Can I read The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (Buddhism and Modernity) on EtoBox?

The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (Buddhism and Modernity) by Erik Braun is a history book available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (Buddhism and Modernity) about?

Insight meditation, which claims to offer practitioners a chance to escape all suffering by perceiving the true nature of reality, is one of the most popular forms of meditation today. The Theravada Buddhist cultures of South and Southeast Asia often see it as the Buddha's most important gift to humanity. In the first book to examine how this practice came to play such a dominant—and relatively recent—role in Buddhism, Erik Braun takes readers to Burma, revealing that Burmese Buddhists in the colonial period were pioneers in making insight meditation indispensable to modern Buddhism. Braun focuses on the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw, a pivotal architect of modern insight meditation, and explores Ledi's popularization of the study of crucial Buddhist philosophical texts in the early twentieth century. By promoting the study of such abstruse texts, Braun shows, Ledi was able to standardize and simplify meditation methods and make them widely accessible—in part to protect Buddhism in Burma after the British takeover in 1885. Braun also addresses the question of what really constitutes the "modern" in colonial and postcolonial forms of Buddhism, arguing that the emergence of this type of

Who reads The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (Buddhism and Modernity)?

Author

Erik Braun

Publisher

Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press

Published

2013

Language

EN

ISBN

9780226000800

Category

history

Subjects

Buddhism, Religion, History

Rating

4.2 / 5 (8 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14