A Teacher
U Ba Khin
Insight through moment-to-moment awareness of bodily sensation (vedana) and impermanence (anicca)
The transmission
Sayagyi U Ba Khin (1899-1971) was a Burmese lay meditation master who taught insight practice while holding one of his country’s most demanding public offices, serving as the first Accountant General of the Union of Burma from independence in 1948.
Born in Rangoon and rising from modest means through the colonial accounts service, he took up meditation in 1937 under the layman Saya Thetgyi and pursued it alongside a full official career, embodying his conviction that the deepest contemplative attainment was open to householders in the thick of worldly duty, not only to monks in seclusion.
In 1952 he founded the International Meditation Centre in Rangoon, where he distilled Vipassana into a systematic, teachable discipline centred on the continuous observation of bodily sensation as the doorway to directly experiencing anicca, impermanence, and through it dukkha and anatta.
He compressed the practice into structured short retreats that lay people could complete, and welcomed foreign students, believing the technique should return to its country of origin, India, and spread from there throughout the world.
That aspiration was realised through his student S. N. Goenka, whom he authorised to teach and who carried Ba Khin’s sensation-based method to hundreds of centres worldwide, making Ba Khin one of the pivotal transmitters of insight meditation to the modern lay world.
What they gave
Sensation-based (vedana) body-scan technique: Systematised Vipassana around the continuous, moment-to-moment observation of bodily sensation as the direct experience of impermanence.
- Vipassana for lay people in daily life: Insisted the highest practice was accessible to busy householders, modelling it through his own decades-long government career.
- Systematic short-course training: Founded the International Meditation Centre (1952) and compressed the practice into structured retreats lay students could complete.
- Transmission to S. N. Goenka: Authorised Goenka to teach, seeding the worldwide spread of the method to hundreds of centres.
In their words
Continuous awareness of Anicca and so of Dukkha and Anatta, is the secret of success.
The experience of Anicca, when properly developed, strikes at the root of one’s physical and mental ills and removes gradually whatever is bad in him, i.e., the causes of such physical and mental ills.
The world is facing serious problems. It is just the right time for everyone to take to Vipassana meditation and learn how to find a deep pool of quiet in the midst of all that is happening today.
Just as the light of a candle has the power to dispel darkness in a room, so also the light developed in one man can help dispel darkness in several others.
The more one is attached to self, the greater is the suffering.
The line they stand in
U Ba Khin practised in the lineage of the great scholar-monk Ledi Sayadaw, receiving the technique through Ledi Sayadaw’s lay disciple Saya Thetgyi under whom he began meditating in 1937.
The practice is rooted in Theravada Burmese Abhidhamma and the systematic mapping of mind and matter, transmitted through a chain of teachers reaching back to the Buddha. Ba Khin’s own distillation of the method was in turn carried worldwide by his student S. N. Goenka.
Their Practices 1
Essential Works
- The Essentials of Buddha-Dhamma in Meditative Practice
- What Buddhism Is