Shariputra Bronze

This beautiful sutta from the Pali canon tells the story of what happened after the beloved disciple and arahat Sariputta passed away.  Sariputta—(Sāriputta (Pāli) or Śāriputra (Sanskrit)—was a truly remarkable student of the Buddha’s, and along with Ananda, was considered his greatest pupil. As Nyanaponika Thera writes of him in The Life of Shariputra:

“Shariputra..was second only to the Buddha in the depth and range of his understanding, and his ability to teach the Doctrine of Deliverance….[Shariputra was a] skilled preceptor and exemplar, [a] kind and considerate friend… [a] guardian of the welfare of the Bhikkhus under his charge…[a] faithful repository of his Master’s doctrine, the function which earned him the title of Dhamma-senapati, Marshal of the Dhamma…[Shariputra was]  always, himself, a man unique in his patience and steadfastness, modest and upright in thought, word and deed, a man to whom one act of kindness was a thing to be remembered with gratitude so long as life endured. Even among the Arahats, saints freed from all defilements of passion and delusion, he shone like the full moon in a starry sky.”

What follows is the account of Sariputta’s passing and how the Buddha turned his students’ attention from their sorrow  to contemplation of the deepest inspiration of Sariputta’s own life—seeing through the impermanence of all fabricated things to the refuge and liberation of the Deathless.

(After the sutta, I’ve embedded a beautiful instrumental piece you can listen to titled “No Longer Mourn for Me.”)

The Cunda Sutta

translated from the Pali by Nyanaponika Thera

Once the Blessed One was dwelling at Savatthi, in Anathapindika’s park. At that time the Venerable Sariputta was at Nalaka village in the Magadha country, and was sick, suffering, gravely ill. The Novice Cunda was his attendant.

And the Venerable Sariputta passed away finally through that very illness. Then the Novice Cunda took the almsbowl and robes of the Venerable Sariputta and went to Savatthi, to the Jeta Grove, Anathapindika’s park. There he betook himself to the Venerable Ananda and, having saluted him, seated himself at one side. Thus seated, he spoke to the Venerable Ananda saying: “Venerable sir, the Venerable Sariputta has had his final passing away. These are his bowl and robes.”

“On this matter, Cunda, we ought to see the Blessed One. Let us go, friend Cunda, and meet the Master. Having met him, we shall acquaint the Blessed One with that fact.”

“Yes, Venerable sir,” said the Novice Cunda.

They went to see the Blessed One, and having arrived there and saluted the Master, they seated themselves at one side. Then the Venerable Ananda addressed the Blessed One:

“O Lord, the Novice Cunda has told me this: ‘The Venerable Sariputta has had his final passing away. These are his bowl and robes.’ Then, O Lord, my own body became weak as a creeper; everything around became dim and things were no longer clear to me, when I heard about the final passing away of the Venerable Sariputta.”

“How is this, Ananda? When Sariputta had his final passing away, did he take from you your portion of virtue, or your portion of concentration, or your portion of the knowledge and vision of deliverance?”

“Not so, Lord. When the Venerable Sariputta had his final passing away he did not take my portion of virtue… concentration… wisdom… deliverance, or my portion of the knowledge and vision of deliverance. But O Lord, the Venerable Sariputta has been to me a mentor, teacher, and instructor, one who rouses, inspires and gladdens, untiring in preaching Dhamma, a helper of his fellow monks. And we remember how vitalizing, enjoyable and helpful his Dhamma instruction was.”

“Have I not taught you aforetime, Ananda, that it is the nature of all things near and dear to us that we must suffer separation from them, and be severed from them? Of that which is born, come to being, put together, and so is subject to dissolution, how should it be said that it should not depart? That, indeed, is not possible.

It is, Ananda, as though from a mighty hardwood tree a large branch should break off, so has Sariputta now had his final passing away from this great and sound community of bhikkhus. Indeed, Ananda, of that which is born, come to being, put together, and so is subject to dissolution, how should it be said that it should not depart? This, indeed, is not possible.

“Therefore, Ananda, be ye an island unto yourself, a refuge unto yourself, seeking no external refuge; with the Teaching as your island, the Teaching your refuge, seeking no other refuge.”

SN 47.13 PTS: S v 161 CDB ii 1642
Cunda Sutta: About Cunda (Sariputta’s Passing Away)

This exquisite music, “No Longer Mourn for Me,” from Ensemble Galilei on their album Come, Gentle Night – Music of Shakespeare’s World, seems a fitting way to conclude this post.  May is speak to your heart, as it has to mine!

Here are some related links:

A Poem about the “severe gift” of Grief

How Facing Pain Helps to End Suffering

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Few words in Buddhism are more well-known, and more debated historically among Buddhists, than the word “emptiness.”  What do we find about “emptiness” in the Pali canon, the oldest records we have of the Buddha‘s teachings?  In this essay Buddhist monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu explains how Theravadan Buddhists understand the word in terms of these earliest teachings.

Whatever one’s own understanding of “emptiness,” the idea of seeing emptiness as a mode of perception that liberates is basic to all schools of Buddhism.  As Thanissaro Bhikkhu points out, the the whole purpose of geting into “emptiness mode” is “to loosen all attachments to views, stories, and assumptions, leaving the mind empty of all the greed, anger; and delusion, and thus empty of suffering and stress.”

Emptiness

by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to, and takes nothing away from, the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them.

This mode is called emptiness because it is empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience in order to make sense of it: the stories and worldviews we fashion to explain who we are and the world we live in. Although these stories and views have their uses, the Buddha found that the questions they raise—of our true identity and the reality of the world outside—pull attention away from a direct experience of how events influence one another in the immediate present. Thus they get in the way when we try to understand and solve the problem of suffering.

Say, for instance, that you’re meditating, and a feeling of anger toward your mother appears. Immediately, the mind’s reaction is to identify the anger as “my” anger, or to say that “I’m” angry. It then elaborates on the feeling, either working it into the story of your relationship to your mother or to your general views about when and where anger toward one’s mother can be justified. The problem with all this, from the Buddha’s perspective, is that these stories and views entail a lot of suffering. The more you get involved in them, the more you get distracted from seeing the actual cause of the suffering: the labels of “I” and “mine” that set the whole process in motion. As a result, you can’t find the way to unravel that cause and bring the suffering to an end.

If, however, you adopt the emptiness mode—by not acting on or reacting to the anger but simply watching it as a series of events, in and of themselves—you can see that the anger is empty of anything to identify with or possess. As you master the emptiness mode more consistently, you see that this truth holds not only for such gross emotions as anger, but also for even the most subtle events in the realm of experience. This is the sense in which all things are empty. When you see this, you realize that labels of “I” and “mine” are inappropriate, unnecessary, and cause nothing but stress and pain. You can drop them. When you drop them totally, you discover a mode of experience that lies deeper still, one that’s totally free.

To master the emptiness mode of perception requires firm training in virtue, concentration, and discernment. Without this training, the mind stays in the mode that keeps creating stories and worldviews. And from the perspective of that mode, the teaching of emptiness sounds simply like another story or worldview with new ground rules. In terms of the story of your relationship to your mother it seems to be saying that there’s really no mother, no you. In terms of your worldview, it seems to be saying either that the world doesn’t really exist, or else that emptiness is the great undifferentiated ground of being from which we all came and to which someday we’ll all return.

All Tangled Up IV - Tom Tavelli

These interpretations not only miss the meaning of emptiness but also keep the mind from getting into the proper mode. If the world and the people in the story of your life don’t really exist, then all the actions and reactions in that story seem like a mathematics of zeros, and you wonder why there’s any point in practicing virtue at all. If, on the other hand, you see emptiness as the ground of being to which we’re all going to return, then what need is there to train the mind in concentration and discernment, since we’re all going to get there anyway? And even if we need training to get back to our ground of being, what’s to keep us from coming out of it and suffering all over again? So in all these scenarios, the whole idea of training the mind seems futile and pointless. By focusing on the question of whether or not there really is something behind experience, they entangle the mind in issues that keep it from getting into the present mode.

Now, stories and worldviews do serve a purpose. The Buddha employed them when teaching people, but he never used the word emptiness when speaking in these modes. He recounted the stories of people’s lives to show how suffering comes from the unskillful perceptions behind their actions, and how freedom from suffering can come from being more perceptive. And he described the basic principles that underlie the round of rebirth to show how bad intentional actions lead to pain within that round, good ones lead to pleasure, while really skillful actions can rake you beyond the round altogether.

In all these cases, these teachings were aimed at getting people to focus on the quality of the perceptions and intentions in their minds in the present—in other words, to get them into the emptiness mode. Once there, they could use the teachings on emptiness for their intended purpose: to loosen all attachments to views, stories, and assumptions, leaving the mind empty of all the greed, anger; and delusion, and thus empty of suffering and stress. And when you come right down to it, that’s the emptiness that really counts.”

Thanissaro Bhikkhu is the abbot of Metta Forest Monastery in Valley Center, California.

His most recent book is The Wings to Awakening (Dhamma Dana Publications).

“Emptiness”, by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight, 8 March 2011, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/emptiness.html . Retrieved on 17 January 2012.

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A recurring theme in Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s writing is his stress on how important it is to understand what kinds of questions the Buddha answered, and refused to answer, in his teachings. Many people think his new way of using the Pali word “khandhas” was the answer to the question, “Who am I” or “What is a person?” But in fact, as Thanissaro Bhikkhu explains, the Buddha was actually answering a whole different set of questions.

What kind of question do the “khandhas” or “aggregates” answer?

by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

“THE BUDDHA’S AWAKENING gave him, among other things, a new perspective on the uses and limitations of words. He had discovered a reality— the Deathless—that no words could describe.

At the same time, he discovered that the path to Awakening could be described, although it involved a new way of seeing and conceptualizing the problem of suffering and stress. Because ordinary concepts were often poor tools for teaching the path, he had to invent new concepts and to stretch pre-existing words to encompass those concepts so that others could taste Awakening themselves.

One of the new concepts most central to his teaching was that of the khandhas, usually translated into English as “aggregates.” Prior to the Buddha, the Pali word khandha had very ordinary meanings: A khandha could be a pile, a bundle, a heap, a mass. It could also be the trunk of a tree. In his first sermon, though, the Buddha gave it a new, psychological meaning, introducing the term “clinging-khandhas” to summarize his analysis of the truth of stress and suffering.

Throughout the remainder of his teaching career, he referred to these psychological khandhas time and again. Their importance in his teachings has thus been obvious to every generation of Buddhists ever since. Less obvious, though, has been the issue of how they are important: How should a meditator make use of the concept of the psychological khandhas? What questions are they meant to answer?

The most common response to these questions is best exemplified by two recent scholarly books devoted to the subject. Both treat the khandhas as the Buddha’s answer to the question, “What is a person?” To quote from the jacket of the first:

If Buddhism denies a permanent self, how does it perceive identity?… What we conventionally call a ‘person’ can be understood in terms of five aggregates, the sum of which must not be taken for a permanent entity, since beings are nothing but an amalgam of ever- changing phenomena…. [W]ithout a thorough understanding of the five aggregates, we cannot grasp the liberation process at work within the individual, who is, after all, simply an amalgam of the five aggregates.”

From the introduction of the other:

“The third key teaching is given by the Buddha in contexts when he is asked about individual identity: when people want to know ‘what am I?’, ‘what is my real self?’. The Buddha says that individuality should be understood in terms of a combination of phenomena which appear to form the physical and mental continuum of an individual life. In such contexts, the human being is analysed into five constituents—the pañcakkhandh› [five aggregates].”

This understanding of the khandhas isn’t confined to scholars. Almost any modern Buddhist meditation teacher would explain the khandhas in a similar way. And it isn’t a modern innovation. It was first proposed at the beginning of the common era in the commentaries to the early Buddhist canons—both the Therav›din and the Sarvastivadin, which formed the basis for Mahayana scholasticism.

However, once the commentaries used the khandhas to define what a person is, they spawned many of the controversies that have plagued Buddhist thinking ever since: “If a person is just khandhas, then what gets reborn?” “If a person is just khandhas, and the khandhas are annihilated on reaching total nibbana, then isn’t total nibbana the annihilation of the person?” “If a person is khandhas, and khandhas are interrelated with other khandhas, how can one person enter nibbana without dragging everyone else along?”

A large part of the history of Buddhist thought has been the story of ingenious but unsuccessful attempts to settle these questions. It’s instructive to note, though, that the Pali canon never quotes the Buddha as trying to answer them.

In fact, it never quotes him as trying to define what a person is at all. Instead, it quotes him as saying that to define yourself in any way is to limit yourself, and that the question, “What am I?” is best ignored. This suggests that he formulated the concept of the khandhas to answer other, different questions. If, as meditators, we want to make the best use of this concept, we should look at what those original questions were, and determine how they apply to our practice.

The canon depicts the Buddha as saying that he taught only two topics: suffering and the end of suffering (§2). A survey of the Pali discourses shows him using the concept of the khandhas to answer the primary questions related to those topics: What is suffering? How is it caused? What can be done to bring those causes to an end?”

(This excerpt is from the Introduction to a great essay by Thanissaro Bhikkhu called “A Burden Off the Mind: A Study Guide on the Five Aggregates.”)

Click here to visit “Metta Refuge Dharma Nuggets” — short Dharma insights for your Daily Practice and Inspiration

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In this essay Thanissaro Bhikkhu analyzes the profound importance of understanding the nature of our intentions and the actions that arise out of those intentions.  In many ways, as he points out, this issue is at the very heart of the Buddha’s teaching—looking deeply into intention, into cause and effect, and seeing how to “unbind” these things.

Ajaan Geoff, as he is affectionately known by his students and friends, also goes into one of the apparent “paradoxes” of Buddhism—how even the intent to be liberated is itself a fabrication—as is even the path leading to liberation, though this skillful path is the very highest of fabrications.

In my previous post, Chaos Theory and Buddhist Views of Causality, Ajahn Geoff goes into this apparent paradox in greater depth. For those who really want to dig into the subject, you may want to investigate these three documents, which you can download from Dhammatalks.org in PDF or e-book format:

The Mind Like Fire Unbound

The Shape of Suffering: A Study of Dependent Co-Arising

and especially:

The Paradox of Becoming

Of course, all of this is simply an aid to the one essential thing it all boils down to: practice!  Without practice, without earnest and skillful working with our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and intentions —and watching and analyzing the results of our actions — we are just “armchair” Buddhists, so to speak.

The practice comes to life when it becomes our life.  May these skillful insights and instructions inspire and help you!  Steve Goodheart

Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Watch What You’re Doing

Thanissaro Bhikkhu

“Days and nights fly past, fly past: What am I doing right now?”

The Buddha has you ask that question every day, both to keep yourself from being complacent and to remind yourself that the practice is one of doing. Even though we’re sitting here very still, there’s still a doing going on in the mind. There’s the intention to focus on the breath, the intention to maintain that focus, and the intention to keep watch over how the breath and the mind are behaving. Meditation as a whole is a doing. Even when you practice non-reactivity or “being the knowing,” there’s a still an element of intention. That’s what the doing is.

That was one of the Buddha’s most important insights: that even when you’re sitting perfectly still with the intention not to do anything, there’s still the intention, and the intention itself is a doing. It’s a sankhara, a fabrication. It’s what we live with all the time. In fact, all of our experience is based on fabrication. The fact that you sense your body, feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness—all of these aggregates: To be able to experience them in the present moment you have to fabricate a potential into an actual aggregate. You fabricate the potential for form into an actual experience of form, the potential for feeling into an actual experience of feeling, and so on.

This element of fabrication lies in the background all the time. It’s like the background noise of the Big Bang, which hums throughout the whole universe and doesn’t go away. The element of fabrication is always there, shaping our experience, and it’s so consistently present that we lose sight of it. We don’t realize what we’re doing.

What you’re trying to do as you meditate is to strip things down so you can see the very elemental fabrications going on in the mind, the kamma you’re creating with every moment. We’re not making the mind still simply to have a nice restful place to be, a nice experience of ease to soothe our stressed-out nerves. That may be part of it, but it’s not the whole practice. The other part is to see clearly what’s going on, to see the potential of human action: What are we doing all the time? What are the potentials contained in this doing? Then we apply that understanding of human action to see how far we can go in stripping away the unnecessary stress and suffering that come from acting in unskillful ways.

It’s important that we always keep this in mind as we meditate. Remember: We’re here to understand human action, in particular our own human actions. Otherwise we sit here hoping that we don’t have to do anything, that we can just wait for some Imax experiences to come whap us upside the head, or some nice glowing sense of oneness to come welling up inside. And sometimes things like that can come unexpectedly, but if they come without your understanding how or why they came, they’re not all that helpful. They’re restful for a while, or amazing for a while, but then they go away and you have to deal with your desire to get them back. And, of course, no amount of desire is going to get them back if it’s not accompanied by understanding.

You can’t totally drop human action until you understand the nature of action. This is really important. We like to think that we can simply stop doing, stop doing, stop doing, and things will settle down, get calm, and open up to emptiness. But that’s more like zoning out than meditating. There is an element of stopping in the meditation, an element of letting go, but you can’t really master it until you understand what you‘re trying to stop, what you’re letting go. So try to watch out for that.

When you come out of a good meditation, don’t simply get up and go back to the kitchen, have a cocoa, and go back to sleep. Reflect on what you did so as to understand the pattern of cause and effect, to see exactly what you fabricated in the process of bringing the mind down to a state of calm. After all, the path is a fabricated path. It’s the ultimate fabrication. As the Buddha said, of all the fabricated phenomena there are in the world, the highest is the noble eightfold path. This is the path we’re trying to follow right now. It’s something put together, and you won’t understand it until you see the putting-together in as you’re doing it.

So always have that in the back of your mind: that you are doing something here. Sometimes it seems frustrating that the whole hour may be spent just pulling back, pulling back, pulling the mind back to the breath. It wanders off, so you pull it back again, and then it wanders—when is the peace and calm going to come? Well, before it can come you have to develop some understanding. So when you pull it back, try to understand what you’re doing.

When it wanders off, try to understand what’s happening, what you did to encourage or allow it to wander off. In particular, try to uncover all the skillful and unskillful intentions that go into this back-and-forth process. When you understand how the mind goes back and forth, you’ll reach the point where you can keep it from going back and forth. At the same time, you’ll develop the kind of insight we want in the meditation: insight into actions.

The Buddha said discernment involves comprehending the process of fabrication, the process of action that’s going on in the mind all the time. And all the basic building blocks of action are right here. There’s the physical fabrication that leads to action—in other words, the breath. Without the breath you couldn’t do any other physical actions at all. Then there’s verbal fabrication: directed thought and evaluation. Without those you wouldn’t be able to speak.

And then there’s mental fabrication: perceptions and feelings. Without those, the process of mental fabrication wouldn’t have any building blocks to build with. These are all the most basic forms of activity: physical, verbal, and mental. So we bring them all together right here when we’ve got the mind with the breath. We’re focused on the breath, directing our thoughts to the breath, evaluating the breath, aware of all the mental labels that label the breath, and all the feelings that come with the breath, pleasant or unpleasant. All the basic building blocks are right here.

These building blocks are not things, they’re activities. You might call them basic activity units. These are the things you have to bring together in order to get the mind to settle down. Otherwise it goes off and elaborates all kinds of other worlds to inhabit, pulling its attention away from the basic activity units and hoping to live in their end-products.

So you keep reminding yourself to come back to this level, this level, this level where things are basic, and you try to manipulate these things skillfully so as to still the mind. It’s an intentional stilling, so there’s an element of doing even in the being still, but it’s a doing for the purpose of knowing. Most of our doing is for the purpose of ignorance. It comes out of ignorance and heads toward ignorance, covering up our intentions so that we can forget the effort that goes into the doing and simply enjoy the end-product experiences that our doing creates.

Some people think that Buddhism is a religion of experiences. We want to have a religious experience when we come here, we want to have an experience of release or an experience of peace. Actually, though, the Dhamma is meant to take us beyond our incessant habit of producing and consuming experiences. And to do that, we have to understand the nature of action that underlies the producing and consuming, to see exactly what it is to be a human being who acts. What does it mean to act? How does the mind act? What is an intention? Why does the mind have intentions? Are these process really pleasant or are they burdensome? What would it be like if we didn’t have to do them?

We need to look into these things, we need to understand these processes before we can get to where we really want to go. If you don’t understand human action, you won’t be able to explore the full limits of human action. You won’t be able to understand how far human action can take you. So we’re here to study, we’re here to learn from our actions.

This teaching on action is something particular to the Buddha’s teachings— this sense of what an action is and how far an action can go. It’s easy to say that all the great religions focus on having experiences beyond what words can describe. Sounds nice. Very friendly. Very ecumenical. But when you compare what the various religions say about action—what it means to act, what the potentials of human action are—you see that they differ greatly.

Some teachings say that we don’t really act at all, that there’s an outside force acting through us, that everything’s predetermined. Others say that we do act, but our actions have no real consequences. Or that there are lots of limitations on what we can do to produce true happiness, so we need some outside power to help us. You can’t lump these various teachings on action together and pretend that the differences don’t count. The fact is: They don’t jibe. They’re diametrically opposed. They get in one another’s way.

This was why the early Buddhists kept insisting that the teaching on action was what set Buddhism apart, that it was the most important issue where people have to make a choice and take a stand. And this was why the Buddha’s last words were that we need to be heedful. He didn’t end his teaching career with some nice platitudes on emptiness or nibbana. He said to be heedful—to see our actions as important and to keep that importance in mind at all times.

So this is where you have to make a choice: Which theory of action are you planning to place your hopes on? That’s what you’re asked to commit to when you take refuge in the Triple Gem: the teaching on action, the teaching on kamma. Taking refuge is not a warm, fuzzy, cowardly cop-out. It’s the act of taking on full responsibility for your choices and intentions.

How far are you planning to go with your actions? How far are you willing to push the envelope? These are questions that we all have to answer for ourselves, and no one can force the answer on us. But just remember: The Buddha said that it’s possible for human action to go to the end of action—in other words, to go to a dimension in the mind where ultimately there is no more intention. He says that that’s the highest happiness. Now, we can take that statement merely as an historical curiosity or we can take that as a personal challenge. It’s up to us.

At the very least, when you’re sitting here meditating and things don’t seem to be going right, don’t blame it on the weather. Don’t blame it on the time of day. Just look at what you’re doing. Look at the raw material you have to work with and your skill in fashioning that raw material into a state of calm.

From the Buddhist point of view, that raw material comes from past actions. You can’t change the fact that this is the raw material you have at hand, but you can fashion that raw material in different ways. That freedom of choice is always present. So if things aren’t going well in your meditation, look at your intentions to see what you might change. Look at your perceptions, at the questions you’re posing in the mind. Experiment. Improvise. See what makes a difference.

When things are going well, try to maintain them well. See how you can develop that sense of wellness even further. This is Right Effort. This is where we encounter the element of intention, the element of action directly in our own minds. If you sit here complaining about how things aren’t going well in your meditation, that’s your choice: You chose to complain. Is that the most skillful thing to do? If it’s not, try something else. You’ve always got that freedom.

When things are going well, you can always choose to get complacent. If you get complacent, where does that take you? You can choose to manipulate things too much, too little, or just right. The choices are here. It’s important that we keep that in mind. Otherwise we find ourselves trapped in a particular situation and can’t think our way out, because we don’t realize the range of available possibilities.

Try to keep your sense of those possibilities as alive as possible, so that the doing of the meditation becomes a skillful doing and not just a thrashing around. You observe, you watch, you look into this question: “What does it mean to have an intention? How can I see the results of my intentions? Where do they show their results?” They show their results both in your state of mind and in your breathing, so look right here, make your adjustments right here.

And even if you’re not consciously thinking about the nature of human action, you’re learning a lot about your own actions as you work with the breath, trying to keep the mind with the breath, trying to make the breath a good place for the mind to stay. You’re muddling around here in the basic elements of human action, like a young kid fooling around with a guitar: After a while, if the kid is observant, the fooling around turns into music. The more observant you are in the way you relate to the breath, the more your muddle will turn into a process of discovery.

Click here to visit “Metta Refuge Dharma Nuggets” — short Dharma insights for your Daily Practice and Inspiration

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Jack Engler

These remarks are excerpted from a day-long program given by Jack Engler at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (BCBS) on November 1, l997. Jack has had a long association with Dharma study and practice. He studied Pali language and Abhidhamma at the Post-Graduate Institute of Buddhist Studies in Nalanda, Bihar, and practiced meditation for several years in India with Anagarika Munindraji and Dipa Ma. He also studied with the Ven. Mahasi Sayadaw in Burma. He is co-author of Transformations of Consciousness (Shambhala, l986), and has been a clinical psychologist for more than twenty years. Jack is on the BCBS board of directors, and teaches in Barre from time to time.

The Unconscious Motivations for Meditation Practice

Jack Engler

I think there was a tendency in the first generation of vipassana practitioners in America to look upon meditation in the same way as a traditional Catholic would look upon the sacrament. There is a principle in sacramental theology, called ex opere operato, according to which the sacraments are efficacious in and of themselves, independent of the person administrating them or the person receiving them. In the early days of vipassana practice at IMS, we tended to adopt the same attitude towards meditation practice: “Here are the instructions—you understand them, you do it, and it works.”

My experience over the years is much more complicated than that. I find that meditation practice, like any other kind of behavior, can be used for good or for ill. It can be liberating—or we can yoke it into the service of our own neuroses. Buddhaghosa called practice a “path of purification.” It’s like refining the alloys out of ore until what you’re left with is the pure metal. As a process of refinement, practice is often loaded with trial and error. We make mistakes and discover how we’ve lost our balance again and again; but gradually we learn what’s right effort and what’s compulsion, what’s straining, what’s avoidance. A lot of practice is just the process of discovering what is not the path.

From a certain perspective of course it is all path—the process itself is the path. But in asking the same kinds of questions of a spiritual practice that a therapist, for example, might ask of any experience, one might discover a dozen unconscious motivations towards practice. And it’s worth looking at these for a moment, because meditation practice—like any other behavior—is multiply determined. It may have a lot of different meanings and be driven by a host of different motives. This is of course very much the Buddhist teaching of conditionality: there is no one simple cause and effect, but many ways in which even a single sitting is conditioned by many factors.

For example, at certain stages of the life cycle the major developmental task is the task of identity formation, of finding out who I am as a person, what values I am going to live by, who I am going to be. And if one is having trouble with that, or is ambivalent or conflicted about it, you can adopt the view of selflessness and egolessness and use it as a way of not really tackling this task.

Or practice can take the form of a narcissistic wish: through practice I am going to become self-sufficient and invulnerable, I am not going to hurt any more, I won’t feel pain or disappointment. I think for most of us this is buried somewhere in our psyche, though it would usually be subtle. It may be a lingering kind of narcissistic ideal around the notion of perfection. Practice can be fueled by the hidden thought , “I’ll be rid of all these yucky things about myself that I don’t like.” It’s important to be aware of this impulse or motive to the extent to which it is there.

You see how these things can skew even how you pay attention and what you pay attention to. Attention itself is very conditioned. The day that you can sit down and be mindful is probably the day you don’t need to practice anymore. It’s like the old principle in psychoanalysis: the day you can come in and just free associate on the couch is the day you don’t need analysis anymore. In other words, mindfulness and free association have to be learned and sorted out from all of the potential distortions. But that’s the wonderful part of practice, discovering all this and sorting it out, refining it.

Another unconscious motivation is often a fear of individuation, a fear of becoming independent and asserting oneself. This may show up as a certain passivity which could be rooted in avoidance of commitment and accountability. My experience with western practitioners is that we’re too detached—we need to learn how to become attached, in a healthy way. When people talk about detachment and renunciation, it often means there is some phobic avoidance. True detachment or true non-attachment is really plunging in and doing something with your whole heart, giving yourself totally to the act, totally to the person or totally to the situation and not holding anything back, doing whatever you are doing completely and then letting go.

Sometimes practice can be driven by devaluation of reason and intellect, especially for people for whom thinking is painful or who don’t like to think. It’s the converse of people who find feeling painful. Or it can, even in the act of looking into the inner world, be an escape from the inner world. So I can say to myself, “Well, it’s all just sensation, or it’s just thinking, or it’s just feeling.” That’s the classic instruction right? The classic way of noting, just noting; don’t get all caught up in the content. But that in itself can sometimes be an avoidance, not really wanting to know what I’m thinking, not seeing my thought very clearly and not seeing what I’m feeling very clearly.

There may be other hidden motives in practice, like the fear of intimacy or the fear of social involvement. Practice can sometimes be a substitute for grief and mourning. Dharma asks the same question as a therapist would ask: How do we let go of the things that bind us? How do we let go of unhealthy attachments? They have to be grieved, they can’t just be observed or watched or dismissed by the kind of noting we use for mindfulness practice. There’s no way to avoid the process of mourning.

Insight by itself is not enough, in therapy or in meditation, because insight doesn’t necessarily lead to change. We all know that we can have a very good conceptual grasp of something, or insight into ourselves, and still do the same damn thing we’ve always done. It’s the inner resistance that has to be dealt with before change occurs. So there really is no way around grieving in this transient world.

But sometimes we use practice to immunize ourselves from the feeling and the pain—practice can be used to avoid feeling. It can be done in an intellectual way through obsessive observation or by splitting off affect and feeling from insight and understanding, so the observation stays very cool and dry. But this detached coolness has a certain lifelessness about it. Of course you can use practice to wallow in feeling too.

Then there are motives of passivity and dependence. Practice can become self-punishing, out of some kind of guilt or bad feeling about yourself. The stubborn refusal not to move until the end of the sitting, for instance: “I’m in a lot of pain but the bell hasn’t rung yet and the instructions are not to move until the end of the sitting.” Now, this can be an opportunity to work with pain and that can be a very powerful form of practice in that moment. It can also have other roots though; there can be a self-punishing quality in staying with pain when it’s not really productive or when we’re doing it in a masochistic way.

The art of practice is gradually teasing out that difference and gradually being able to distinguish the healthy and skillful motivations from the unhealthy and unskillful. That is why practice can be so creative, because it requires these constant discriminations all the time. You can’t do it in a mechanical way. There’s so much to learn and so many wonderful choices all the time in practice—and this is one of them.

Click here to visit “Metta Refuge Dharma Nuggets” — short Dharma insights for your Daily Practice and Inspiration

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Dighanakha asked the Buddha, “Gautama, what is your teaching? What are your doctrines? For my part, I dislike all doctrines and theories. I don’t subscribe to any at all.”

The Buddha smiled and asked, “Do you subscribe to your doctrine of not following and doctrines? Do you believe in your doctrine of not-believing?”

Somewhat taken aback, Dighanakha replied, “Gautama whether I believe of don’t believe is no importance.”

The Buddha spoke gently, “Once a person is caught by belief in a doctrine, he loses all his freedom. When on becomes dogmatic, he believes his doctrine is the only truth and that all other doctrines are heresy. Disputes and conflicts all arise from narrow views. They can extend endlessly, wasting precious time and sometimes even leading to war. Attachment to views is the greatest impediment to the spiritual path. Bound to narrow views, one becomes so entangled that it is no longer possible to let the door of truth open.”

[...]

Dighanakha asked, “But what of your own teaching? If someone follows your teaching will he become caught in narrow views?”

“My teaching is not a doctrine or a philosophy. It is not the result of discursive thought or mental conjecture like various philosophies which contend that the fundamental essence of the universe is fire, water, earth, wind, or spirit, or that the universe is either finite or infinite, temporal, or eternal. Mental conjecture and discursive thought about truth are like ants crawling around the rim of the bowl — they never get anywhere. The things I say come from my own experience. You can confirm them all by your own experience.

[...]

My goal is not to explain the universe, but to help guide others to have a direct experience of reality. Words cannot describe reality. Only direct experience enables us to see the true face of reality.”

Dighanakha exclaimed, “Wonderful, wonderful Gautama! But what would happen if a person did perceive your teaching as a dogma?”

[...]

I must state clearly that my teaching is method to experience reality and not reality itself, just as a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself. An intelligent person makes use of the finger to see the moon.”

Click here to visit “Metta Refuge Dharma Nuggets” — short Dharma insights for your Daily Practice and Inspiration

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Samsara Divided by Zero

by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

“The goal of Buddhist practice, nibbana, is said to be totally uncaused, and right there is a paradox. If the goal is uncaused, how can a path of practice — which is causal by nature — bring it about? This is an ancient question. The Milinda-pañha, a set of dialogues composed near the start of the common era, reports an exchange where King Milinda challenges a monk, Nagasena, with precisely this question. Nagasena replies with an analogy. The path of practice doesn’t cause nibbana, he says. It simply takes you there, just as a road to a mountain doesn’t cause the mountain to come into being, but simply leads you to where it is.

Nagasena’s reply, though apt, didn’t really settle the issue within the Buddhist tradition. Over the years many schools of meditation have taught that mental fabrications simply get in the way of a goal that’s uncaused and unfabricated. Only by doing nothing at all and thus not fabricating anything in the mind, they say, will the unfabricated shine forth.

This view is based on a very simplistic understanding of fabricated reality, seeing causality as linear and totally predictable: X causes Y which causes Z and so on, with no effects turning around to condition their causes, and no possible way of using causality to escape from the causal network.

However, one of the many things the Buddha discovered in the course of his awakening was that causality is not linear. The experience of the present is shaped both by actions in the present and by actions in the past. Actions in the present shape both the present and the future. The results of past and present actions continually interact. Thus there is always room for new input into the system, which gives scope for free will. There is also room for the many feedback loops that make experience so thoroughly complex, and that are so intriguingly described in chaos theory. Reality doesn’t resemble a simple line or circle. It’s more like the bizarre trajectories of a strange attractor or a Mandelbrot set.

Because there are many similarities between chaos theory and Buddhist explanations of causality, it seems legitimate to explore those similarities to see what light chaos theory can throw on the issue of how a causal path of practice can lead to an uncaused goal. This is not to equate Buddhism with chaos theory, or to engage in pseudo-science. It’s simply a search for similes to clear up an apparent conflict in the Buddha’s teaching.

Jules-Henri Poincaré

And it so happens that one of the discoveries of non-linear math — the basis for chaos theory — throws light on just this issue. In the 19th century, the French mathematician Jules-Henri Poincaré discovered that in any complex physical system there are points he called resonances. If the forces governing the system are described as mathematical equations, the resonances are the points where the equations intersect in such a way that one of the members is divided by zero. This, of course, produces an undefined result, which means that if an object within the system strayed into a resonance point, it would no longer be defined by the causal network determining the system. It would be set free.

In actual practice, it’s very rare for an object to hit a resonance point. The equations describing the points immediately around a resonance tend to deflect any incoming object from entering the resonance unless the object is on a precise path to the resonance’s very heart.

Still, it doesn’t take too much complexity to create resonances — Poincaré discovered them while calculating the gravitational interactions among three bodies: the earth, the sun, and the moon. The more complex the system, the greater the number of resonances, and the greater the likelihood that objects will stray into them. It’s no wonder that meteors, on a large scale, and electrons on a small scale, occasionally wander right into a resonance in a gravitational or electronic field, and thus to the freedom of total unpredictability. This is why meteors sometimes leave the solar system, and why your computer occasionally freezes for no apparent reason. It’s also why strange things could happen someday to the beating of your heart.

Buddha - Anya Langmead

If we were to apply this analogy to the Buddhist path, the system we’re in is samsara, the round of rebirth. Its resonances would be what the texts called “non-fashioning,” the opening to the uncaused: nibbana. The wall of resistant forces around the resonances would correspond to pain, stress, and attachment. To allow yourself to be repelled by stress or deflected by attachment, no matter how subtle, would be like approaching a resonance but then veering off to another part of the system. But to focus directly on analyzing stress and attachment, and deconstructing their causes, would be like getting on an undeflected trajectory right into the resonance and finding total, undefined freedom.

This, of course, is simply an analogy. But it’s a fruitful one for showing that there is nothing illogical in actively mastering the processes of mental fabrication and causality for the sake of going beyond fabrication, beyond cause and effect. At the same time, it gives a hint as to why a path of total inaction would not lead to the unfabricated. If you simply sit still within the system of causality, you’ll never get near the resonances where true non-fashioning lies. You’ll keep floating around in samsara. But if you take aim at stress and clinging, and work to take them apart, you’ll be able to break through to the point where the present moment gets divided by zero in the mind.”

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Steve Goodheart Essay

In the “Diamond Approach” of A. H. Almaas, there are many similarities, yet profound and important differences between this path and Buddhism, perhaps particularly Theravadan Buddhism.  Almaas envisions, and speaks from his experience, of “something” beyond “the void” or “emptiness” of traditional Buddhism—that which he calls “Essence” or “Being.”

When Almaas speaks of “Essence” or “Being” his meaning of these terms, though uniquely his (and one should investigate for oneself as to what Almaas means), are to my mind very much more like the Mahayanan view of ultimate reality, as when the Tibetans speak of the dharmakaya, or “truth body” or “reality body” —the unmanifested or “inconceivable” aspect of a  Buddha. Perhaps what Almaas is pointing to with “Essence” is also similar to the concept of a “Buddha nature.”  Again, investigate Almaas for yourself, and see what you think.

What Almaas is trying to describe is also similar to some Vedantan philosophic views of Being, though with many important distinctions and differences. Again, don’t assume that if you know what Vedanta means by “Being” or “Essence” you know what Almaas means. For example, there is much in Almaas that also reflects Sufism and its views of the ultimate, and Sufism is not Vedanta.

Bottom line: go and see for yourself in Almaas writings. All descriptions of reality are just that—no one knows that better than Almaas, but I have found what Almaas has seen and discovered extraordinarily helpful and skillful, especially in his integration of spirituality and psychological healing.

Below are some relevant quotations of Almaas on the “void” and “emptiness” from the beautifully designed and highly useful online Almaas glossary, the The Almaasary.

The quotations are from these books:

The Void: Inner Spaciousness and Ego Structure

Essence: The Diamond Approach to Inner Realization

I hope these short excerpts pique your curiosity to look into the Diamond Approach of Almaas for yourself.  Like many others, I have found the teachings to be deep and extraordinarily skillful. Steve Goodheart

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The Void

The experience of the void is an important juncture. It is necessary for the transition from the realm of personality to the realm of Essence or Being. But by no means is it the final end of personality. And the void itself is not Essence yet.”
A. H. Almaas (Essence, pg 48)

So we see that the void is the emptiness resulting from the dissolution of personality needed for the emergence of Essence. In other words the basic ground of our experience is empty space, the void.
A. H. Almaas (Essence, pg 52)

Empty Space and the Void

“The void is the experience of oneself, one’s Essence, as empty space. It is an experience of expansion, spaciousness, openness, and boundlessness. The mind is not bound by the rigid boundaries of the personality’s self-image. Its effect on perception is to see things as they are, without distortion… The void is really nothing but the absence of the personality and its various distortions. The mind is empty then, completely empty of the personality. It is as if the inner space is cleaned out, emptied, of the personality and its patterns, mental or physical. The person feels free, fresh, light, and unhampered. The mind is seen as it is, an immaculate emptiness.
A. H. Almaas (Essence, pg 141)

“Even the annihilation space is experienced, and hence there is a boundary. In other words, it is an individual experience. The annihilation is still related to oneself. The sense of individual experience remains, in a very subtle sense, as the annihilation of self. The experience is still self-centered, self-related. The annihilation happens to somebody, to oneself. The dissolution of this subtle boundary of individual experience leads to yet deeper and more open space, an utterly empty space.

This space is complete and total emptiness. It is the emptiness which eliminates separating boundaries. There is no more a sense of individual experience. There is nobody there experiencing the emptiness. At this level, there is no difference between awareness and emptiness. Again, this space cannot be conceived by the mind. The mind cannot conceive of experience which is not an individual experience.”
A. H. Almaas (The Void, pg 149)

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• A. H. Almass on Sinking Your Boats and becoming the Universal Heretic (mettarefuge.wordpress.com)

Ajahn Medhanandi

The Joy Hidden in Sorrow

Reflections by Ajahn Medhanandi

“When Marpa, the great Tibetan meditation master and teacher of Milarepa, lost his son he wept bitterly. One of his pupils came up to him and asked: ‘Master, why are you weeping? You teach us that death is an illusion.’And Marpa said: ‘Death is an illusion.  And the death of a child is an even greater illusion.’

But what Marpa was able to show his disciple was that while he could understand the truth about the conditioned nature of everything and the emptiness of forms, he could still be a human being. He could feel what he was feeling; he could open to his grief. He could be completely present to feel that loss.And he could weep openly.

There is nothing incongruous about feeling our feelings, touching our pain, and, at the same time understanding the truth of the way things are. Pain is pain; grief is grief; loss is loss — we can accept those things. Suffering is what we add onto them when we push away, when we say, ‘No, I can’t.’

Today, while I was reading the names of my grandparents who were murdered, together with my aunts and uncles and their children, during World War II — their naked bodies thrown into giant pits — these images suddenly overwhelmed me with a grief that I didn’t know was there.

I felt a choking pressure, unable to breathe. As the tears ran down my cheeks, I began to recollect, bringing awareness to the physical experience, and to breathe into this painful memory, allowing it to be. It’s not a failure to feel these things. It’s not a punishment. It is part of life; it’s part of this human journey.

So the difference between pain and suffering is the difference between freedom and bondage. If we’re able to be with our pain, then we can accept, investigate and heal. But if it’s not okay to grieve, to be angry, or to feel frightened or lonely then it’s not okay to look at what we are feeling, and it’s not okay to hold it in our hearts and to find our peace with it.When we can’t feel what must be felt, when we resist or try to run from life, then we are enslaved.Where we cling is where we suffer, but when we simply feel the naked pain on its own, our suffering dies…That’s the death we need to die.

Through ignorance, through our inability to see Dhamma, to see things as they really are, we create so many prisons. We are unable to be awake, to feel true loving-kindness for ourselves, or even to love the person sitting next to us. If we can’t open our hearts to the deepest wounds, if we can’t cross the abyss the mind has created through its ignorance, selfishness, greed, and hatred, then we are incapable of loving, of realising our true potential.We remain unable to finish the business of this life.”

This excerpt is from:

Freeing the Heart (click to download PDF)

Nuns’ Community at Amaravati & Cittaviveka Buddhist Monasteries

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“Feeling is not-self …. “Perception is not-self …. “Fabrications are not-self …. “Consciousness is not-self. If consciousness were the self, this consciousness would not lend itself to dis-ease. It would be possible (to say) with regard to consciousness, ‘Let my consciousness be thus. Let my consciousness not be thus.’ But precisely because  consciousness is not-self, consciousness lends itself to dis- ease. And it is not possible (to say) with regard to consciousness, ‘Let my consciousness be thus. Let my consciousness not be thus.’

“What do you think, monks: Is form constant or inconstant?”

“Inconstant, lord.” “And is that which is inconstant easeful or stressful?” “Stressful, lord.”

“And is it fitting to regard what is inconstant, stressful, subject to change as: ‘This is mine. This is my self. This is what I am’?”

“No, lord.” “… Is feeling constant or inconstant?” “Inconstant, lord.” …. “… Is perception constant or inconstant?” “Inconstant, lord.” …. “… Are fabrications constant or inconstant?” “Inconstant, lord.” …. “What do you think, monks: Is consciousness constant or inconstant?” “Inconstant, lord.”

“And is that which is inconstant easeful or stressful?” “Stressful, lord.” “And is it fitting to regard what is inconstant, stressful, subject to change as: ‘This is mine. This is my self. This is what I am’?” “No, lord.”

“Thus, monks, any form whatsoever that is past, future, or present; internal or external; blatant or subtle; common or sublime; far or near: Every form is to be seen with right discernment as it has come to be as: ‘This is not mine. This is not my self. This is not what I am.’

“Any feeling whatsoever…. “Any perception whatsoever…. “Any fabrications whatsoever…. “Any consciousness whatsoever that is past, future, or present; internal or  external; blatant or subtle; common or sublime; far or near: Every consciousness is to be seen with right discernment as it has come to be as: ‘This is not mine. This is not my self. This is not what I am.’”

— SN (Samyutta Nikaya) 22:59

Translated from the Pali canon by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

from “Skill in Questions”
HOW THE BUDDHA TAUGHT
Thanissaro Bhikkhu

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Click here to visit “Metta Refuge Dharma Nuggets” — short Dharma insights for your Daily Practice and Inspiration