Sayadaw U Pandita

Sayadaw U Pandita was born in 1921 near Rangoon, now Yangon. He became a monk young and studied the Pāli scriptures for years. In 1952 he passed the Dhammacariya examinations, which qualified him as a teacher of the texts. In 1950 he had begun to practise vipassana under Mahasi Sayadaw, and in 1955 he left his post as a scripture teacher to teach meditation at Mahasi’s centre in Rangoon.

When Mahasi Sayadaw died in 1982, U Pandita became the guiding teacher of the Mahasi centre. In 1991 he left that post and founded Panditarama Meditation Center in Yangon. Branch centres followed in Myanmar and in other countries, including Nepal, Australia, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States.

His influence in the West dates from the spring of 1984, when the Insight Meditation Society brought him to lead a three-month silent retreat at Barre, Massachusetts. Salzberg and Goldstein, who sat the retreat, had not met him before. She found him fierce and demanding, and she returned to Burma in 1985 to practise loving-kindness under his guidance for three months. His talks from the 1984 retreat were collected as In This Very Life.

Diana Winston, who ordained as a nun under him for a year, describes the style as a kind of boot camp. Students were asked to practise mindfulness through every waking moment, and to note each experience in body and mind with precision. She also writes that he insisted on ethics as the base for meditation, and that many found him abrupt and distant. This was a method for people willing to be pushed, and the accounts say so plainly.

Winston credits him with the first suggestion that Western insight teachers teach mindfulness to teenagers, which led to teen retreats at the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock, and argues that his way of teaching mindfulness runs through much of the secular mindfulness movement. That is her view, not an established fact.

He kept teaching in Asia, Europe, Australia and the United States until his death. He died on 16 April 2016, aged 94, in a hospital in Bangkok. He also wrote The State of Mind Called Beautiful.