Practice note · 21 September 2026
S. N. Goenka and Pa-Auk Sayadaw, and what this course takes from each
This course comes from two Theravāda traditions that approach the same path from different sides. I have practised in both — ten-day courses in the tradition of S. N. Goenka since 2012, and long retreats in the Pa-Auk tradition since 2019 — and the course is built on what each does best.
Goenka was a layman of Indian origin, born and raised in Burma, where he met U Ba Khin and learned Vipassana from him, studying under his guidance for fourteen years. In 1969 he settled in India and began teaching. In a country still divided by caste and religion, his courses drew thousands of people from every background, and people travelled from abroad to sit them.
He conducted hundreds of courses in India and around the world, and from 1982 began appointing assistant teachers to meet the demand. Centres in his tradition were founded across India, the United States, Europe and Asia; an estimated millions of people have now learned the technique through them. He received the Padma Bhushan, one of India's highest civilian honours, in 2012, and died in September 2013 at the age of eighty-nine.
His approach is deliberately non-sectarian: the Buddha taught a path, not a religion, and the courses are open to anyone of any background. My first course, at Dhamma Neru near Barcelona in 2012, was taught with his recorded instructions to around sixty students, and it was enough to change the direction of my life.
The Venerable Āciṇṇa, known as Pa-Auk Tawya Sayadaw — Sayadaw means respected teacher — was born in 1934 in the village of Lei-Chaung, about a hundred miles north-west of Yangon. He became a novice at ten, took full ordination at twenty in 1954, and in 1956 passed the examination that gave him the title of Dhammācariya, teacher of the Dhamma.
From 1964 he lived and practised in the forest, for years at a time, while continuing to study the texts. In 1981 he was asked to take care of the Pa-Auk Forest Monastery, and from 1983 monks and lay people began coming to learn meditation there; the first foreigners arrived in the early 1990s. The monastery grew from a single bamboo hut to hundreds of dwellings, with hundreds of practitioners during the rains retreat. In 1997 he published a five-volume work on the path of practice, with citations from the Pāli texts, and in 1999 he received the title Aggamahā Kammaṭṭhānācariya, highly respected teacher of meditation.
The Goenka tradition gives the breath three days and then moves to Vipassana, scanning sensation throughout the body, relying on the intensity of the retreat — ten hours a day, in silence — to make those three days enough.
At Pa-Auk the breath is not a preliminary. Concentration is developed deeply and precisely, often for weeks or months, before insight practice begins, and the body is examined through the four great elements — earth, water, fire and air. Coming to that after years in the Goenka tradition was an education in itself. Both are right for their setting.
A home course has the setting of neither. It does not have ten silent days in a row, and most people will not sit for months before they see why they are sitting. So the course takes the long foundation from Pa-Auk — thirty days on the breath before any body work — and the body scanning from Goenka, and uses Pa-Auk's four elements again later.
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