Insight Myanmar

At a time when foreigners were only granted seven-day visas to Burma, then one of the most closed countries in the world, Alan Clements arrived in 1977 and managed to stay nearly five years, training directly under Mahasi Sayadaw and then Sayadaw U Pandita, despite enduring repeated forced disrobings, deportations and eventual blacklistings. Despite this, Alan has returned to the Golden Land whene...

We caught up with Sayalay Piyadassii in Yangon, between time in her native Lithuania and as a student at Shan State Buddhist University in Taunggyi. She shares how her initial enthusiasm taking silent vipassana retreats in the tradition of S.N. Goenka led to nunhood in Myanmar in 2013, and she has remained in robes ever since. A number of themes are brought up in her spiritual biography, such as f...

Thabarwa Sayadaw has had a meteoric rise in Myanmar. After weathering a series of crises that threatened the very existence of his monastery, the Burmese monastic’s mission is now expanding at an unprecedented rate across not only the country but the entire world. And then there is his monastery itself, which is redefining the role of monasticism and the shape of Burmese Buddhism in the 21 st cent...

We are proud to present the inaugural episode of the Insight Myanmar podcast! Our host, Joah McGee, will first give a brief introduction about the podcast’s mission and background, followed by short previews of each of the first six interviews we’ve conducted so far. The full-length podcasts will be aired once weekly and feature (in order of appearance on the trailer): Alan Clements, an American y...