Follow and live, sleep and collapse — breath, posture and voice in a guided meditation of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia, measured against the tradition it wears

On 30 October 2026 the Buddhist Society of Western Australia recorded a guided meditation with its spiritual director, Ajahn Brahm, and published it on YouTube. The paper measures this recording frame by frame and sample by sample and reads it against the oldest instructions on posture and breath in India, China and Japan. For four and a half minutes the monk tells a full hall that he never does anything in meditation and that everything is silent. For the next fourteen minutes his microphone carries every one of his breaths into the hall: 303 breaths, 20 to 23 a minute, each with a whistle at 5.1 kHz that grows louder and higher as the session goes on. His belly moves about half a millimetre per breath, his shoulder about one. The canons, from the Pali canon, the Bhagavad Gītā and the Yogasūtra to the Warring States jade inscription on circulating the qi, Dōgen and Keizan, ask for an upright body, a wakeful mind and a breath no one hears. The recording shows a slump instead of an upright body, a heavy breath instead of a quiet one, and a joke about powers instead of the teaching. The subject of the paper is a public performance of a tradition and whether it accords with the sources to which the robe lays claim; the personal attainments, sincerity and character of Ajahn Brahm lie outside its scope. Methods: detection of breath sounds, motion tracking by phase correlation against a fixed reference, spectral analysis of the whistle, voice analysis and local transcription of the quotations; scripts and data are documented.