He is a monk who has overcome evil

He who wholly subdues evil-deeds born small and great, is called a monk because he has overcome all evil. - Dhammattha Vagga - The Dhammapada

Science explores meditation's effect on the brain

by Lionel Wijesiri

Scientists are now taking advantage of new technologies to see exactly what goes on inside the brains of Buddhist monks and other individuals when they meditate intensively and regularly. The neuroscientists have discovered that regular meditation actually alters the way the brain is wired, and that these changes could be at the heart of claims that meditation can improve health and well-being.

In 1998, Dr. James Austin, a neurologist, wrote the book 'Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness'. Several mindfulness researchers cite his book as a reason they became interested in the field. In it, Austin examines consciousness by intertwining his personal experiences with meditation with explanations backed up by hard science. When he describes how meditation can "sculpt" the brain, he means it literally and figuratively.

Before Austin, others had aimed to teach meditation to individuals without experience but who hoped to reap mental and physical health benefits. In 1975, Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in USA., where they continue to practice and teach meditation.

Salzberg has written several books, including 'Faith and Loving-kindness,' 'The Revolutionary Art of Happiness'. Kornfield holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, Burma and India.

Effects of meditation

For decades, researchers at the Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin have sought to document how meditation enhances the qualities societies need in their human capital: sharpened intuition, steely concentration, and plummeting stress levels.

What's different today is groundbreaking research showing that when people meditate, they alter the biochemistry of their brains. The evolution of powerful mind-monitoring technologies has also enabled scientists to scan the minds of meditators on a microscopic scale, revealing fascinating insights about the plasticity of the mind and meditation's ability to sculpt it.

Some of those insights have emerged in the lab of Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Throughout his career, Davidson has pondered why people react so differently to the same stressful situations, and for the past 20 years he has been conducting experiments to find out.

Davidson has been placing electrodes on meditating Buddhist monks as they sit on his lab floor watching different visual stimuli - including disturbing images of war - flash on a screen. Davidson and his team then observe the monks as they meditate while ensconced in the clanking, coffin-like tubes of MRI machines.

What the researchers see are brains unlike any they have observed elsewhere. The monks' left prefrontal cortices - the area associated with positive emotion - are far more active than in non-meditators' brains.

In other words, he says, the monks' meditation practice, which changes their neural physiology, enables them to respond with equanimity to sources of stress.

Meditation doesn't make meditators sluggish or apathetic ; it simply allows them to detach from their emotional reactions so they can respond appropriately.

"In our country, people are very involved in the physical-fitness craze, working out several times a week," says Davidson. "But we don't pay that kind of attention to our minds. Modern neuroscience is showing that our minds are as plastic as our bodies. Meditation can help you train your mind in the same way exercise can train your body."

Davidson's research didn't stop with the monks. To find out whether meditation could have lasting, beneficial effects in the workplace, he performed a study at Madison Biotech Company employees. Four dozen employees met once a week for eight weeks to practice mindfulness meditation for three hours.

The result, published last year in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, showed that the employees' left pre-fontal cortices were enlarged, just like those of the monks (but not that much). "We took typical, middle-class Americans trying to cope with the demands of an active work life and active family life who reported being relatively stressed out," says Davidson.

"And what we found out is that after a short time meditation had profound effects not just on how they felt but on their brains and bodies."

Cancer patients

In a series of experiments conducted at Canada's Princess Margaret Hospital, cancer pain patients have found out that profound changes are possible with meditation. Take the case of Melissa Munroe, a first-class professional athletic in Canada.

After being diagnosed with cancer about six year ago, Melissa Munroe suffered excruciating pain as tumours pressed against her nerves and organs. Making things worse was the trauma of her diagnosis. It was shocking, because Munroe had led such a healthy lifestyle.

Munroe said, "I've never drank alcohol in my whole life, never smoked cigarettes in my whole life, and never done drugs in my whole life. It was a shock to me when I was diagnosed with cancer."

At Toronto's Princess Margaret Hospital where she underwent chemotherapy, Munroe took a meditation program with psychiatrist Dr. Tatiana Melnyk. Munroe soon learned that pain is not just a physical sensation, but can be made worse through anxiety.

Daily meditation helped her isolate her pain and manage it, despite her initial reservations. "I was the biggest sceptic. I wasn't sold on it because I'd never tried it. But what I didn't realize is that if people have ever found themselves taking a walk in the countryside, in the forest, or on a nice pleasant autumn day . and find themselves in a bit of a contemplative state, that's a form of meditation."

The meditation was so effective that Munroe was able to avoid any pain medication. She also decided to take a seminar with Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who pioneered the use of medical meditation at the University of Massachusetts. "I really enjoyed it. I can relate to anybody who's logical, rationale, and who uses common sense. Jon Kabat-Zinn literally just describes how we just kind of get in the way of ourselves and complicate our lives when our lives maybe aren't that complicated."

While Munroe initially tried meditation to manage her chronic pain on the advice of a colleague, she soon learned that the program was having a profound impact on her general sense of well-being. She is now highly enthusiastic about meditation, and speaks eloquently about the process as only a daily practitioner could.

"It's not about ignoring your thoughts," Munroe says, "It's like when you're walking down a street on the sidewalk in the city and there's people walking in the opposite direction. You see them in the distance, they come closer and then they pass you by. Well, it's the same thing with thoughts as you meditate. It's not about avoiding the thought, because the very effort that you put into avoiding the thought steers you away from a meditative state."

Munroe sees meditation as a way to raise a person's quality of life by learning to focus on what's important, and ignore fleeting and meaningless desires. For patients like Munroe, who has learned to regain control of her life by gaining control of her pain, meditation is now a natural part of her daily existence. She encourages everyone to try it.

On understanding the world as taught by the Buddha

by Kingsley Heendeniya

We are witness to earthquakes, landslides, hurricanes, cyclones, tsunamis, floods, fires, wars, murder, poverty and so on - things again from the time civilizations like Mayan, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Chinese, Mongolian, Indian, Muslim etc rose to zenith and vanished. Everything seems a film re-play.

Clearly, this cannot be caprice of an all-powerful, all-merciful, all-knowing Being - to create merely to destroy. So what does the Buddha have to say about it?

To begin with, the Buddha did not teach about the beginning, the end and purpose of the world though he spoke briefly about cyclical world contraction and expansion [as scientists now claim], recollecting his birth in 33 aeons of world contraction and expansion: "Seeking but not finding the house builder, I traveled through the round of countless births".

He used the concept 'world' as a metaphor for this body. "It is in this fathom-long carcass with its perceptions and its mind that I describe the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world, and the way leading to the cessation of the world. It is utterly impossible to reach by walking the world's end; but none escape from dukkha unless the world's end has been reached."

There can be no dispute that the 'world' is what is perceived by our five senses and mind. The world exists only insofar there is consciousness. Extirpate the trap of consciousness, and you arrive at the 'end' of the world. Alas! " Few do, just as birds fly away from a net" says the Buddha.

In the Mahahattipadopama Sutta [The Greater Discourse on the Elephant's Footprint], his foremost disciple venerable Sariputta, inter alia, says: The internal earth, water, air, fire, space elements [of the body] are the same as the external earth...space elements.

Now, there comes a time when the water element is disturbed and the external earth element vanishes...the water element is disturbed and it carries away villages, towns, cities, countries...the great ocean sinks down to hundred leagues...two palms deep...not enough to wet even the joint of a finger.

The fire element is disturbed and burns villages...countries...goes out of fuel...when they seek to make fire with hide parings. The air element sweeps away ...countries...when they seek wind by means of a fan or bellows...and even the straw drip-edge of the thatch does not stir.

He describes this graphic cyclic scenario not to frighten but tell that when even this immense earth such as it is is impermanent, subject to destruction, disappearance and change and ask: "What of this body, which is held to by craving, and lasts but a while?

The Buddha describes the body in many ways, as one may describe the world. He describes its construction however, in three relevant aspects: matter, consciousness, and impermanence.

He speaks about the five aggregates [khanda] of matter, feelings, perceptions, determinations, consciousness likened to a lump of froth, a water bubble, a mirage, a plantain trunk, a conjuror's trick respectively; the five senses, mind and external percepts to an empty village and village raiding robbers; as when trembling over what is claimed 'mine' to fish in the puddles of a failing stream; name-&-mater [nama-rupa] and consciousness; when a stupid or intelligent man through nescience has acquired this body and name-&matter externally, and in that way a dyad; as six elements: earth, water, fire, air, space and consciousness.

Considering the last description above, you will agree that matter cannot be said to exist, when there is no indicative consciousness.

Though the Buddha has nowhere said it, it seems to me that when in higher jhana, it is possible by skilled mediators, from 'leaving behind the body' surmount perceptions of matter and sensory impact, access infinite space, infinite consciousness, infinite nothingness, neither-perception-nor-perception, cessation of perception and feeling, specifically in that ascending order, [and return to the 'normal' state], what pervades the universe from its 'beginning'- like electro-magnetism or gravity - is mindfulness and awareness consciousness.

But nowhere has the Buddha said what exactly is 'consciousness' - for a very logical reason: No one can be conscious of consciousness! It is impossible.

Thus, he describes the state of escape from it in delightful verse [as rendered]: "Just as a flame blown by the wind's force, Upasiva, goes out and designation applies to it no more, so too, the Silent Sage, freed from the name-body, goes out and designation applies to it no more...For when all ideas have been abolished, all ways of saying, too, have been abolished."

Note: the physical entity we call 'our body', is simply referred to as 'it'. Understanding this is the great profound riddle in the Teaching, the way to final release from conceiving, liberation from parochial consciousness - not in some remote indeterminate after-life, but as the Buddha assures us, and as many achieved from him pointing the way - in this very life, here and now. It is the end of the world reached by not walking to it.

Vessagiriya - the monastery of the Vaisya-Setthis

by Rohan L. Jayetilleke

Vessagiri or commonly known in Sinhala as Vesagiriya or Vaisyagiri, is the traditional name of the forest bound cluster or rocks in Anuradhapura, adjoining the highway to Kurunegala, about a mile to the south-west of Sri Maha Bodhi, Anuradhapura.

It is surrounded by structural ruins of the monastery (Vihara) which had cells in the 23 caves of the two of the three rocks. The three rocks according to archaeologists are marked Rocks A, B and C.

The Rock A has a breached stupa with pillars at the south of the point of entry to the rock. In Rock B are twelve caves. In Rock C are two caves with drip-ledge inscriptions. There are structural ruins all round the Rocks A. B and C and also in the adjoining paddy fields in the environs. The rock caves had been the abodes of meditative monks.

As regards the identification of this site as Vessagiri Vihara, Mahavamsa states it was built by King Devanampiya Tissa in third century B.C.

This is evidenced by the probable age of the Brahmi script inscriptions, the archaic style of ruined buildings, the relative location of the site in respect to the Isurumuniya Vihara built by the same king. According to the Sri Lanka chronicle Mahavamsa, Vessagiri had its name from the 500 Vaisyas (leaders of arts, crafts, banking, trade and commerce guild leaders) who came from Vedisa, the present Madhya Pradesh, to finance the Buddhist structures to be established by their kinsman Arhant Mahinda.

These leading entrepreneurs from Madhya Pradesh, who were the leaders of guilds of artisans belonging to various craft clans (kula) brought down members from the 18 kulas in order to execute building operations, paintings, music and dance and other arts and crafts to stabilize Buddhism in Lanka.

The 500 Vaisyas having been ordained, preferred to live together as one group as their food, thoughts and other activities were completely different to the indigenous people of Sri Lanka.

Even Isurumuniya too denotes, the abode of the silent personages. They too were the migrant Vaisya - Setthis.

They had their own language and script whereas Sinhala at the time was scriptless and Mahinda having brought the Tripitaka commentaries and had them translated into the colloquial Sinhala language and designed a written script to Sinhala in the model of the Brahami script.