Dipa Ma’s Life Story

condensed from Dipa Ma: The Life and Legacy of a Buddhist Master: The Extraordinary Life and Teaching of Dipa Ma

Dipa Ma was born with the family name Nani Bala Barua on March 25, 1911, in an East Bengal village near the Burmese border. Her family belonged to the Bengali Barua clan, descendants of the original Buddhists of India.

Although meditation was rarely practiced by householders, many local families observed Buddhist rituals and customs. As a young child, Nani showed an exceptional interest in these rituals, serving monks at the local temples, giving alms, and making Buddha statues. She did not seek the company of other children, instead evincing an insatiable appetite for knowledge. Although it was not customary for girls in her village to go to school, Nani could not be kept away, and evenings often found her engaging her father in discussions about her school texts.

But in India, a girl’s childhood ended early. In accordance with the norms of her culture, at the age of twelve Nani was taken from school and her parents’ home and married to a man of twenty-five, Rajani Ranjan Barua. She lived with her new in-laws until age fourteen, when she was put on a boat to Rangoon to begin a life in a new country, joining a man whom she had known for no more than a week. Rajani was gentle and supportive of his wife, and as trust developed between them, they fell deeply in love.

From the day she arrived in Rangoon, Nani felt a strong desire to meditate. Even though girls typically did not study meditation, she repeatedly asked Rajani for permission to learn it. Each time she asked, he would suggest that she wait until she was older, following the traditional Indian custom of postponing spiritual practice until later in life, when the householder’s duties were fulfilled. She compensated by reading and studying whatever she could find on the Buddha’s teachings.

Nani’s life, settled and comfortable at first, began to spiral into adversity and suffering. After many years of childlessness, a painful source of social shame, she twice conceived and twice lost these children in infancy.

After twenty-seven years of marriage she finally bore a girl, whom she called Dipa. It was then that she was given the name Dipa Ma, which means "mother of Dipa"- and, since Dipa means "light" in Bengali, it also means "mother of light."

Soon after, Dipa Ma was stricken with hypertension and was bedridden for several years. Singlehandedly, Rajani nursed his wife and took charge of toddler Dipa, while continuing to work full time as an engineer. One night in 1957, he came home from work and told his wife that he was feeling ill, and within hours, he was dead of a heart attack.

Dipa Ma was overwhelmed with grief and confusion. In the space of ten years, she had lost two children, her husband, and her health.

Her health continued to decline, and she felt that her only hope of survival would be to practice meditation. But while she had performed Buddhist rituals all her life, she knew little about what meditation practice actually entailed.

Dipa Ma made arrangements to go to the Kamayut Meditation Center in Rangoon for a retreat. There she was given instructions in vipassana (insight) meditation and began to practice diligently Although she was unable to stay at the retreat center, she meditated patiently at home for several years while caring for her daughter.

Eventually another opportunity came to attend a retreat at the Thathana Yeiktha meditation center in Burma where a family friend, Anagarika Munindra, was teaching. During her first week of meditation, Dipa Ma experienced a life-changing insight. The grief she had borne day and night vanished. Her constant fearfulness was gone, leaving her with an unprecedented equanimity and a clear understanding that she could handle anything.

Dipa Ma’s practice deepened dramatically, and she moved rapidly through the classical stages of the progress of insight that are said, in the teachings of the Theravada Buddhist tradition, to precede enlightenment. After six days, she experienced an extraordinary instantaneous shift, and her life was profoundly and irrevocably transformed.

At the age of fifty-three, after three decades of yearning for freedom and with limited instruction and opportunities to practice, Dipa Ma reached the first stage of enlightenment. Over the next year of practice at home and at the meditation center, she reached the second stage of enlightenment, and her physical and mental condition were transformed yet again.

Those who knew Dipa Ma were amazed. Almost overnight she had changed from a sickly, dependent, grief-stricken woman into a healthy, independent, radiant being. Dipa Ma told those around her:

Dipa Ma persuaded her sister Hema and her children to practice as well. Among the austere, saffron-clad monks, the two middle-aged mothers and their six children followed a strict practice. The young Dipa’s commitment to meditation practice was especially gratifying to her mother, who wanted to give her daughter something of enduring value, the "priceless gift." Again and again she would tell Dipa that meditation offered the only way to peace.

In 1963, her teacher Munindra began to instruct her in the ancient Indian siddhis, or practice of spiritual powers. She was selected not only for her extraordinary concentration but also for her impeccable morality. Dipa Ma, Hema, and three of their daughters were introduced to dematerialization, body-doubling, cooking food without fire, mind-reading, visitation of the heaven and hell realms, time travel, knowledge of past lives, and more. Dipa Ma was the most adept of all Munindra’s students. Her mastery of the siddhis was tested by skeptical observers and researchers and left them astounded.

In 1967, because of Burma’s changing political situation, Dipa Ma decided to return to her native India. She settled in Calcutta where she attracted a wide range of students, many of whom were people from her neighborhood, ordinary householders who under normal circumstances would never have been exposed to meditation, let alone a highly accomplished master.

Drawing from traditional vipassana teachings, Dipa Ma crafted extraordinary methods to induce her students to practice mindfulness in the course of their busy lives. Mindfulness, she said, could be applied to every moment of every activity: speaking, ironing, cooking, shopping, caring for children. "The whole path of mindfulness," she repeated tirelessly, "is this: ‘Whatever you are doing, be aware of it.’" Dipa Ma had so much faith in the power of meditation amid the hubbub of daily life that one admirer dubbed her "The Patron Saint of Householders."

When asked about the difference between formal meditation practice and daily life, Dipa Ma adamantly insisted, "You cannot separate meditation from life."

Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and many others who would eventually become prominent teachers in America were introduced to Dipa Ma in the 1970s. They were each captivated by her phenomenal presence, her unique teaching style, and her boundless love for her students.

In the words of Joseph Goldstein, "There may be a few times in our lives when we meet a person who is so unusual that she or he transforms the way we live just by being who they are. Dipa Ma was such a person. . . . [She possessed] a quality of the quietest peace fully suffused with love. This stillness and love were different from anything I had encountered before" (from the foreword to Dipa Ma: The Life and Legacy of a Buddhist Master).

Sharon, Jack, and Joseph became devoted students, spending time in Dipa Ma’s small apartment whenever they could. In the early 1980s, they asked Dipa Ma to teach two three-month retreats at the vipassana meditation center they co-founded (Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts), exposing hundreds of other practitioners to her radical yet down-to-earth approach to vipassana practice.

Dipa Ma’s death in 1989 was as replete with grace as the later years of her life. Her neighbor Sandip Mutsuddi described her last moments: "She bowed with her hands in prayer. She bowed toward the Buddha and did not get up. So we lifted her off the floor and found that her breathing had stopped. She had died in her bow to the Buddha. Her face was very calm and at peace."