Since the 1970s non-Buddhist Westerners have been writing detailed descriptions of their personal experiences in vipassanā meditation retreat settings. These memoirs illustrate that meditation is positioned as a universal practice that is constructed as objective and empirically valid, but at the same time must be enacted within particular spaces, cosmologies, and socio-cultural contexts. To illustrate this relationship between the universal and particular, this article analyzes ten vipassanā meditation memoirs by non- Buddhists, an early group of memoirs from the 1960s and 1970s and more contemporary ones from 2011 to 2015. During this time, the meditation retreat has been experienced in multiple contexts, but non-Buddhists’ engagement with meditation consistently results in their judgment that the practice is universal enough. These non-Buddhist evaluations of the universal are further decoded within the Buddhist tradition and in comparison with critical theorists of modernity in order to recognize that universals are always manifest within particular contexts.
