The Birth of Insight (Hardcover Book)

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Insight meditation, which claims to offer practitioners a chance to escape all suffering by perceiving the true nature of reality, is one of the most popular forms of meditation today. The Theravada Buddhist cultures of South and Southeast Asia often see it as the Buddha s most important gift to humanity. In the first book to examine how this practice came to play such a dominant and relatively recent role in Buddhism, Erik Braun takes readers to Burma, revealing that Burmese Buddhists in the colonial period were pioneers in making insight meditation indispensable to modern Buddhism.

Braun focuses on the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw, a pivotal architect of modern insight meditation, and explores Ledi s popularization of the study of crucial Buddhist philosophical texts in the early twentieth century. By promoting the study of such abstruse texts, Braun shows, Ledi was able to standardize and simplify meditation methods and make them widely accessible in part to protect Buddhism in Burma after the British takeover in 1885. Braun also addresses the question of what really constitutes the modern in colonial and postcolonial forms of Buddhism, arguing that the emergence of this type of meditation was caused by precolonial factors in Burmese culture as well as the disruptive forces of the colonial era. Offering a readable narrative of the life and legacy of one of modern Buddhism s most important figures, The Birth of Insight provides an original account of the development of mass meditation.

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Very significant

This is a very significant book for those practicing in the Vipassana tradition, explaining the social, political, and religious context from which the world-wide Vipassana meditation movement was born. It is dense, but readable. Highly recommended.

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Reviewed by: (Verified Buyer) Elissa Brown from North Fork on 11/26/2017

Vital information for a student of Vipassana

I had read pretty much all of the English translations of Ven. Ledi Sayadaw's manuals that are available. While they are inspiring and informative in themselves, I am grateful to Erik Braun for having done such a thorough job of researching the history of the Sayadaw's life and giving us the context for all the writing and teaching he did in his lifetime. This in-depth study not only reveals details from other, Burmese-language manuals not yet translated, but it also gave me the understanding that by carrying on with our practice and study of pariyatti we are fulfilling Ven. Ledi Sayadaw's original vision of how the Buddha's teachings (the sāsana) can be preserved and protected for the ages.

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Reviewed by: Richard from Washington, USA on 10/10/2015

Excellent book

I just finished reading this, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It is well written and very well researched. The author has explored Burmese and Pāli texts to reveal interesting facts about Ven. Ledi Sayadaw that are not available in English. For anyone interested in the roots of the lineage of teachers in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin, this is a must read.

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Reviewed by: Brihas from USA on 10/4/2015