case of direct quotations. Also note that in Mahasi tradition,
the term yaw-gi is suffixed to four main categories: they are monk yaw-gi, nun
(thi-hla-shin) yaw-gi, lay male yaw-gi, and lay female yaw-gi.
Mahasi meditations
The Mahasi Sayadaw of Burma systematically developed the practice of
Vipassana meditation, known also as insight meditation, which came to be
identified with new practices of Buddhism focusing on individual oriented
practice of contemplation. Mahasi Sayadaw states that the meaning and
purpose of the meditation practice, according to true Buddha teaching, is
"carried out for the purpose of realizing Nibbana [nirvana] and thereby
escaping from the ills of life: old age, ill-health, death, and so forth" (Mahasi
Sayadaw 1958:1). 17 In 1958 Mahasi Sayadaw wrote a treatise about the real
purpose of undertaking meditation in accordance with the actual teaching of
Buddha, after it was realized that although many thought they knew how to
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