Local Cure, Global Chant: Performing Theravadic Awakening in the Footsteps of the Ledi Sayadaw

Abstract

This article takes as its starting point a repertoire of protective texts and practices articulated as ritual therapeutics in the early twentieth century by the well-known Burmese scholar-monk, the Ledi Sayadaw. Through an exploration of meditation-practice, meditation-teaching, and meditation-performance contexts in postcolonial Burma and India, I demonstrate the ways in which such texts and practices were adapted and refigured within the teaching models of two important twentieth-century Vipassanā meditation masters, Sayagyi U Ba Khin and S. N. Goenka. I argue that these protective texts and practices are constitutive aspects of the meditation modalities developed by these two teachers. I conclude with an exploration of the history of the Black American theologian and student of U Ba Khin, Leon E. Wright. In reflecting on Wright’s case, I consider the ways in which modern scholarly practices within Buddhist (modernism) studies continue to participate in the erasure of historically marginalized worlds and persons.