[4] She was a prominent Buddhist master in Asia and also taught in the United States where she influenced the American branch of the Vipassana movement.

[5] Nani Bala Barua was born on 25 March 1911 in a small village in Chittagong, East Bengal, British India (now part of Bangladesh).

[4] She very much wanted to attend school but in 1923 at the age of twelve she was married and later went to live with her husband, an engineer, in Rangoon (Yangon), Burma.

[4] In 1963 she was chosen to study the siddhis (spiritual powers) with the Indian master Anagarika Munindra,[7] a senior student of Mahasi Sayadaw.

According to scholars, the Visuddhimagga is one of the extremely rare texts within the enormous literatures of various forms of Jainism, Buddhism, and Hinduism to give explicit details about how spiritual masters were thought to actually manifest supernormal abilities.