The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw by Erik Braun

Author:Erik Braun [Braun, Erik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

FIG. 4. Photograph of Ledi included in Ledi Sayadaw, The Vipassanā Dīpanī or The Manual of Insight (1915).

But, however much delight was shared, these interactions certainly did not lead Ledi and his Western correspondents to think of Buddhism in the same way. For a scholar such as Rhys-Davids, a focus on philosophy fit an Orientalist vision of a Buddhism shorn of cosmology, focused on the early texts, and aligned with Western philosophy. While Ledi emphasized doctrinal learning, too, previous chapters have shown us that he saw the study of Abhidhamma as embracing a wide textual lineage and fitting comfortably within a traditional cosmology. In the Manual on Insight Knowledge he frames practice, in fact, in terms of the dire threat of the endless round of rebirth (saṃsāra):

The four realms of misery down to the great Avici Hell, stand wide open to a Puthujjana [an ordinary person] who departs from the abode of men, like space without any obstruction. As soon as the term of life expires, he may fall into any of the Nirayas or realms of misery. Whether far or near, there is no intervening period of time. He may be reborn as an animal; as a Peta, a wretched shade; or as an Asura or Titan, an enemy of Sakka the King of the gods, in the wink of an eyelid.35

In a moment of mutual and overlapping influence, a Westerner such as Rhys-Davids could take from her interaction with Ledi the philosophical knowledge she sought, even as he shaped her approach to Abhidhamma study along Burmese lines.36 For Ledi, the correspondence reinforced the way he popularized meditation as a close observation of reality informed by Abhidhamma learning. But his cosmological vision coexisted with it, one in which, as he put it in the Manuals on the Factors of Awakening, “How very fearful, scary, abhorrent, detestable, and sickening is the state of an ordinary person.”37

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