Bhikkhu Cintita

Category: samadhi

  • Non-Self and Buddhist Practice – Part Five

    Uposatha Day, Full Moon, April 18, 2011

    Right Concentration (Samma-Samadhi) is the final step on the Noble Eightfold Path, the culmination of the Path, the last termite implicated in the destruction of the structure of the self.

    The Termite of Right Concentration.

    Right Concentration is a different kind of step because it is not actually something you do, but rather a natural consequence of the preceding seven steps. The five steps immediately prior to concentration involve volitional actions, practices in the purest sense. These are the three Virtue steps of Right Speech, Right Action and Right Livelihood, and the first two meditation steps of Right Effort and Right Mindfulness. All of these are things we do over and over in the Buddhist life, things we make choices about, individual actions of body, speech and mind. The initial two steps of the Noble Eightfold Path, on the other hand, which make up the Wisdom group of Right View and Right Resolve, are practices of a less discrete sort: they are matters of study, contemplation and commitment, but still things we do in some sense. Right Concentration is the consequence of all of these steps. As such the steps leading up to Right Concentration are like building a fire: we start with some newspaper, then kindling, then logs, of course oxygen is available without effort, and we add heat (say as a spark from a flint stone), and a flame arises. Right Concentration is like the fire, it is a rarified quality of mind, call it concentrated wholesomeness.

    Now, concentration is common in meditation practices, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, and it is also something that sometimes arises spontaneously, or when something is of utmost importance and urgency. But these instances of concentration are generally not Right Concentration. For instance, a hunter or a sniper commonly has extremely strong concentration just before a kill. A dog, or particularly a cat, similarly seems to have unblinking concentration when stalking prey. A hunter’s concentration, as deep as it may be, is not Right Concentration, because it is based in the intention to kill; it lacks at a minimum the backing of Right Resolve, Right Action, Right Livelihood and Right Effort. Concentration also seems to arise naturally when there is danger, when the cost of making a mistake is high, or when something provokes lust. But here concentration would arise as an accomplice of the self. Concentration typically brings temporary euphoria, a blissful feeling; in fact, some people engage in dangerous activities like bungee jumping or driving fast for recreation … on purpose, probably to induce states of blissful concentration.

    In most forms of non-Buddhist meditation concentration is achieved almost exclusively through Mindfulness, which we looked at last week. There we learned that Mindfulness is a practice of remembering to keep the mind on a single task, most commonly holding one’s attention on a single object. This is a simple yet difficult exercise that can quickly lead to the arising of a very stable quality of mind. These forms of meditation also tend to produce temporary feelings of bliss without the cost or risk of sky diving or alligator wrestling.

    Right Concentration is not something we do; it is instead a mental space that we dwell in and explore at every opportunity. We make use of the other steps of the Noble Eightfold Path to do this, much as a smith produces in his forge a fire of the desired size and temperature by feeding it with the right kind and amount of wood or coal, by the skillful use of the bellows, and so on. As we attend to our concentration we bring the other factors of the Noble Eightfold Path to bear in a focuses and coordinated way to move our concentration in the direction we would like. We will see that the benefits of Right Concentration ultimately feed back into the effectiveness all of the other steps in the Noble Eightfold Path, as if the Termite of Right Concentration kicks back pep pills, or growth hormones, to all of the other termites.

    In Right Concentration two qualities are highlighted, serenity and clarity. These are captured in the metaphor of a forest pond. If kids are splashing in the pond, someone is throwing in a stick for his dog to swim out and fetch, another is jumping out of a tree, plunging into the water holding his nose, and a motorboat is pushing up waves, pulling a water-skier, the pond will be neither serene nor clear. Our minds are like this in their normal state, jumping around like a money or coming at us with a constant stream of useless thoughts. However, when the kids have gone, the dog is snoozing at home, the motorboat and water skis have been taken out of the water and are out on the highway somewhere, the pond has a chance to settle and after a time the surface becomes like glass. From one angle we see the reflection of the trees against the sky and the setting sun. From another we can look down into the depths of the water and see fish, crabs, growing plants every pebble at the bottom of the pond as clear as can be. Serenity and clarity arise in unison.

    And so it is with the mind, normally churned into a frenzy by our self-centered delusions, our self-centered aspirations, our unvirtuous speech and action, our ignoble livelihood, our runaway unskillful thoughts and our unsteady minds. As each of these departs, our thoughts begin to float rather than rush past, they are kind, and sometimes stop altogether, we can see what is there prior to our fabrications and how our fabrications arise. Serenity and clarity arise in unison. At some point we flip into a state in which serenity and clarity come effortlessly, Effort and Mindfulness are no longer a chore, we simply dwell there.

    We can fruitfully explore this space of concentration in various ways. We can, for instance, go into deeper and deeper levels of serenity, or we can apply our clarity in certain directions. This is why we often talk about serenity (samatha) and insight (vipassana) meditation. The Buddha actually never really talked about two separate kinds of meditation, since serenity and clarity always arise together, but by choice of object of mindfulness, for instance, we seem often to favor one over another. Attending to something highly localized like the touch of the breath at the edge of the nostrils, for instance, can propel us into deep states of concentration, quantified as jhanas. Attending to something like the decaying of the body is less focused but opens up theme of investigation in which clarity can be of particular efficacy. Also as we get up from the meditation cushion and begin to move about in the world, the depth of our concentration tends to let up, but with training does not disappear altogether and can also be recalled in an instant. Thereby the clarity of concentration has many fruitful opportunities to alight on new subjects throughout the day.

    Right Concentration is a quality of mind that is already imbued with the qualities acquired through the seven practices that precede it. It includes the habit of contemplating the arising and cause of suffering, the nature of impermanence and the notion of non-self. It includes the aspirations toward kindness and renunciation, and the many practices of virtue. It includes the practice of weeding and watering in the garden of the unskillful and the skillful. And of course it includes mindful of various wholesome things. As such the concentrated mind tends to settle into and become even clearer about these qualities. This is what I mean by concentrated wholesomeness. From the perspective of clarity is is like turning a magnifying glass on each of these aspects of practice; in effect in Right Concentration we walk the whole Path anew but at a much more refined and detailed level. Our contemplations become very sharp, we begin to see directly impermanence and emptiness. Our aspirations are brought into relief and any deviation from renunciation, kindness or non-harming is immediately noticeable. The whole process of acting in the world, from inception of intention to tracing of consequences comes into sharp focus, and we begin to act decisively without entangling ourselves in justifications. Skillful or unskillful qualities of thoughts jump out at us as soon as they arise, we can feel the tension in the unskillful.

    The self does not fare well in the world of the rightly concentrated mind. The self’s tendencies toward fabrication, excuse and manipulation settle down and appear as cheap trickery. The pain of maintaining a self or acting out the self’s demands becomes all too clear. The self is discovered to be elusive as a primary phenomenon of actual experience; no matter how hard we look for it all we see is the flux and contingency of the things imagined to be a self, to belong to a self or to contain a self.

    Right Concentration is the last of the termites chewing on the trestle of the self and all of its supports. Next week we will see what happens when the bridge collapses.

  • Noble Eightfold Path: Right Concentration

    Uposatha Day Teaching

    The Eighth and final Fold of the Eightfold Path is Right Concentration. Concentration in Pali or Sanskrit is samadhi, a familiar word in Buddhist vocabulary. A potter or other skilled craftsman also requires a degree of concentration and does his or her best work with concentration, in which the mind of the potter is collected in one place, concerned with one task, still, focused. Concentration contrasts with the more typical scattered state of the human mind. However the average human mind seems to be naturally concentrated when there is danger, when the cost of making a mistake is high, or when something is just darn interesting. Concentration when present typically brings euphoria, a blissful feeling, which might be why some people engage in dangerous activities like bungee jumping or driving fast for recreation. Buddhism provides the training that makes very deep levels of concentration available on demand.

    The functions of the concentrated mind in Buddhist practice are in support of the other folds of the Noble Eightfold Path. In the mind’s typical state thoughts come at us like a rushing river, like a fire hose or like a sand storm. Alternatively we can say that the mind jumps around from place to place like a monkey, like a basket ball or buzzes around like a swarm of gnats. Under such conditions we have little opportunity either to observe our thoughts to get to know them, and almost all opportunity to observe and get to know what is happening in the world around us gets lost in the deluge of thought. Likewise under such conditions we have little opportunity to respond appropriately to thoughts as required by many of the steps in the Path.

    Thoughts are also like choppy water, stirred up by paddlers and power boats, that obscures both external phenomena and the mind itself.. On the other hand, the concentrated mind is serene and sharp like a still forest pool, without a ripple, such that you can see every detail of the bottom of the pond. The serenity of concentration gives Right Speech, Right Action, Right Effort and Right Mindfulness each a boost. Each of these involves making decisions with consideration of intentions and other mental factors. Serenity is like seeing these mental factors with a magnifying glass. For instance, part of Right Speech is not to speak in anger. For many people this is nearly impossible because the gap between anger and speech is slight. With a serene mind this gap is large. In fact one is likely to catch the series of thoughts leading to anger at an early stage with a softening effect. The sharpness or clarity of concentration gives a great boost to Right View, Right Resolve and Right Livelihood because it supports penetrating insight into the way things really are. For instance, one cannot avoid a continuous awareness of the flux and contingency of all things, and the tendency of the mind toward fabrication.

    So concentration or samadhi is a very useful tool, for the potter as well as for the Buddhist on the Path. How do we get there? The short answer is, Through all of the other folds of the Noble Eightfold Path. If your life is less dispersed, if you do not spend your time struggling, your mind will be more concentrated. All the folds from Right Resolve through the three factors of Ethical Conduct and up to Right Effort establish a non-self-seeking relationship to the world, reducing our stress and anxiety. We will see next week how Right View brings this to an even deeper level. All this reduces the scattering of our mental resources, brings the mind to the here and now. Cultivating physical serenity in our lives is an additional aid to concentration: walks in the woods, avoiding idle chatter and mindless entertainment, reducing clutter in your surroundings, living an orderly, which often means highly conventional, life.

    But the most direct instruments for establishing concentration are Right Effort and Right Mindfulness. Bhikkhu Bodhi in his treatise on the Noble Eightfold Path describes a metaphor used in an ancient commentary for the relationship of Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration: Three boys see flowers blooming high in a tree, but even the tallest of them, boy C, cannot reach them. Therefore another boy, A, leans over to let the tallest boy climb up on his back. This gives the needed height but boy C has trouble keeping his balance and is afraid to stand as high as he can. So the remaining boy, B, takes hold to steady C. Boy A is Effort, boy B is Mindfulness and boy C is Concentration. Through Effort, which works with the earlier folds, we gain a degree of purity and stability of mind. Concentration takes this to an even higher level, but cannot do this without Mindfulness.

    Right Concentration is most effectively practiced in seated meditation, but tends to carry over from there into everyday life in a less rarefied form. The most common form of seated meditation involves selecting an object of concentration, such as the physical sensation of breath felt in the rising and falling of the abdomen, or simply a candle. Your task is to keep your mind focused on the object. Mindfulness reminds you of this task as distractions arise. It is the guard that protects concentration from all of the fascinating things the mind would like to do instead. Right Effort is primary in working with the unskillful mental factors that are likely to otherwise be distractions. These factors working together often feel like a struggle as the mind is repeatedly distracted from its object of concentration, sometimes for minutes at a time. But with practice, and especially as one sits for long periods, the mind settles and the concentration narrows increasingly in on the object. The struggle stills, or even disappears, leaving serenity and clarity.

    Most meditation traditions take as their primary aim to develop intense levels of concentration. Concentration can be very intense indeed. The aim of meditation in Buddhism is somewhat different. Recall that in the years immediately preceding his enlightenment the future Buddha engaged in developing extraordinary state of concentration but in the end recognized the inadequacy of concentration. Intense states of concentration develop serenity with the advantages described above, but past a certain point this is at the expense of the clarity or sharpness necessary for insight into the nature of reality. The extreme one-pointedness of mind eventually shuts down investigation. In fact many adepts are said to have reached enlightenment with limited concentration. Also deep levels of concentration carries a couple of dangers. First, one can become attached to the pleasure of concentration, which then becomes a self-serving impediment to progress on the Path. Second, the intense serenity of concentration can mislead you into thinking you have reached some great attainment on the path, possibly even awakening. With these caveats, concentration is nevertheless and important tool which the sincere practitioner should give a lot of attention to developing.

    On this day of the Last Quarter Moon spend some time in seated meditation, enjoy the serenity of clarity that comes with concentration and resolve to make seated meditation a part of your daily routine if it is not already, even if it is for ten or fifteen minutes each day.