Hi Chownah,
If you surveyed SN Goenka's students, you'll find a range of responses. From "I'm bowing because everyone else is doing it" right through to bowing to honor the triple gem. A lot of people bow out of respect, gratitude, personal reverence, and also because they are bowing to the Dhamma embodied in SN Goenka and/or the tradition/lineage.
What I have observed is that his western students bow once. In Myanmar the Burmese bow three times and what I have seen in India is that most of his Indian students bow once and some when they bow once move their hands (in Anjali) to the ground to the forehead three times.
Chownah, you might find the following interesting:
Question: Goenkaji, every time assistant teachers enter and leave the meditation hall, Dhamma servers bow down. The students are watching this, and when they offer Dhamma service they do the same thing. It has become almost a ritual. Could you please advise on this?
Goenkaji: In pure Dhamma no ritual at all should be allowed. Dhamma and ritual cannot co-exist. I find nothing wrong in somebody's paying respect to an assistant teacher, provided this person is paying respect to Dhamma. An assistant teacher, or whoever sits on the Dhamma seat-assistant or senior assistant or deputy or Teacher, anybody-is representing the Buddha, the teachings of the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the entire lineage of the Teachers of Vipassana. He or she lives a life of Dhamma and is serving people in Dhamma. One develops a feeling of devotion, of gratitude towards this person.
Bowing down is a meritorious deed. Actually one is bowing down to Dhamma, paying respect to Dhamma. But when this becomes merely a formal rite or ritual, it goes totally against Dhamma. If some- one bows out of respect and others feel, "If I do not bow then people will consider me a very discourteous person, so I must also bow," again, there is no Dhamma. To act with Dhamma is always to have a pure volition in the mind. Otherwise it is just a mechanical exercise: you bow down and give good exercise to your back! If these back exercises are to be done, better do them in your own room. If somebody does not bow because at that particular moment, he or she has not developed the volition of devotion towards Dhamma, I feel happy: "Very good." Bowing must be with this volition of paying respect to Dhamma, not to the individual.
kind regards,
Ben
“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Learn this from the waters:
in mountain clefts and chasms,
loud gush the streamlets,
but great rivers flow silently.
- Sutta Nipata 3.725
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