This article is adapted from a workshop offered at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, February 23-25, 1996 by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Abbot of Metta Forest Monastery, San Diego County, California.
Many people tell us that
the Buddha taught two different types of meditation: mindfulness meditation
and concentration meditation. Mindfulness meditation, they say, is the direct
path, while concentration practice is the scenic route that you take at your
own risk because it's very easy to get caught there and you may never get
out. But when you actually look at what the Buddha taught, he never separates
these two practices. They are both parts of a single whole. Every time he
explains mindfulness and its place in the path, he makes it clear that the
purpose of mindfulness practice is to lead the mind into a state of Right
Concentration--to get the mind to settle down and to find a place where it
can really feel stable, at home, where it can look at things steadily and
see them for what they are.
Part of the "two
practices" issue centers on how we understand the word jhana, which is
a synonym for Right Concentration. Many of us have heard that jhana is a very
intense trance-like state that requires intense staring and shutting out the
rest of the world. It sounds nothing like mindfulness at all. But if you look
in the Canon where the Buddha describes jhana, that's not the kind of state
he's talking about. To be in jhana is to be absorbed, very pleasurably, in
the sense of the whole body altogether. A very broad sense of awareness fills
the entire body. One of the images the Buddha used to describe this state
is that of a person kneading water into dough so that the water permeates
throughout the flour. Another is a lake in which a cool spring comes welling
up and suffuses the entire lake.
Now, when you're with
the body as a whole, you're very much in the present moment. You're right
there all the time. As the Buddha says, the fourth jhana— in which the
body is filled with bright awareness—is the point where mindfulness and
equanimity become pure. So there should be no problem in combining mindfulness
practice with whole-body awareness that gets very settled and still. In fact,
the Buddha himself combines them in his description of the first four steps
of breath meditation: (1) being aware of long breathing, (2) being aware of
short breathing, (3) being aware of the whole body as you breathe in and breathe
out, and then (4) calming the sensation of the breath within the body. This,
as the texts tell us, is basic mindfulness practice. It's also a basic concentration
practice. You're getting into the first jhana—Right Concentration—right
there, at the same time that you're practicing Right Mindfulness.
To see how Right Mindfulness
and Right Concentration help each other in the practice, we can look at the
three stages of mindfulness practice given in the Foundations of Mindfulness
Sutta. Take the body as an example. The first stage is to keep focused on
the body in and of itself, putting aside greed and distress with reference
to the world. What this means is taking the body as a body, without thinking
about it in terms of what it means or what it can do in the world. It could
be either good or bad looking. It could be strong or weak. It could be agile
or clumsy—all the issues we tend to worry about when we think about the
body. The Buddha says to put those issues aside.
Just be with the body
in and of itself, sitting right here. You close your eyes—what do you
have? There's the sensation of "bodiness" that you're sitting with.
That's your frame of reference. Try to stay with it. Keep bringing the mind
back to this sense of the body until it gets the message and begins to settle
down. In the beginning of the practice you find the mind going out to grasp
this or that, so you note it enough to tell it to let go, return to the body,
and hold on there. Then it goes out to grasp something else, so you tell it
to let go, come back, and latch onto the body again. Eventually, though, you
reach a point where you can actually grasp hold of the breath and you don't
let go. From that point on, whatever else that happens to come into your awareness
is like something coming up and brushing the back of your hand. You don't
have to note it. You stay with the body as your basic frame of reference.
Other things come and go, you're aware of them, but you don't drop the breath
and go grasping after them. This is when you really have established the body
as a solid frame of reference.
As you do this, you develop
three qualities of mind. One is mindfulness (sati). The term mindfulness means
being able to remember, to keep something in mind. In the case of establishing
the body as a frame of reference, it means being able to remember where you're
supposed to be—with the body—and you don't let yourself forget.
The second quality, alertness (sampajanna), means being aware of what is actually
going on in the present. Are you with the body? Are you with the breath? Is
the breath comfortable? Simply notice what's actually happening in the present
moment. We tend to confuse mindfulness with alertness, but actually they are
two separate things: mindfulness means being able to remember where you want
to keep your awareness; alertness means being aware of what's actually happening.
The third quality, ardency (atappa), means two things. One, if you realize
that the mind has wandered off, you bring it right back. Immediately. You
don't let it wander around, sniffing the flowers. Two, when the mind is with
its proper frame of reference, ardency means trying to be as sensitive as
possible to what's going on—not just drifting in the present moment,
but really trying to penetrate more and more into the subtle details of what's
actually happening with the breath or the mind.
When you have these three
qualities focused on the body in and of itself, you can't help but settle
down and get really comfortable with the body in the present moment. That's
when you're ready for the second stage in the practice, which is described
as being aware of the phenomenon of origination and the phenomenon of passing
away. This is a stage where you're trying to understand cause and effect as
they happen in the present. In terms of concentration practice, once you've
got the mind to settle down, you want to understand the interaction of cause
and effect in the process of concentration so that you can get it to settle
down more solidly for longer periods of time in all sorts of situations, on
the cushion and off. To do this, you have to learn about how things arise
and pass away in the mind, not by simply watching them, but actually getting
involved in their arising and passing away.
You can see this in the
Buddha's instructions for dealing with the hindrances. In the first stage,
he says to be aware of the hindrances as they come and go. Some people think
that this is an exercise in "choiceless awareness," where you don't
try to will the mind in any direction, where you simply sit and watch willy-nilly
whatever comes into the mind. In actual practice, though, the mind isn't yet
ready for that. What you need at this stage is a fixed point of reference
for evaluating the events in the mind, just as when you're trying to gauge
the motion of clouds through the sky: You need to choose at a fixed point—like
a roof gable or a light pole—at which to stare so that you can get a
sense of which direction and how fast the clouds are moving. The same with
the coming and going of sensual desire, ill will, etc. in the mind: You have
to try to maintain a fixed reference point for the mind—like the breath—if
you want to be really sensitive to when there are hindrances in the mind—getting
in the way of your reference point—and when there are not.
Suppose that anger is
interfering with your concentration. Instead of getting involved in the anger,
you try simply to be aware of when it's there and when it's not. You look
at the anger as an event in and of itself—as it comes, as it goes. But
you don't stop there. The next step—as you're still working at focusing
on the breath—is recognizing how anger can be made to go away. Sometimes
simply watching it is enough to make it go away; sometimes it's not, and you
have to deal with it in other ways, such as arguing with the reasoning behind
the anger or reminding yourself of the drawbacks of anger. In the course of
dealing with it, you have to get your hands dirty. You've got to try and figure
out why the anger is coming, why it's going, how you can get it out of there,
because you realize that it's an unskillful state. And this requires that
you improvise. Experiment. You've got to chase your ego and impatience out
of the way so that you can have the space to make mistakes and learn from
them, so that you can develop a skill in dealing with the anger. It's not
just a question of hating the anger and trying to push it away, or of loving
the anger and welcoming it. These approaches may give results in the short
run, but in the long run they're not especially skillful. What's called for
here is the ability to see what the anger is composed of; how can you take
it apart.
One technique I like to
use—when anger is present and you're in a situation where you don't immediately
have to react to people—is simply to ask yourself in a good-natured way,
"Okay, why are you angry?" Listen to what the mind has to say. Then
pursue the matter: "But why are you angry at that?""Of course,
I'm angry. After all...""Well, why are you angry at that?"
If you keep this up, the mind will eventually admit to something stupid, like
the assumption that people shouldn't be that way—even though they blatantly
are that way—or that people should act in line with your standards, or
whatever. The mind is so embarrassed about that, it tries to hide from you.
But finally, if you keep probing, it'll fess up. You gain a lot of understanding
into the anger that way, and this can really weaken its power over you. ...you
have to learn about how things arise and pass away in the mind, not by simply
watching them, but actually getting involved in their arising and passing
away.
In terms of the positive
qualities like mindfulness, serenity, and concentration, it's a similar sort
of thing. First, you're aware of when they're there and when they're not,
and then you realize that when they're there it's much nicer than when they're
not. So you try to figure out how they come, how they go. You do this by consciously
trying to maintain that state of mindfulness and concentration. If you're
really observant—and this is what it's all about, being observant—you
begin to see that there are skillful ways of maintaining the state without
getting all tied up in failure or success in doing it, without letting the
desire for a settled state of mind actually getting in the way of the mind's
settling down. You do want to succeed, but you need a balanced attitude toward
failure and success so that you can learn from them. Nobody's keeping score
or taking grades. You're here to understand for your own sake. So this process
of developing your foundation of mindfulness or developing your frame of reference
is not "just watching." It's more a participation in the process
of arising and passing away—actually playing with the process—so
that you can learn from experience how cause and effect work in the mind.
It's like learning about
eggs. You can learn certain things about eggs just by watching one, but you
don't learn very much. To learn about eggs you have to put them in a pan and
try to make something out of them. As you do this long enough you begin to
understand that there are variations in eggs, and there are certain ways that
they react to heat and ways that they react to oil or butter or whatever.
And so by actually working with the egg and trying to make something out of
it, you really come to understand eggs.
It's the same with the
mind: unless you actually try to make something out of the mind, try to get
a mental state going and keep it going, you don't really know the processes
of cause and effect within your own mind. There has to be a factor of actual
participation in the process. That way you can understand it. This all comes
down to being observant and developing a skill. The essence of developing
a skill means two things. One, you're aware of a situation as it is given
and, two, you're aware of what you put into it. When the Buddha talks about
causation he says that every situation is shaped from two directions—the
causes coming in from the past and the causes you're putting into the present.
You need to be sensitive to both. If you aren't sensitive to what you're putting
into a situation, you'll never develop any kind of skill. As you're aware
of what you're doing, you also look at the results. If something isn't right,
you go back and change what you've done—keeping at this until you get
the results you want. And in the process, you learn a great deal from the
eggs or whatever you're trying to deal with skillfully.
The same holds true with
the mind. Of course, you could learn something about the mind by trying to
get it into any sort of a state, but for the purpose of developing really
penetrating insight, a state of stable, balanced, mindful concentration is
the best kind of soufflé you want to make with the mind. The factors of pleasure,
ease, and rapture that arise when the mind really settles down help you stay
comfortably in the present moment, with a low center of gravity. Once the
mind is firmly settled there, you have something to look at for a long period
of time so that you can see what it's made up of. In the typical unbalanced
state of the mind, things are appearing and disappearing too fast for you
to notice them clearly. But as the Buddha notes, when you get really skilled
at jhana, you can step back a bit and really see what you've got. You can
see, say, where there's an element of attachment, where there's an element
of stress, or even where there's inconstancy—within your balanced state.
This is where you begin to gain insight, as you see the natural cleavage lines
among the different factors of the mind.
Another advantage to this
mindful, concentrated state is that as you feel more and more at home in it,
you begin to realize that it's possible to have happiness and pleasure in
life without depending on things outside of yourself—people, relationships,
approval from others, or any of the issues that come from being part of the
world. This realization helps pry loose your attachments to things outside.
Some people are afraid of getting attached to a state of calm, but actually
it's very important that you get attached here, so that you begin to settle
down here and begin to undo your other attachments. Only when this attachment
to calm is the only one left do you begin work on loosening it up as well.
Still another reason why
solid concentration is necessary for insight is that when discernment comes
to the mind, the basic lesson it will teach you is that you've been stupid.
You've held onto things even though deep down inside you should have known
better. Now, try telling that to people when they're hungry and tired. They'll
come right back with, "You're stupid, too," and that's the end of
the discussion. Nothing gets accomplished. But if you talk to someone who
has had a full meal and feels rested, you can broach all kinds of topics without
risking a fight. It's the same with the mind. When it has been well fed with
the rapture and ease coming from concentration, it's ready to learn. It can
accept your criticisms without feeling threatened or abused.
So. This is the role that
concentration practice plays in this second stage of mindfulness practice:
It gives you something to play with, a skill to develop so you can begin to
understand the factors of cause and effect within the mind. You begin to see
the mind as just a flux of causes with their effects coming back at you. Your
ideas are part of this flux of cause and effect, your emotions, your sense
of who you are. This insight begins to loosen your attachments to the whole
process.
What finally happens is
that the mind reaches a third level of mindfulness practice where the mind
comes to a state of perfect equilibrium—where you've developed this state
of balanced concentration to the point where you don't have to put anything
more into it. In the Foundations of Mindfulness Sutta this is described as
simply being aware—if you are using the body as your frame of reference,
being aware that "There is a body," just enough for knowledge and
mindfulness, without being attached to anything in the world.
Other texts call this
the state of "non-fashioning." The mind reaches the point where
you begin to realize that all causal processes in the mind—including
the processes of concentration and insight—are like tar babies. If you
like them, you get stuck; if you don't like them, you get stuck. So what are
you going to do? You have to unravel your participation in the present moment.
That's when things open up in the mind.
Many people want to jump
right in and begin at the level of not adding anything to the present moment,
but it doesn't work that way. You can't be sensitive to the subtle things
the mind is habitually adding to the present until you've consciously tried
to alter what you're adding. As you get more and more skilled, you get more
sensitive to the subtle things you didn't realize you were doing. You reach
a point of disenchantment, where you realize that the most skillful way of
dealing with the present is to strip away all levels of participation that
cause even the slightest bit of stress in the mind. You start dismantling
the levels of participation that you learned in the second stage of the practice,
to the point where things reach equilibrium on their own, where there's letting
go and release.
So it's important to realize
that there are these three stages to mindfulness practice, and to understand
the role that deliberate concentration practice plays in taking you through
the first two. Without aiming at Right Concentration, you can't develop the
skills needed for understanding the mind—for it's in the process of mastering
the skill of mindful concentration that true insight arises.
Only when you've really
understood and mastered the currents of cause and effect in the mind—the
currents of craving that cause suffering and stress, and the currents of mindfulness
and concentration that form the Path—can you let them go and find the
freedom that lies beyond them.