I attended two 10-day Vipassana meditation retreats, and I think most of the comments are making way too much a deal out of it.

To start, I'm a catholic and vipassana meditation has never been in conflict with that religion. It is just a technique, nothing else. There are speeches every evening (recorded ones so they are the same in every center and don't rely on one teacher specific abilities), but repeatedly it says in the speech that you don't have to believe any of it, just practice meditation and leave the rest aside. Which works for me; I listened with interest and enjoyed hearing about buddhist views but that's it.

I will not expand on the benefits of meditation, well documented and well known. Vipassana is just a technique and done intensively in an enclosed environment. The technique is very simple in its theory: you just observe your breathing and the sensations on your skin. No use of any mantra, or anything. Even yoga has more spiritual stuff around it (which always bothers me a bit).

You don't speak for ten days so you can focus better. The last day you can talk and share with whoever - I personnaly did not feel the need to as I was fully enjoying that silence for once. And as far as food goes, you can eat as much as you want, but only twice a day, which proved totally enough for me. I lost 2 pounds in 10 days and never felt hungry. Of course no alcohol, which again was a nice change.

Last but not least, there is zero pressure at vipassana retreats and after: you give what you want, nobody monitors whether how much you have given, it's at a table in the refectory, you can go when you want on the last day, no tabs kept. I gave 250$ I think, which for 10 days of food and lodging is really little. I have never since received any call or any marketing material asking for money. Or anything for that matter. I have not attended any social event, get together or anything. Nor have I been asked to. And that suits me fine. Totally low (even no) pressure environment.

Again, I went to just meditate and I did. It is gruelling, it is hard work but to me it was worth it and certainly not a brainwashing cult. I might go back a third time in a couple of years if I feel the need for a reset, but who knows.

Also I did not keep in touch with any teacher, member or participant: I was going there to meditate, not make friends, or find a community or anything. And I found a perfect environment to do it: meals and accommodation taken care of, no talking or reading, the only thing to do all day is meditate.

The rest to me is irrelevant and I am puzzled that anybody can see this as a cult; if it is, it is one of the least effective in terms of recruiting, marketing and money making. By those accounts, Starbucks would be a cult (and a more successful one)...

Besides that, congratulations on that site, it is interesting (I read the part on Landmark / EST and found it quite scary and an eye opener - which prompted me to react on the vipassana thread).

Vipassana is mistakenly taught as just a mere method.

It arises straight from the world view of Thervedan Buddhism. And in Buddhadharma it is postulated that everything arises from a chain of causation.

There is no Prime Mover, no Absolute/Atman and no Creator who existed before creation itself.

Unfortunately, too many instructors will package vipassana as though it is 'just a method' because that gets more bodies in the room.

With a good instructor who has honorable intentions and seeks only to support students on the patho of insight, with no desire for personal gain, vipassana retreats can be great.

It is also of the utmost importance that persons doing the retreats be stable. No one should go off their prescription medications if these are needed. Persons who find more emotion surging up than they can handle should feel able to leave without feeling they have failed.

I have done one ten day retreat of this type and can report how tender and open one does become.

I can also report that one teacher tried to use the retreat to serve the needs of his own personality.

If a leader has that kind of difficulty, any method, including vipassana, can be perverted into a means of serving the ego cravings of the instructor or worse, be used to recruit students to join some commercial venture that the leader hints to be useful.

Am glad to report that in the Benedictine Catholic and Eastern Christian traditions there are also methods of meditation that are contemplative but that are grounded in the Nicene Creed that God is Trinity - a stance entirely alien to Buddhadharma, including the Theravedan Buddhism from which the vipassnana meditation originated.

I'll add a brief note of dissent, as it could (hypothetically) help someone (and some people do haunt these forums looking for help) --and I'm aware that very few people have the experience with the languages (or the fieldwork) to even offer a casual comment on the subject.

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Vipassana is mistakenly taught as just a mere method. It arises straight from the world view of Therv[ā]dan Buddhism. And in Buddhadharma it is postulated that everything arises from a chain of causation.
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No, it doesn't come straight from anything: it's the product of a number of 20th century impulses, and has a much weaker connection to anything ancient in Buddhism than it does to (surprise?) fads in Burma that were current at the time of its founding. This isn't surprising in itself, for the same reasons that (e.g.) America's "Zen Master Rama" has more in common with fads in his own era (in California) than he does with the first patriarchs of Zen Buddhism (in China).

Goenka wasn't the only one innovating and calling it "ancient" in his cultural context: plenty of the stuff (e.g.) that Mahasi Sayadaw taught has no basis in any ancient scripture (and, in a sense, that's okay... so long as nobody's deceiving themselves about it, nor being deceived).

Almost nobody knows anything about the ancient sources to (thus) be able to critically compare them to the modern practices. The example you've mentioned in single phrase, "the chain of causation", is one of the most laughable examples of gross mistranslation and misinterpretation in Buddhism today…

[a-bas-le-ciel.blogspot.ca]

…although the most laughable might be the mistranslation of "breathing meditation" itself.

[asiapacific.anu.edu.au]

These are not minor errors of interpretation: for many of these groups, these are core doctrines, that define "orthodoxy" from their perspective. They're also wrong --and not "a little bit wrong" but all the way wrong.

In over-compensating for their lack of any kind of scriptural basis, they get into a cycle of attacking anyone who would debate these assumptions with them. That's sad for a number of reasons, including the fact that Buddhism was founded on a compendium of debates, and is supposed to be a religion of philosophical debate; sadly, these groups (whether they're considered cults or not) take on an aesthetic of hyper-conformism, because debate of any kind has become impossible for them.

I have no reason to say that Goenka is the worst of the bunch; however, what he's teaching is not orthodox Buddhism, and actually has a somewhat difficult dotted line connecting it to Theravāda Buddhism… and many things that be pointed out that separate Goenka-ism from Theravāda Buddhism (including its peculiar anti-clericalism: Goenka's movement consists entirely of laypeople doing things for themselves, and not working with monks living under the Pātimokkha, etc.).

I believe in freedom of speech, and, basically, I think it's inevitable that people will invent all sorts of nonsense and (falsely) attribute it to Buddhism; unfortunately, right now, there is no "other side" to the argument. There are virtually no legitimate sources to compare any of this stuff to (and the most diverse and dishonest nonsense imaginable, even about the subject of meditation, can be found with the imprimatuer of someone-or-another's PhD stamped onto it).

Both Goenka's group and the Dhammakāya group have founded "research institutes". It remains to be seen if any of them will proceed to do legitimate research (not impossible, but unlikely). Sadly, we now have a long list of failed institutions founded in the 20th and 21st centuries; none of them remained operational for long, and very few were ever productive of scholarship.

Very nice comment on the misinterpretation of 'outbreath', which does illustrate how easily such mistakes can proliferate and thoroughly confuse when transplanted unquestioned from one cultural context to a different cultural context.

Your first link also makes clear how treacherous it can be to rely on so-called 'authoritative' texts that are little more than various idiosyncratic interpretations of primary sources that themselves already suffer from the limitations of their ancient and culturally specific contexts.