Bhikkhu Cintita

Author: bhikkhu cintita

  • Buddha’s Meditation and its Variants 4

    Right Effort
    New Moon Uposatha Day                              index to series

    Buddhist practice often seems extremely austere to those, like myself, who grew up in the self-indulgent, instant-gratification West. However we should remind ourselves that this practice is already the Middle Way, and itself the product of backing away from a more extreme austerity. This particularly applies to Right Effort. Right Effort, it will be recalled, has to do with the cultivation of what in the mind is wholesome, like truthfulness, and the inhibition of what is unwholesome, like deceit. The Buddha once admonished a monk, who had as a lay person been a fiddle-player, or a player of some stringed instrument, but as a monk was putting too much push into his practice:

    “Now what do you think, Sona. Before, when you were a house-dweller, were you skilled at playing the vina?”
    “Yes, lord.”
    “And what do you think: when the strings of your vina were too taut, was your vina in tune & playable?”
    “No, lord.”
    “And what do you think: when the strings of your vina were too loose, was your vina in tune & playable?”
    “No, lord.”
    “And what do you think: when the strings of your vina were neither too taut nor too loose, but tuned to be right on pitch, was your vina in tune and playable?”
    “Yes, lord.”
    “In the same way, Sona, over-aroused persistence leads to restlessness, overly slack persistence leads to laziness. Thus you should determine the right pitch for your persistence, attune the pitch of the faculties, and there pick up your theme.”
    – Sona Sutta, AN 6.55

    Apparently the effort of the Bodhisattva had been very tight indeed, suppressing any hint of bodily or mental pleasure. It was recalling his experience of bliss in spontaneous jhana as a boy under the rose-apple tree that he recognized the error in this.

    Why am I afraid of the bliss which has nothing to do with sensual pleasures and unbeneficial qualities? It occurred to me, ‘I am not afraid of the bliss since it has nothing to do with sensual pleasures and unbeneficial qualities. – MN 36

    Meditation has never been the same since. Right Samadhi is in fact built upon a bed of delight (piti) and pleasure (sukkha) that naturally arises not through pursuit of sensual stimulation, but through seclusion and virtue. The lowest level of jhana, the first jhana, is defined as containing four jhana factors and implicitly a fifth: thought, discursiveness, delight, pleasure and then unification of mind, and to be born of seclusion. The emphasis on delight and pleasure, according to the Suttas, encourages the practice of samadhi, encourages renunciation of wordly pleasures as these turn out to be shoddier than spiritual delight and pleasure, and gives us the opportunity to examine refined levels of pleasure and resultant stress while in samadhi. [AN 5.3]

    This gets interesting: Although initially encouraged, each of the first four factors still introduces a tiny bit of disturbance into the hyper-stillness of samadhi. As samadhi begins to deepen the most wildly disruptive factors are lost first, that is, not surprisingly, thought and discursiveness. The result is called the second jhana. In the stillness of the second jhana, even delight becomes a bit irksome. When that is lost the result is called the third jhana. In the even greater stillness of the third jhana, pleasure itself is revealed as a disturbing racket in the mind, that when lost brings us to the highest and imperturbable fourth jhana. In short, the levels of jhana are no more than the operation of Right Effort operating at increasingly refined levels of samadhi. In practice not much effort needs to be involved: just as a fire begins to dry out and improve the woodpile used to feed it, samadhi has a tendency given enough time to settle into deeper jhanas of its own accord.

    More generally, Right Effort is the ongoing practice that directly purifies the mind. It is a natural continuation at the mental level of the practice of virtue at the level of bodily and verbal action. It is itself based in mindfulness, a careful monitoring of thought and intention that turns toward the skillful, the beneficial qualities of mind and away from that which vexes and harms. Every time there is resistance to Right Anything, then Right Effort is called for. If it is time to meditate and you are just too lazy, laziness is to be weeded out and ardency needs to be watered. If you really want to eat Ted’s cookie and are about to snatch it when he is not looking, greed is to be weeded out, contentment watered. Often the effort required is enormous; you may be dealing with ingrained habits or natural instinctive behaviors capable of destroying marriages or causing bodily injury.

    There are some standard mental techniques involved in Right Effort, but you will probably discover some of your own, from substituting another thought for the one you are unskillfully entertaining, to deconstructing your present thought, from changing your perspective or conceptualization of the situation, to bringing the thought into the focus of attention until it dissipates of itself. Buddhism also makes use of visualization practices, for instance, metta (loving-kindness) meditations and contemplations of the qualities of the Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha, to inspire the development of wholesome qualities of mind, along with Buddhist ritual and devotional practices. A reliable guide to the arising of the unwholesome is the simultaneous arising of stress, anxiety, the edginess that through practice you become finely attuned to. Right Effort is karmically beneficial; its regular application shapes your character in beneficial ways. It is recommended that every Buddhist develop the skill of Right Effort to the point that it becomes a thread woven into the length and breadth of everyday life. It is Right Effort that also twists the strand of virtue into our meditation practice, that leads to the bright purity of mind required in Right Samadhi.

    Approaching meditation per se, that is, the development that results in samadhi, attention turns particularly to the five hindrances, which serve as a checklist for establishing the immediate preconditions of meditation, which are essentially mental seclusion from most of the things that are normally playing out in your head to one degree or another. The five hindrances are:

    • Lust. “Hubba-hubba.”
    • Ill-will. “That darn %&$*@!”
    • Sloth and torpor. “Zzzzzz.”
    • Restlessness and remorse. “If only I had …, I know, I’ll …”
    • Doubt. “What do I think I’m doing here anyway?”

    The hindrances pretty much cover the major factors likely to intrude into samadhi in a blatant way, and should they later intrude anyway, Right Effort is braced to drive them away.

    If the mind is freed of these five hindrances, it will be pliant and supple, will have radiant lucidity and firmness, and will concentrate well upon the eradication of the taints. – AN 3:17-18

    Although Right Effort can be viewed as a kind of mindfulness itself, it is Right Mindfulness that weaves the strand of wisdom into our samadhi. We will look at Right Mindfulness next week.


  • Buddha’s Meditation and its Variants 3

    How to Build a Fire
    Last Quarter Moon Uposatha Day                              index to series

    Meditation in Buddhism is an integral part of the totality of Buddhist practice, as most commonly stated as the Noble Eightfold Path, and cannot be understood apart from it. The Path is as follows, eight folds falling into three groupings, the last of which concerns meditation:

    Wisdom Group

    • Right View
    • Right Resolve

    Virtue Group

    • Right Speech
    • Right Action
    • Right Livelihood

    Samadhi Group

    • Right Effort
    • Right Mindfulness
    • Right Samadhi

    Right Samadhi is the furnace in which the products of the previous seven folds are melded to produce knowledge and vision and ultimately liberation.

    There are Right View, Right Resolve, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort and Right Mindfulness. The one-pointedness of mind equipped with these seven factors is called Noble Right Samadhi with its supports and accessories. – SN 45.28

    Samadhi comes in different forms, but it is not Buddha’s meditation unless it derives from straightening views and intentions, from purifying virtue and from kindling and stoking the flame with Right Effort and Right Mindfulness, that is, with Buddha’s effort and Buddha’s mindfulness.

    Ideally before beginning meditation practice you will begun to befriend the Dhamma, have learned about suffering and the ending of suffering, about the Noble Eightfold Path, about the contingent nature of reality, and have begun contemplating these and starting to observe these things in your own experience. You will have resolved to develop kindness and non-harming and a willingness to let go of personal advantage. You will also have begun to cultivate virtue in your deeds and words and established a lifestyle inclined to nonharming. Even without meditation virtue can be very strong, but wisdom based only on hearing and reflection will have an upper limit until it is melded in the furnace of samadhi.

    Right Effort is a deepening of the practicing of virtue from the physical level of speech and action to the mental level of thought and intention. It is an ongoing project undertaken by every Buddhist practitioner and is ideally maintained throughout the day, not just in the context of seated meditation. It works as a gardener cultivating that which is pure, skillful or wholesome in the mind: flowers of kindness and generosity and shrubs of equanimity and wisdom, while ridding the mind of what is tainted, unskillful or unwholesome: weeds of greed and ill-will and infestations of delusion. It plays a role in every other step in the Path insofar as each step represents what is skillful; that is why we call these steps “Right.” In the context of meditation Right Effort turns its attention particularly to purifying the mind of the five hindrances: lust, ill-will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and remorse, and doubt. These are unskillful factors that, according to experience, have a particular talent for inhibiting or disrupting meditation.

    Right Mindfulness is a wonderfully skillful practice that the Buddhist practitioner is also encouraged to engage throughout the day, not just in the setting of seated meditation. It is the ability to stay on top of things, to discern appropriately, to remember what task is at hand, not to be distracted by what is irrelevant, to return the attention to the relevant should it go astray. Mindfulness is a stabilizing factor of the mind as well a faculty that keeps us out of trouble, a factor that keeps us from falling off of a ladder and that reminds us to buckle our seat belts and to close the door. Mindfulness is a factor in all steps of the virtue group, since each of these steps requires keeping on top of ethical decisions as situations arise. Right Effort is itself a kind of mindfulness focused on discerning and managing skillful and unskillful thoughts. Just as Right Effort is a deepening of virtue, mindfulness is used as a medium in the Buddha’s method for deepening the development of wisdom. In the context of meditation Right Mindfulness turns its attention to any of a set of delineated contemplations, in the four topic domains of body, feeling, mind and phenomena, the four foundations of mindfulness. Depending on the success of our practices of wisdom and virtue, Right Effort and Right Mindfulness will feed dense and fragrant logs into the flames of samadhi so that it burns hot and bright and smells good to boot.

    Right Samadhi is a resultant quality of mind, pure, refined and rarified. Right Samadhi is equated with the four jhanas (in Pali, dyanas in Sanskrit), progressive degrees of this remarkable quality of mind. Samadhi and jhana are often translated as concentration or meditative absorption, but the Buddha’s samadhi seems to be quite distinct from concentration or absorption in other meditative traditions, as are the other factors of the Path.

    Bhikkhus, these eight things, developed and cultivated, if unarisen do not arise apart from the discipline of a Bhagava (Buddha). What eight? Right View, Right Resolve, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Samadhi. – SN 45.15

    Unlike effort or mindfulness, but like fire, samadhi is not something you do directly, but arises at least partially from what you do. It is said to arise from seclusion, from the satisfaction that arises with virtue, as well as from Right Effort and Right Mindfulness.

    For one of Right Mindfullness, Right Samadhi springs up. – SN 5.25-6

    It is also also encouraged by assuming a still bodily posture. Accordingly, how-to meditation instructions in the Suttas are primarily framed in terms of mindfulness, while meditation in broader contexts, such as the entire Path or the life of a bhikkhu is almost always framed in terms of the jhanas.

    I am using fire today as a simile for samadhi in order to capture the causal connections among the factors involved, but fire poorly expresses the actual experience of samadhi. The experience of Right Samadhi is serene and keenly aware, that is, relaxed, calm, open, sensitive to, but unperturbed by, whatever arises. It is often referred to in the Suttas as calm abiding. For a clearer idea let’s switch to the Buddha’s own simile of a pond in a mountain glen, which also captures two critical factors that arise in samadhi: samatha, or serenity, and vipassana, or insight.

    Just as if there were a pool of water in a mountain glen — clear, limpid, and unsullied — where a man with good eyesight standing on the bank could see shells, gravel, and pebbles, and also shoals of fish swimming about and resting, and it would occur to him, ‘This pool of water is clear, limpid, and unsullied. Here are these shells, gravel, and pebbles, and also these shoals of fish swimming about and resting.’ In the same way — with his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability — the monk directs and inclines it to the knowledge of the ending of the mental fermentations. – Maha-Assapura Sutta MN39

    It is in Right Samadhi that serenity is established and at the same time that the highest knowledge and wisdom are cultivated, leading to the total eradication of taints, and ultimately to the attainment of final liberation. In short, Samadhi provides the conditions for working with the mind at a very pure, refined and intimate level that then turns back to complete the development of wisdom begun at the start of Noble Eightfold Path.

    That one could fulfill the wisdom group without having fulfilled the samadhi group that is not possible. – DN18

    The Noble Eightfold Path provides a natural flow from wisdom and virtue, progressively refined to the level of thought, intention and contemplation then melded in the flame of the very refined mental state of samadhi to begin the path anew with a refined degree of cognitive and affective purity. The result is that all of the factors of the Noble Eightfold Path build on and support each other. This is the genius of the Buddha’s Path of training.

    How to build a fire. To make a fire you need to find or create a place free of smothering dampness and cooling wind and access to dry wood. Preparing to make a fire is like Right Effort. Right Effort tames the distracting mental factors, the hindrances , which could easily inhibit the fire, like wind and dampness.

    You then place and adjust kindling and logs and other flammables, and blow air, in a way that encourages the embers of the previous fire (assume that embers already exist). Tending to the fire is like Right Mindfulness and the fire itself is like Right Samadhi. Right Mindfulness stabilizes the mind by providing a focus, bringing the mind into alignment like carefully placed logs.

    Finally a flame arises and grows and, if the first two steps are skillfully performed, it provides constant and ample heat and light. Right Samadhi is the flame that arises in at least partial dependence on the things that you do to burn hot and bright. Take note that whereas preparation, tending, effort and mindfulness are things you do, fire and samadhi each arise of its own accord in at least partial dependence of the things you do. In fact that can even arise spontaneously as factors happen to come into line in the presence of the ever-present embers.

    Singleness of mind is samadhi, the four foundations of mindfulness are its themes, the four right efforts are its requisites, and any cultivation, development and pursuit of these qualities are its development. – MN44

    The process of tending, aided by preparation, not only gives rise to the fire, it also determines the particular qualities of the fire, the heat, light, smoke, oder and type of ash it produces, whether it flares up and quickly dwindles, the size of the flame, how the flame spreads, and so on. You tend to the fire in a way that produces the desired qualities. The process of mindfulness, aided by effort, not only gives rise to samadhi, it also determines the particular qualities of samadhi, the intensity or level of samadhi, the levels of delight and pleasure, concentration, arising thought processes and other features, how supportive it is of samatha or of vipassana, and so on. Part of tending a fire is to monitor and adjust the qualities of the fire and part of being mindful is to monitor and adjust the qualities of samadhi.

    Although there is a causal progression from Right Effort through Right Mindfulness to Right Samadhi, as samadhi grows it begins to dominate and assume a life of its own. In its early stages the flame of samadhi must be kindled carefully and adverse influences, such as too much wind or anger, need to be controlled. For a while after that logs still must be placed carefully and attention carefully focused. However when samadhi is burning fiercely, when the fire has become deep and serene, effort and mindfulness flow of themselves: samadhi dries out any moisture in its vicinity and determines itself the flow of air, from all sides then skyward, the hindrances are pretty much locked out and tending to samadhi entails merely tossing in a log every once in a while any which way. In samadhi the mind eventually settles in imperturbably pulling mindfulness along.

    This has been a concise pass through Buddha’s meditation. In the next weeks I will report in a bit more detail in turn about Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Samadhi, and about the attainment of knowledge and vision in Right Samadhi, giving particular attention to the uniquely Buddhist features of each of these.

     

  • Buddha’s Meditation and its Variants 2

    Discovering Buddha’s Meditation
    Full Moon Uposatha Day                              index to series

    The Suttas report that the Bodhisattva left home to become a wandering ascetic, and lived and practiced much like other wandering ascetics, until he rebelled against the prevailing wisdom, boldly plunged into his own way of doing things, … and succeeded. I think of the wandering ascetics as much like those of our contemporaries who engage in extreme sports or extreme dieting, performing wondrous feats like starving the body of all but the smallest crumb of nutrition. The Buddha’s was the Middle Way. This applied to meditation as well.

    The Suttas report that the Bodhisattva studied with two meditation masters and attained all of the jhanas (progressive state of meditative absorption) they could dream up until he decided, in his blend of frustration and daring, to let the child be master to the man, … and succeeded. We know little about what techniques the bodhisattva had learned, but presumably they entailed extreme states of concentration, starving the mind of all but the smallest crumb of experience through focusing the attention as narrowly as possible and stripping away any joy that this was in danger of bringing. Then the Bodhisattva remembered an experience he had had quite spontaneously under a rose-apple tree as a child.

    I thought: ‘I recall once, when my father the Sakyan was working, and I was sitting in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree, then — quite secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful mental qualities — I entered and remained in the first jhana: rapture and pleasure born from seclusion, accompanied by directed thought & evaluation. Could that be the path to Awakening?’ Then following on that memory came the realization: ‘That is the path to Awakening.’ MN 36

    What he envisioned was something much more broad and giddy than what he had been taught as jhana.

    The Buddha is known for the habit of giving traditional vocabulary new meaning, as when he appropriated the brahmanic term “karma,” meaning ritual action, and but used it for volitional action. He continued to use the term term “jhana” for his new discovery, but there is some evidence that he also invented a new brand new word to be used alongside jhana. It has been observed that the term “samadhi” seems to occur nowhere in the literature of India before the Buddha (Walsh, The Long Discourses of the Buddha, p. 556), though it was subsequently appropriated in the Hindu literature. Now samadhi, or jhana, is not something the yogi does; it is a resultant quality of mind that arises through doing something else the yoga does do, primarily exercising mindfulness. For the wandering ascetic mindfulness would have been very primitive and direct: Just keep your attention in one place, don’t let it wander. For the Buddha mindfulness became something much more open, something that can be practiced throughout the day, while walking, when stretching limb, while eating, when defecating, or when sitting with crossed legs attending — in a relaxed way, mind you — to the breath. Virtue and wisdom also were incorporated in the Buddha’s method as necessary preconditions for the arising of Right Samadhi, a very rare and pure state of mind, at once still and keenly aware.

    In the following weeks I will highlight the main features of the Buddha’s discovery. However given the daunting plethora of meditation techniques referred to last week, it is incumbent upon me to clarify how most reliably we can know what method or methods, exactly, the Buddha taught.

    We rely on a huge body texts presumed to have been spoken some 2,500 years ago, Scholars tell us that the texts that most clearly originated from the time of the Buddha are roughly the Vinaya, except for the final chapter, the first four Nikayas (the Digha, Majjhima, Samyutta and Anguttara, when I quote the suttas I generally use DN, MN, SN and AN to refer to these) and the Sitta Nipata of the Khuddhaka Nikaya. For all other Buddhist Buddhist scriptures an origin at least hundreds of years later has been reliably established. These later texts include most of the Khuddhaka Nikaya, such as the Jataka stories, the Abhidhamma and the Abhidharmas of various traditions, the Mahayana Sutras, and less controversally, the Pali commentaries and the Sanskrit shastras. Now, this does not mean that the later works are not authentic in the sense of accurately reflecting the intentions of the Buddha, only that they are less reliable than the earlier texts at determining what those original intentions are. Some of them are doubtlessly brilliant reflections of the the Buddha’s thought.

    But even the earlier texts are of questionable pedigree: They were committed to memory, then transmitted from generation to generation for hundreds of years, through recitation and memorization, before attaining written form. Then they were transmitted from scribe to scribe for many further hundreds of years before we arrive at the earliest extant copies of significant portions of the corpus that is available to scholars for examination today. Throughout this long period of oral and orthographic transmission these texts were undoubtedly subject to error, to intentional modification, to rewording, to insertion, deletion and rearrangement, certainly to embellishment, and even to wholesale incorporation of original new works of later composition. Linguistic vicissitudes further complicated matters of interpretation as these texts have been either translated into new languages along the way or preserved in long dead languages that the reciters and scribes could at best imperfectly understand.

    With so many sources of fuzziness, how do we know that any given teaching found in these ancient texts is authentic? How do you know that your gerbil is authentic and not just fur all the way? Luckily there are a number of additional factors that shore up our confidence in what we know of the Buddha’s teachings.

    First, there are separate transmissions of this early corpus which separated themselves geographically and linguistically at an early date and when compared can help identify what has been inserted, modified, deleted, and so on, over the centuries in one or the other transmission. The most important versions of the early corpus are the Pali, preserved in Sri Lanka in something close to the language(s) of the Buddha, and the Chinese, originally maintained in Sanskrit in Northern India, but translated into Chinese before most of the Sanskrit texts were lost through historical circumstances. Reassuringly these two versions are in surprisingly close, but still not in perfect, agreement in all details. Techniques of text analysis developed particularly by biblical scholars provide further clues as to authentic and modified passages.

    Second, and probably most importantly, the yogi’s practice is not based on texts alone, but also on the experiences that arise through practice. The text is like a map, the experience like the terrain that the map purports to describe but which the yogi actually sets his feet in. Attention to both text (or at least words of a teacher) and experience are necessary, since one provides a check on the other. The text is easily subject to misinterpretation especially if it has been transmitted across time, culture and milieu, and experience is even more easily subject to misinterpretation as it is transmitted through the haze of the yogi’s own delusions, at least until he reaches higher levels of attainment. However, those parts of the map that cannot be made to accord with experience are quickly abandoned or rewritten in the yogi’s mind to bring them into line with experience. From an historical perspective, practitioners are likely have maintained the integrity of the texts. If most of the reciters and scribes that have transmitted the ancient texts to us over the generations were also practitioners we can expect that any mistransmissions will tend to have been quickly corrected to restore the original intention if not the letter, that there will have been a constant pressure to bring the texts into line with experience should they go astray. This empirical aspect of the Buddhist scriptures allows them to escape the Buddha’s own blind-leading-the-blind criticism of brahmanic scriptural tradition found in the Canki Sutta (MN95). I suspect that it is only when the reciters or scribes are pure scholar-monks, not yogis, for repeated generations, that the blind will lead the blind and the texts will begin to diverge alarmingly from their original intention.

    Third and finally, the ancient texts do not simply consist of a list of independent elements free to vary in any direction, but rather express a coherent and integrated system. The Buddha was a very systematic thinker and his genius shines through quite vividly and unmistakenly in this corpus in spite of any fuzziness. This is like a jigsaw puzzle in which all the pieces fit into place to reveal a particular scene. If at some point we clearly recognize the Golden Gate Bridge even with missing or left-over pieces, it is unlikely that some permutation of the pieces will reveal instead a Swiss village. Any extraneous pieces that do not fit in probably got mixed in from a different jigsaw puzzle that also got some of our pieces. Buddhist scholars can and do argue endlessly about the extraneous or missing pieces, even seeking out obscure passages to argue in favor of the Swiss village. There is no proof that they are wrong; but the shining forth of a coherent picture is darn compelling.

    My intention in the coming weeks is to describe what the Pali Suttas themselves seem rather directly to say, occasionally pointing out where inauthenticities (missing and left-over pieces) may have crept in, in order to reveal the coherent system present therein as something that maps reliably onto actual meditative experience. Although this interpretation is clearly recognized by many contemporary teachers, it is often confused or even rebutted by others. I hope that reference to to the Suttas, to the coherence of their most straight-forward interpretation, and to its reflection in meditative experience, will clear make clear what the Buddha actually taught. I will later show how confusion arises in the attempt to reconcile later variants, often no more than terminological variants coherent in themselves, of the Buddha’s teaching with the Suttas.

    Does this sound reasonable?

  • Buddha’s Meditation and its Variants 1

    Introduction

    Uposatha Teaching for First Quarter Moon

    A number of people have asked if I would write about meditation in this blog. Meditation practice is a very individual thing, opening deep levels of personal exploration, hopefully in communication with an engaged and understanding teacher. The audience for this blog is moreover likely to come from a daunting plethora of perspectives, each with its own vocabulary, conceptual framework and representative teachers. Although I balk at the thought of trying to teach meditation in this venue, the existence of this daunting plethora is itself of some interest and I would like to spend some weeks writing about this.

    This daunting plethora has proved itself a source of bewilderment, doubt and contention in Asia but particularly in the West where a large sample of Buddha’s meditation and its variants can often be found within a single community. As a result meditators bandy about many terms, like “mindfulness,” “insight,” and “jhana” with little agreement on what these mean, and with much uncertainty about the relative merits of alternative techniques or doubts about the viability of their own chosen practices. Often knowledgeable meditators talk right past one another with an uneasy feeling that something is out of accord but unable to determine what.

    For the most part I contentedly practice shikantaza, just sitting, the predominant form of meditation in the East Asian Soto Zen school in which I long practiced and was once ordained. I find myself now, however, in the Theravada tradition and am therefore frequently asked questions like, “Do Zennies practice vipassana or samatha?”or “What is your object of meditation?” As simple as the questions seem to the Theravada practitioner they do not make much sense in the framework of Zen. Even within the relatively orthodox Theravada tradition there are profound disagreements concerning, for instance, what exactly samadhi or jhanas are, whether samadhi is really necessary in Buddhist practice, and whether insight can arise only after leaving jhana. Then there are things like koans as practiced in Soto’s sister, the Rinzai Zen tradition, as objects of meditation, and all these esoteric Tibetan practices I keep hearing about.

    In spite of the modern daunting plethora of methods, the Buddha actually gave some us some very clear instructions about meditation, available to us today in the Pali Suttas and in the Chinese Agamas. I will spend the first few weeks on the Buddha’s meditation. Radically innovative in its day, the Buddha’s meditation forms a coherent and comprehensive system, fully an expression of the remarkable genius of the Buddha. He describes a framework that gathers and focuses the rays of the entirety of Buddhist practice, in its conceptual, ethical and affective dimensions, and turns them ineluctably toward Nirvana.

    Not many Buddhist practitioners actually follow the letter of the Buddha’s meditation, fewer than claim to do so. Every major school of Buddhism that I am aware of has introduced significant changes into the Buddha’s description of meditation. However this is not necessarily a bad thing: Many changes seem to have been a pedagogical necessity as Buddhism has been transmitted over time and culture to people with radically different world views and conceptual habits than those of the Buddha’s time and place. Many other changes were probably due to misunderstandings or miscommunications, for instance, as a purely intellectual understanding transmitted in a period of slump without verification through practice. However, some of these misunderstandings seem in subsequent periods of resurgence to have evolved further into new methods that restored the Buddha’s original intention. Other changes involve swapping in elements from the techniques of non-Buddhist traditions. And finally, some changes may be intentional modifications of what had come before because someone had a good idea that may even produce improved results. Just as human languages evolve across time and place yet maintain their function, Buddhism has shown itself capable of similar change.

    Next week I will begin this project by outlining my understanding about what the Buddha taught about meditation. I will let the early suttas for the most part speak for themselves. I would like to spend the final few weeks of this series on the variants to Buddha’s meditation, especially shikantaza and some modern “vipassana” techniques. I will consider how they preserve the elements and structure of the Buddha’s meditation and speculate how and why they may have deviated from it.

    Since my knowledge of the range of the daunting plethora is limited, I encourage others who have knowledge of techniques beyond my small scope of familiarity to apply the exercise I will exemplify here to them as well. I expect that we will find that almost every technique preserves the Buddha’s original intention.

  • The End of Blog Vacation

    I will resume my weekly series of Uposatha Day posts next week, for the First Quarter Moon on November 3.

    I have used my little vacation to put some ideas into order, to visit family and the attend the Seventeenth Annual Western Buddhist Monastic Conference in Sacramento, CA. In the meantime the weather here in Austin, Texas has turned from bake to chill very quickly.

    A lot of construction is disrupting the accustomed stillness at the Sitagu Buddhist Vihara where I live, which will produce a pagoda, a Dhamma hall, many more cottages, and, my particular interest, a dedicated brick library building! There are some sketches HERE. I have for a few months undertaken to catalog our books and implement a check-out system, and growing out library. We will soon be a fully functional retreat center, for both meditation and retreat. Then the peace will return. The plan is that a very eminent Burmese meditation teacher will lead a long retreat here next May after the opening of the new pagoda. More about that later.

    My new Uposatha series will be entitled “Buddha’s Meditation and its Variants.”

  • Uposatha Day Teachings Going on Vacation

    I have been posting Uposatha Day teachings weekly for almost a year and a half on this blog. I have decided at least temporarily to suspend this schedule. The primary reason is not to take a break from writing, but to put more energy into reworking and consolidating much of what I have written, which does not lend itself to producing weekly results.

    However, if there is someone out there who has become addicted to my Uposatha Day postings and cannot manage without a weekly Dhamma fix from this particular pusher, please let me know. Maybe I can work something out, for instance, by posting reruns.

    I intend to continue make frequent postings to this blog, just irregularly. I will continue to post episodes in the series “Through the Looking Glass: How I Became a Buddhist Monk.” I will also post anything I am reworking when it has settled back into a readable form. Some material will appear eventully as ebooks. I will probably also post some independent essays when I am so inspired. If anyone would like to post questions to my blog I will try to respond to them there.

    If this literary output interests you I invite you to subscribe to my blog so that you will get email announcements when something new is posted. I also invite you to explore the contents of my Web site for old blog postings and other essays and, as of now, one ebook, “From Thought to Destiny.”

    I am gratified that my weekly postings have been so well read and well received. I thank Michael Rickicki for discovering my blog at some point and starting to repost it to the Uposatha Day Observance Club on Facebook, and to many others who have posted links to it.

     

     

  • The Art of Lay Life 11: Lay and Monastic (cont.)

    Uposatha Teaching for the Last Quarter Moon (Index to Series)

    In this series I have been careful to distinguish the monastic lifestyle from the being an ordained monastic. The monastic lifestyle is adopted as a matter of degree, an ordained monastic is something you either are or are not. The two do not necessary coincide.

    Ven. Pema Chodron (USA)

    This is an important distinction because it helps us understand what kind of attainment a layperson is capable of or might expect from Buddhist practice. In particular I hope I have dispelled the notion that you must be an ordained nun or monk in order to become enlightened. Your potential derives not in being ordained but from adopting to some degree a monastic lifestyle. I hope I have clarified in this series both why the monastic lifestyle is a huge aid to practice and how the monastic lifestyle can be integrated with the elements of a lay life as a primary factor in that life. So the monastic life style is a desirable development for both the layperson and the ordained monastic, and a challenge for each, albeit in general more of a challenge for the layperson.

    Last week I began discussing the role of actual monastic ordination. This is important to consider lest everything I had written before last week give the impression that monastic ordination is unnecessary or unimportant in Buddhism. In fact it is of critical importance for laypeople as well as monastics. Last week I described why it is immensely useful to ordain as a monastic as an immediate way of developing a monastic lifestyle. Monastic ordination, in short, is something that has enjoyed the support of monastic communities throughout Buddhist history without interruption. As an ordained monastic I, to take the most immediate example, am supported by laypeople in my aspiration to live a monastic lifestyle, as well as to have the time for meditation, teaching and being of benefit to others that complement that.

    Ven. Buddharakkhita (Uganda)

    So, why does the laity support monastics so willingly? Is there a tangible benefit for the laity? The answer is … yes! In fact I would probably not be a monastic if this were not the case.

    First, many believe in what monastics are doing and want to support it selflessly, without thought of personal gain. Interestingly it seems that the laity are generally particular eager to support meditating monastics, by all appearances the most idle, but generally held in very high regard .

    Second, the monastics set an example that inspires laypeople in their own practice. This might be compared to the inspiration that professional athletes give to amateur tennis players, cyclists, joggers and so on. The example they set is that of the monastic life, toward which lay practitioners lives most beneficially will lean. Of course individual monastics might fail to be strong examples, but by and large the monastic sangha will provide examples in high concentration. A key part of the example these monastics will set is in providing a reality check to the notion that personal excess leads to happiness; my own experience is that monastics as a class are, contrary to any unexamined common sense, the happiest people in the world. Each is a kind of very visible walking science experiment, a test tube in which the ingredients of the monastic life have been poured and then stirred with results open to inspection.

    Ven. Thubten Chodron (USA)

    Third, the laity probably get the cheapest clergy in the world. A monastic’s needs are very modest, they do not have to have a fancy house with a two-car garage, do not have to support a family and send kids to college, unlike, say, a Protestant minister. Also since as a group they are very immersed in Buddhist practice, ideally living that practice 24-7, Buddhist monastics probably include within their ranks some of the most qualified spiritual teachers on the planet.

    I should point out parenthetically that some Buddhist traditions also have a non-monastic clergy, sometimes alongside the monastic. Most of the Japanese clergy is now non-monastic, which is why we generally talk about Zen priests in the West rather than Zen monks, and much of the Korean, even though these ordain in a fashion once historically reserved for monks and nuns. In the Tibetan tradition there are some lamas (teachers) who are not monks. And of course in the West it is rare to find a qualified teacher who is a monastic, but also common to find teachers with no recognizable qualifications. However non-monastic clergy generally have specific training that qualifies them as clergy, sometimes very rigorous, very often including a long period of living as a monastic, or simply in extreme seclusion. But non-monastic clergy do not continually share the monastic lifestyle, and so most of which I report here about the advantages of monastic ordination does not carry over to them.

    Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi (USA)

    Fourth, the support of the monastic community encourages selflessness by making practice not just a personal concern but a community concern. Supporting monastics is traditionally a focal point for the the joyful and selfless practice of generosity (dana). It is a natural focal point, because it involves these people who are essentially helpless without lay support and yet who inspire that support for reasons other than being cute like kittens or puppies. However, it quickly spills over into other areas, which can be more readily observed in Asia than in the West. Generosity is the life-blood of the Buddhist community.

    Ven. Brahmavamso (UK/Australia)

    For instance, traditionally if you, as a layperson, want to devote a month to meditation, you could expect, in Asia, to be fully supported in that aspiration. You would be given a hut in a meditation center, meditation instruction and one-on-one meetings with a teacher, a schedule and a place to meditate with others, and meals, all at no cost to you. Why? Because laypeople have contributed to the material needs of the center, and the monastics or laypeople have come forward as instructors. Why do they do all this? For almost all the same reasons monastics are readily supported. The sustainers of a meditation center believe in your aspirations, they value you as a stronger practitioner living in their community, they believe your efforts are worth supporting.

    Fifth, the ordained monastic sangha was charged by the Buddha with maintaining the integrity of the teachings, and has historically succeeded in doing just that. It is the primary channel through which the Buddha’s teachings have passed through all these centuries down to you, and will be the primary channel through which it will be passed to future generations. Why is this channel necessary? There are certainly many religious traditions that have nothing like this; Quakers do not even have a clergy of any kind. Islam is supposed to be the same way, though it has developed an informal clergy. However, Buddhism has more stringent requirements.

    Ven. Dalai Lama (Tibet)

    Buddhism is an unusually sophisticated religion. It doesn’t need to be for everyone; many people approach it in terms of devotional practices, some ethical guidelines and the practice of dana, for instance. But at its most refined it entails a detailed program of practices and studies or understandings, which fall under the various parts of the Noble Eightfold Path. One can spend years in practice and study and not yet reach the depths of the teachings. Moreover study and practice is depends on the availability of teachers and adepts because the teachings are easily subject to misinterpretation. Before the Buddha began his teaching career he doubted that even he could correctly convey the teachings and the early suttas are full of stories in which he corrects incorrect understanding.

    Ven Cheng Yen (Taiwan)

    The ordained monastic sangha, as long as it thrives, practices diligently and follows the monastic code, ensures that there is always a concentration of adepts who devote their lives full time to practice and study, and teaching. It does not ensure all ordained monastics will be adepts, nor entail that all adepts are ordained, only that there is a concentration of adepts that will keep the flame of Dharma burning. And since monastics are required to wear robes, that flame is easy to locate. The laypeople who become exceptional practitioners are those that stand close to that flame; very few of them are more than one or two steps away from monastics who shaped their practice and understanding, even among Western teachers.

    This is comparable to the role of the academic community, for instance, in ensuring the progress of science. Science also involves a core of adepts, those who are credentialed or have academic appointments, supported by the greater society, even when individuals produce no tangible benefit to the society (in fact often the most respected scientists are the “pure” scientists who have the least concern for practical results, just as the most respected monastics tend to be those who meditate all day). Just as in the monastic sangha, individual scientists may sometimes be poor examples of productive research, and individuals outside of that core may produce exceptional research (remember that Einstein in his most brilliant early days was an amateur scientist, and a “pure” scientist), but that core does represent a concentration of talent that keeps Science alive, and keeps it from dissipating into pseudo-science and wild speculation. A productive amateur scientist will have stood close to the flame and rarely been more than a step away from professors who shaped their ability to do research and the urgency to report results with integrity.

    Noble Lay Practitioners of the Dharma

    With this I conclude this series on the Art of Lay Practice. I hope this has given readers a lot to work with as you navigate the many threads of your life. The key concept I hope I have conveyed is: Simplicity! Make your personal footprint, the domain of your own affairs, what you choose to have a personal stake in, as small as you possibly can. Next year reconsider and try to make your personal footprint even smaller, and so on. People have such huge footprints for such little feet. This will supercharge your practice. Our footprints are outward projections of our sense of self. Buddhist practice is about letting go gradually over time of every manifestation of that sense of being a substantial self. Our lifestyles display the most tangible manifestations and are therefore the most obvious place to begin. When that sense of self vanishes altogether, that is Liberation. And Liberation is possible within the parameters of a lay life.

  • New Episode: “Through the Looking Glass”

    Book II: The Young and the Samsaric
    Episode Two: Becoming

    Synopsis. With difficulty met by determination, John becomes what he once was.

    Find complete contents including this new episode:

    HERE

  • The Art of Lay Life 10: Lay and Monastic

    Uposatha Day Essay for the Full Moon

    Index to Art of Lay Life Series

    Over the last nine weeks I have presented the Art of Lay Life. Summarized in brief the ideal is to live a life that includes those elements, aside from recognized Buddhist practices, that you just have to include, but otherwise is as much like a monastic life as possible. This is an ideal in that I do not expect any readers to take this principle to heart absolutely; lack of conviction, lack of discipline, overwhelming impulses and all of these things conspire against the ideal. An ideal practitioner is a rare thing. However each of you can lean toward the ideal and study your own life to gain conviction that what I write might have some merit.

    The Art of Monastic Life is to renounce and simplify, hanging on to nothing, most especially not any sense of personal identity but also not any of those things that sustain and gratify a special person. Now I have made a big distinction between living a monastic life and being an ordained monastic. The reason is most ordained monastics also only approximate the ideal of a monastic life and in this way are not much different than devout laypeople. It is certainly possible for a devout layperson to sustain a more monastic life than most ordained monastics, and accordingly realize great benefit in practice. This raises the question, Why do we have monastics? The answer, it turns out, is very important to the lay Buddhist.

    First, although an ordained monastic may be imperfect in living a monastic life they vow to do so and have a social obligation to do so. These vows and obligations can be compared to marriage vows and the obligations of being a husband or life, which are also commonly kept imperfectly, and yet generally do make a big difference in sustaining the marriage as a cycle of transgression and repentance  serves to keep a spouse within the understood boundaries. Ordained monastics take a set of vows laypeople generally do not. Moreover just as the wedding ring marks the spouse’s obligations in a way that invites public scrutiny, the robes and the shaved head mark the ordained monastic’s.

    Second, a monastic has a clear blueprint for life more detailed than I could insist on in this series. A monastic’s vows have the form of hundreds, of precepts which specify in detain how to Select, Reject, Balance and Simplify. They leave very little wiggle-room. If you examine them carefully you find that systematically they prohibit virtually every opportunity for seeking personal advantage, for self-enhancement, for self-gratification. Most fundamentally they are based on simplicity, renunciation, and sensual restraint. Celibacy is generally taken as definitive of the monastic. The monastic is not allowed to beautify herself, is not allowed to engage in any normal livelihood, like farming, is not allowed to barter or trade, must strictly curtail sensual pleasures. The monastic is not even allowed to purposely endear themselves to laypeople in the aims of receiving better offerings of food and clothing. In this way the pure ordained monastic becomes the ultimate renunciate, and is likely to progress rapidly on the path. This does not mean the monastic cannot live comfortably, it means that it is, except in crisis situations, it none of her business.

    Third, the monastic has the institutional support necessary to lead a monastic life uncompromised by life’s many contingencies. The institution is that of monastic ordination/vow and of lay support. A lot of people balk at the very idea of religious institutions or organized religions.  (My adult daughter has always maintained that she does not believe in organized religions. She used to often come to the Austin Zen Center, where I used to live as a priest, particularly if some event like a potluck was underway. I would point out to her that someone had to organize that. Ajahn Brahm likes to describe Buddhism as the most disorganized religion.)  The importance of monastic institution to Buddhism is evident in the importance the Buddha attached to it. Consider that the Buddha consistently referred to the entirety of his teachings as the Dharma-Vinaya. The Vinaya, half of this compound, specifically defines the monastic institution in its behavioral, procedural and social aspects. So it is important to understand what functions this institution serves, for both monastics and laity.

    The immediate reason the ordained monastic requires institutional support is that in letting go of seeking any personal advantage she puts herself in an extremely vulnerable situation, and so is totally dependent on the goodwill of the laity, who must take an interest in the welfare of the monastics if they are to survive as monastics. Monastics are like your cat, who would also have a hard time surviving by herself. With that support monastics are in a unique position to fully embrace the monastic lifestyle with virtually no distractions. Thus institutionally Buddhism provides exceptional support for an exceptional lifestyle, for those who are able and willing to vow to pursue that lifestyle. A Buddhist community, in effect, commits itself to offering this opportunity to those able and willing to take advantage of it, thereby enabling a significant numbers of its members will advance far along the path of Buddhist practice.

    This often raises eyebrows in the West, perhaps particularly in a culture like America’s that values individuality and independence. The question arises, Why would lay people trying to progress in their own lay practice support monastics so they can progress in their own?

    Before answering this, consider the following.  The monastic who takes sincere advantage of the opportunity provided by the Buddhist community, when her mind falls in line with the monastic lifestyle, that is, when any thoughts of personal advantage are totally frustrated, has an enormous reserve of time and energy. These can go in any combination of three directions. First, into contemplative practice and study. Second, into activities that directly benefit others. And third, sleep.

    Unfortunately many monastics like to sleep a lot, but it is discouraged, and many spend most of their time in meditation, and many engage themselves not only in teaching the Dharma and providing pastoral counseling (expected clerical functions), but also in general education, founding of hospitals and other social services and public works. This engagement in public welfare is often unrecognized in the West; I was amazed to observe what a significant factor it is in Burmese society. The reason is we tend to think of monastics as pretty idle. They must be idle when it comes to acting on their own behalf, but there is nothing in the monastic precepts that keeps them from being as active as they possibly can on behalf of others. Monastic practice is not about escape from the world, only about escape from self-centered engagement in the world. Ven. Walpola Rahula, author of the classic What the Buddha Taught, wrote another book in which he traces the history of social engagement by monastics in Sri Lanka in the pre-colonial and then colonial times and argues that the idea that monastics are idle came about as the colonial powers disenfranchised the monastics of their traditional social roles as a means of reducing their powerful influence in the society.

    So, why does the laity support monastics? This will be the topic of next week’s essay on the Art of Lay Life.

  • The Art of Lay Life 9: Simplifying

    Uposatha Day Teaching (Index to Series)
    Layman Pang is the very model of the enlightened layman from Eighth Century Chinese Zen (or Chan) lore. He had been a wealthy merchant with a wife and daughter who studied the Sutras and aspired to progress along the Buddhist path. His wife and daughter shared the same aspirations. In fact his daughter is the very model of the enlightened woman, since she all along had a deeper understanding than her father. Layman Pang is the one however who is most often referred to in patriarchal China.

    The first substantial step the three of them took was to gather all of their wealth together in a boat, row out to the middle of the lake and drop it all overboard so that it would not be a burden. They then supported themselves by making and selling utensils of bamboo and traveling from place to place, often visiting monasteries.

    Select. The Pang family whole-heartedly embraced Buddhist teachings and practice. However they also valued each other and their life as a family. They selected little, but clearly family was something they valued independently of the concerns of Buddhist practice. In this sense they were not candidates for monastic ordination.

    Reject. Whether or not their merchant life was always honest is not said. But they took up a livelihood that easily lent itself to virtue and integrity. They are not reported to have spent time drinking or partying, going to shows, gossiping.

    Balance.  Family and their small bamboo manufacturing and selling activities are their primary activities outside of Buddhist practice. We can imagine that they readily brought these within the fold of Buddhist practice by engaging in these activities skillfully, mindfully and with devotion. It is often said that Buddhism does not distinguish the sacred from the secular. Balance is the reason; our practice is, insofar as we are able, to treat the secular as sacred. This is the practice of Balance.

    Simplify. The primary symbolic act of this is the dumping of their wealth in the lake. Practically speaking it would have made more sense to give their wealth to a charitable cause, but this step lends drama to the imperative of ridding themselves of all complications and distractions.

    Now, simplifying was implicit in my discussion of Selecting, when I suggest that you prioritize your values and be sparse in your Selecting. I repeat it as the final step because it cannot be emphasized enough. Even if you have Selected a small set of things you intend to sustain aside from Buddhist practice, Reject everything that is karmically unwholesome and therefore does not sit comfortably in a Buddhist life, Balance what you have Selected by integrating it into sound Buddhist practice, you will probably, if you are at all like most people, still manage to accumulate new complications, hardly knowing it.

    An apt analogy is the way people accumulate home furnishings. If you go into a museum there is a lot of space between artifacts. The artifacts might be paintings or sculpture, but actually might be home furnishings, such as Paul Revere metalware and King Louis’ furniture. If you go into an antique shop everything is packed tightly together and it is hard to walk around. Which is your home like? Most people move into a home with something like the museum in mind, but quickly their homes become more like the junk shop. Often they do not notice the change until they move their place of residence and wonder why they need such a big Ryder truck. It is not a factor of the nature of the artifacts, rather how many they accumulate. More is generally not better. It is the same with the activities they take on, and with the activities of our mind. Clutter keeps them endlessly confused, makes mindfulness difficult, leaves little space for practice or for what is really important, and tends to be a manifestation of a certain level of craving and desire for distraction. Let me repeat my advice of a few weeks ago: If you are serious about simplifying your life, study Voluntary Simplicity, either on line, or the few books on the topic.

    The aim of a Buddhist lifestyle is renunciation. Renunciation is not deprivation, but rather the removal of those aspects of the ordinary life that are self-serving, that seek personal advantage, gratification and enhancement, that serve as the Self’s playground. Selection makes room for aspects of our lives that may not fit this requirement, yet are either valuable to us or a matter of obligation. The other three steps aim to strip away the Self. Rejecting removes the most obvious of the Self’s excesses, or those conditions that lead to the Self’s excesses. Balancing shifts our relationship to the elements in our lives so that our attitude is not that of a master to a servant. Simplifying removes the distracting clutter.

    Now, all this does not entail that a Buddhist life cannot be busy. If you spend your time shopping and channel-surfing this is clutter. If you spend it teaching kids to read or volunteering to plant trees in a park or protesting against a war, this is wholesome, generous, not self-serving and is to be encouraged as a manifestation of kindness and compassion, as well as renunciation. (Caveat: Just as we can shift or relationship  toward selflessness, we can shift our relationship the other way. It is easy to make charity self-serving, using it as a means to garner reputation, for instance).  We simplify in order to make space for the calm abiding which blends into contemplative Buddhist practice, and for all the good we can be doing in the world with the time and energy we save.

    All this does not entail that a Buddhist life is somehow an escape from the world. A common misconception is that laypeople practice in the world, while monastics practice apart from the world. This is at root a license to change nothing in the outward circumstances of your life, to continue living your life exactly as you have been doing, but maybe do it more mindfully. You can presumably slaughter animals mindfully, get drunk mindfully, blow up at your office mate mindfully, sell unneeded insurance mindfully. Nobody escapes from the world. The essence of the Buddhist life is to live in the world responsibly, to finally grow up, to reform those parts of life that lead us astray, that are karmically unwholesome so that the overall trajectory of your life is toward Nirvana.

    The advice I have given in this series is to incline your lifestyle toward the monastic lifestyle. The extent to which you do this is up to you, but it will be a primary determinant of your progress along the Path. This is exactly the same as meditation practice: You can learn to meditate, but then how much you meditate is up to you, but it will be a primary determinant (secondary to lifestyle!) of your progress along the Path. The early scriptures attest to the ability of laypeople to progress along the path, to even reach the Big E. But this arises not casually. The great thing about the Art of Lay Life is that in general it does not preclude what you really have already taken to heart in your life, for instance, family. It just builds around it.