The Hidden Presence and Influence of Thai Buddhist Meditation Practices in the UK

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This project examines Thai Theravada Buddhist meditation practices in Britain, which are little documented but have informed distinctive practices and groups, among Westerners and Diaspora Buddhists, as well as academia. A study of these practices is significant for what it will tell us about the diversity of Theravada meditation techniques and British Buddhism as well as the potential of these little-studied techniques to contribute to mental health and wellbeing, providing information for future researchers. Traditional Thai meditation is little documented in contrast to the Buddhist-derived Mindfulness that began to gain global popularity from the 1970s onwards. Yet the Thai practices were transmitted to the UK earlier, beginning in the 1950s, when Westerners first attempted to establish a Buddhist monastic community in the UK. They offer very distinctive features including a greater focus on physical transformation and on the attainment of deep meditative states. They reflect a greater range and diversity of techniques with histories going back centuries. In contrast, Mindfulness is drawn from a limited range of Buddhist traditions, primarily from modern Burmese vipassana (insight practices), Zen and Tibetan Buddhism. The traditions linked to Mindfulness and Mindfulness itself have therefore been the focus of most scholarship. Meanwhile, the many other types of Buddhist meditation techniques have largely been ignored. While this has begun to change , there has been no systematic study of those Thai traditions that came to the UK, how they have fared during the growing rise of Mindfulness and how they compare to it. Furthermore, some of the Thai traditions that came to the UK are older and distinctive. They include both old and new forms of Thai meditations, demarcated by a radical shake-up during the colonial period that caused once-popular pre-modernisation methods to be less emphasised. Yet Britain, with its early reception of a variety of Thai traditions, as well as its combination of secular, Diaspora and convert practice groups, is an obvious place to conduct research on these practices. Mindfulness has become popular in Britain for a number of reasons including its reputed contribution to wellbeing, legitimated by scientific studies, and commodification out of which people can make money. Since the Thai practices have gone through neither process, I anticipate different values placed on them by their practitioner communities to emerge through this study. While Mindfulness on the whole de-emphasizes the source Buddhist and ethical framework, I anticipate from my initial investigations that these Thai-based practices elicit distinctive responses to the Buddhist sources, including a drive towards in-depth study of complex Buddhist doctrines concerning ethics, psychology and causality.My overall questions are: what Thai techniques are present in the UK, how different are they from more familiar techniques, how influential have they been in and beyond British Buddhism, and why is less known about them? Further, how do the values placed on them by practitioners differ from those placed on Mindfulness, and how do these values influence the dispositions of the groups? Do they warrant the attention of social and neuroscientific investigations into their contribution to wellbeing?My methodological approach includes multi-sites ethnographic fieldwork applied to communities of Thai Buddhist Meditation Practices.Ethnographic methods will include exploring available text sources, participant observation, in-depth interviews and oral history. These open-ended methods will potentially allow for flexibility and the emergence of unexpected information due to the subjective nature of the topic. Oral history will play an important role in gaining first-hand information from informants as oral tradition is an integral part of Buddhism's teacher-pupils relationships.