Atlas of Skills / Vipassana & Meditation

Learn Vipassana & Meditation in Yangon

The Burmese soil where the technique was preserved and re-ignited for the modern world, the original training ground of the Mahasi and U Ba Khin lineages.

The word comes from the Pali texts of early Buddhism, where a meditator is told to sit beneath a tree and simply watch the breath. But the ten-day course taught today was shaped in Burma. There, meditation practice was revived in the 1700s by the monk Medawi, and Ledi Sayadaw (1846–1923) opened it to lay people as well as monks. The lay teacher Sayagyi U Ba Khin trained S. N. Goenka for fourteen years, and in 1969 Goenka began teaching in India. Today the craft is most alive at Dhamma Giri in Igatpuri, which held its first ten-day course in October 1976 and now seats around 600 students in each one, at the head of a tradition now taught at hundreds of centres around the world.

Where it began
Birthplace of the discipline

Yangon, Myanmar

Learn on the Burmese soil where the technique was preserved, in the Mahasi and U Ba Khin lineages.

Season: Nov-Feb · Beginner -> Long-term retreatant

Three centres, one of them running over a hundred buildings for monks, nuns and lay practitioners — a scale nothing else on this craft matches. ⚠ We think lay meditation here is a national practice rather than a visitor's activity, and we could not find one source for that which was not a centre or a directory of centres. That is a belief, and it is printed as one.

BirthplaceUnbroken lineageHeritageNamed masters
Where it is taught — hand-verified

Schools in Yangon

Researched by hand against each school's own course pages · Arnaud Callier. No school paid to be listed.

Named in this town

Where this craft came through here

Where it came through

A lineage, not a staff list. We have not been able to name anyone currently teaching here, which is a gap in our work — ask the school who will be in the room.

What you walk away with

The credential that counts here

Completed 10-day silent course (prerequisite to serve/assist), then long-courses and Assistant Teacher appointment in the Goenka tradition · Certifying body: Vipassana Research Institute (Goenka / U Ba Khin tradition); Theravada monastic lineages

That is the one an outside body sets and marks, which is what separates it from a certificate a school prints itself — that proves you attended. We name which of the two a course actually gives you; ask the school the same question before you pay, and judge the answer yourself.

Write me a note about this one — how you'd love to learn it, and where.

If this box never loads, the same note reaches me at arnaudcallier@pm.me.

Same discipline, other sources

Also for Vipassana & Meditation

Igatpuri (Dhamma Giri), India
Chiang Mai, Thailand
Barre, Massachusetts, USA
Why you can trust this map

How a place gets on here, and what we do when it stops being true

There is a real difference between a school that teaches you and a good-looking website, and too much of the internet is the second kind. Four instruments do the work, and every one of them is visible on the page you are already on.

  • We grade it in public, and publish what is missing. The Measure is five plain questions, not a score: is there a teacher we can name, can a stranger get in, will you be learning beside other people, is the craft alive in the place, and is there enough there to keep you going for years. An empty dot tells you which one we could not answer and why. A craft nobody has graded shows no meter at all, because an absence is not a zero.
  • We print what we checked and did NOT list. Every swept craft carries the places we looked at and turned down, each with its reason. That list is the part no marketplace prints, because a rejection is where the money is.
  • The claims are read back to their sources every night. A robot re-reads every link we publish against the school's own page each night, and every price and course name we have written a test for. page. When one stops matching three nights running, it is flagged for a human — and an entry that cannot be confirmed comes off. It is never softened.
  • Where we are not neutral, we say so above the recommendation. We run one paid week a year, with one teacher. His entry says that before it says anything good about him, and prints the way to reach him without us, at his prices.
  • Nothing here has been stood in yet. An open sheet means desk research, carefully done. No place on this map has been visited and dated by us. When one is, the check will carry a name and a date — and until then, the grade says so in the dots it leaves empty.
  • Nobody pays to be here, and nobody can pay to be left off. No commission, no listing fee, no tourist board. The order is the strength of the community, never the size of the wallet.
Before you trust any school — mine or anyone else's — ask these five things
  1. Who actually teaches it? Can you find them by name, with a track record you can check yourself?
  2. Is the craft alive in that place, or is the school the only thing there? A real scene has more than one good option.
  3. What exactly do you walk away with — a recognised qualification, or a certificate they printed themselves? Ask which.
  4. Can you speak to someone who did the course? A real person, not a testimonial on their own page.
  5. What happens on a bad day — weather, an injury, a teacher who doesn't show? A serious place has an honest answer.

If a place dodges these, that's your answer. It costs you nothing to ask, and it tells you everything.

This is the short version. The full method is here — the six questions, in order, for any craft anywhere.