Local Cure, Global Chant: Performing Theravadic
Awakening in the Footsteps of the Ledi Sayadaw
Daniel M. Stuart p. 282, 284
Why Has Wright Been Erased from the Historical Record?
So why has Wright been erased from the historical record? Once some of the details of his identity get fleshed out, this erasure may appear less surprising. First, Wright was a Black man, a professor of theology at one of the premier institutions of Black learning in the United States, Howard University. So, he was marginalized within the landscape of North American culture by dint of his race. Second, Wright taught meditation largely in the context of Christian theological training. Scholars of Buddhist studies, therefore – even those studying the secularization of Buddhist meditation teachings – have perhaps considered Wright’s teaching mission irrelevant to their scope of study. Third, Wright’s identity as a Christian charismatic and psychic, and an avowed practitioner of the occult sciences, renders him illegible to Buddhist (modernism) studies scholars, since he does not fit the normative paradigm of a Buddhist modernist on a variety of counts.
Wright’s historiographical erasure can thus be understood as part of a larger problem in Buddhist (modernism) studies, the problem of oversimplified scholarly narratives – most of them embedded in historical sociological interpretive frameworks – leading to the historiographical obliteration of the acts and experiences of consequential figures that do not fit neatly within such scholarly narratives. In this respect, I would suggest that it is not just Wright who has been erased in the historiography of Vipassanā meditation and mindfulness meditation, though his erasure is perhaps particularly disturbing. U Ba Khin and S. N. Goenka too, though acknowledged in passing by 23 More and more, scholars paying attention to marginalized groups in the history of the United States are demonstrating how such groups have had important overlooked roles in the development of cultural flows.
Some historians and scholars, have been largely obliterated – or very badly misrepresented – in historical accounts of modern Buddhist meditation because they do not fit the paradigm of Buddhist modernism. The situation gets further complicated when we look at the most common sources used to characterize these figures. The sources drawn on are often their English language talks and publications, many of which demonstrate that they themselves self-censored in certain contexts, thereby at times participating in their own erasure (see, for example, Hart 1988; VRI [1991] 1994; Ba Khin 2012).
This problem comes into stark relief when we assess arguments advanced by Joseph Cheah in his 2011 book Race and Religion in American Buddhism: White Supremacy and Immigrant Adaptation. Conflating the approaches to Vipassanā teaching and practice of the Burmese monastic meditation teacher and scholiast, the Mahāsī Sayadaw, with those of U Ba Khin, Cheah argues that “the presentation of Buddhism by Ledi Sayadaw, Mahasi Sayadaw, and U Ba Khin transcends the concerns and boundaries of locale and sect, which is one of the main characteristics of Buddhist modernism” (48) He goes on to mischaracterize some aspects of U Ba Khin’s teaching approach:
U Ba Khin’s impetus to simplify and rationalize Burmese Buddhist practices to the point of relying only on a particular form of meditation, oneone that was divested of devotional practices and many doctrinal underpinnings, is that it allowed for the introduction of Vipassanā meditation to Westerners, or how this type of meditation could be reinscribed for individualistic ideologies that surrounded the Western context. Cheah 2011: 48
Because the small cult that formed around U Ba Khin considered him to be a special bodhisattva – the being destined to become the future Buddha Metteyya – the various forms of meditation that he tailored to suit individual students were all considered to have an equivalent force based primarily on U Ba Khin’s own charisma and his karmic connection to powerful nonhuman awakened beings who protected his students and his meditation center. Finally, precisely because U Ba Khin was considered to have special karmic prowess as a teacher, there was among his disciples a strong devotionalism to him as a guru figure, a devotionalism tied explicitly to locale and sect. In some contexts, U Ba Khin himself becomes an object of devotion for his students, a wholesome object or ārammaṇa that can be brought to mind at the time of death as a supportive aid toward a wholesome rebirth.
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in a Washington Post, Times-Herald article from February of 1963, titled “Minister Learns Buddhist Meditation,” Wright informed the newspaper that under U Ba Khin’s guidance, he “progressed so rapidly that his guru, or teacher, told him he had reached a state of reflection achieved by only one in 10,000 Buddhists” (Washington Post, Times-Herald 1963). Though this is a somewhat enigmatic statement, it is likely that such an affirmation of Wright’s progress by his teachers was in fact confirmation – on their terms – of his entry into the first stage of Buddhist awakening, the stage of stream-entry (sotāpatti). In any case, his was considered a rare accomplishment, and he was understood to be uniquely talented in matters of karma and spiritual development. On Wright’s experiential terms, a number of other indicators led him to a sense of certainty about the validity of his meditation practice under U Ba Khin. A North American student who learned meditation under Wright shared several of his accounts of visionary experience while meditating in Burma: Near the end of his time there, he [Wright] had a meditation where, when he opened his eyes, there was fire coming out of his feet. And another occasion very near the end, in his meditation, a hand appeared to him and handed him a yellow rose, and he knew it was the blessings of the Christ.