Dipa Ma

Dipa Ma was a Bengali Buddhist householder who took up intensive meditation in middle age, after the deaths of two children and her husband, and went on to teach Mahasi Sayadaw's method herself. She founded no centre and wrote no books. Her influence came through the students who visited her in Calcutta, among them the three Americans who founded the Insight Meditation Society.

What her name means

She was born Nani Bala Barua. "Dipa Ma" means "mother of Dipa", after her daughter. The website devoted to her adds that dīpa means a light or lamp of the Dhamma, so the name is also read as "mother of light".

Childhood, marriage and loss

She was born on 25 March 1911 in a village on the plains of Chittagong in East Bengal, now Bangladesh. At twelve she was married to Rajani Ranjan Barua, an engineer about twice her age, and she later joined him in Rangoon (now Yangon), where he worked. According to Encyclopedia.com, she wanted to learn meditation in Rangoon but was told to wait.

Her first child died in infancy and a second died very young. A daughter, Dipa, survived. In 1957 her husband came home from work feeling ill and died a few hours later of a heart attack.

Learning to meditate in Rangoon

After her husband's death she enrolled at the Kamayut Meditation Center in Rangoon. Later, Anagarika Munindra, a family friend who lived nearby, encouraged her, then 53, to come to the Thathana Yeiktha, where he was studying under Mahasi Sayadaw. The centre is now called Mahasi Sasana Yeiktha.

Munindra was her teacher, and Spirit Rock Meditation Center's lineage page describes her as "Munindra's student". The method she learned is the Mahasi noting practice: close, continuous awareness of the body and mind, supported by brief mental labels, in sitting, walking and daily activity (see mental noting).

A move to Calcutta

In 1967 the Burmese government ordered foreign nationals to leave the country. Dipa Ma moved to Calcutta (Kolkata), where her daughter would have better social and educational opportunities.

Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg travelled to Calcutta often to learn from her. The website devoted to her calls her a primary teacher of Goldstein and Salzberg and one of Kornfield's teachers, and Kornfield's own biography lists her among his teachers.

Teaching in the West

In the 1980s she visited the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and Spirit Rock lists her among the Asian teachers who taught there. According to Spirit Rock, the Mahasi method is the primary technique the IMS founders brought back from Asia, learned through Sayadaw U Pandita, Munindra and Dipa Ma. Spirit Rock still calls it the foundational approach to practice in the Western Insight Meditation lineage it belongs to.

Death in Calcutta

Dipa Ma died in Calcutta in September 1989. Encyclopedia.com reports a neighbour's account that in her last moments she folded her hands and bowed to a statue of the Buddha.

Amy Schmidt's biography, Dipa Ma: The Life and Legacy of a Buddhist Master (2005), tells her story in more detail. The centres where the Mahasi method is taught today, including Panditarama Lumbini in Nepal, are listed on the Mahasi noting page.