Past the Commentaries

Insight Myanmar · Jul 27, 2026 · 1h 54m

Episode #578: Aye Myat Thwe is a Burmese lay Buddhist practitioner raised inside the Mahasi Vipassana world, where devotion, meditation, and study were braided into ordinary family life. Watching her grandmother sit daily, she grew up assuming the classic Burmese hierarchy of authority was stable and complete, the commentaries as canon, Abhidhamma as the tradition’s intellectual summit. For years, she accepted that inheritance without friction.

Then scholarship cracked it open. Learning that Abhidhamma may not be the Buddha’s original teaching shocked her, not because it erased its value, but…