Buddhist Spectrum

Avoid meditation misbeliefs:

Jhana not by the numbers

Ven. Thanissaro Bhikkhu

When I first went to study with my teacher, Ajaan Fuang, he handed me a small booklet of meditation instructions and sent me up the hill behind the monastery to meditate. The booklet - written by his teacher, Ajaan Lee - began with a breath meditation technique and concluded with a section showing how the technique was used to induce the first four levels of jhana.

In the following years, I saw Ajaan Fuang hand the same booklet to each of his new students, lay and ordained. Yet despite the booklet’s detailed descriptions of jhana, he himself rarely mentioned the word jhana in his conversations, and never indicated to any of his students that they had reached a particular level of jhana in their practice.

Meditative experience

When a student told him of a recurring meditative experience, he liked to discuss not what it was, but what to do with it: what to focus on, what to drop, what to change, what to maintain the same. Then he’d teach the student how to experiment with it - to make it even more stable and restful - and how to judge the results of the experiments. If his students wanted to measure their progress against the descriptions of jhana in the booklet, that was their business and none of his. He never said this in so many words, but given the way he taught, the implicit message was clear.

As were the implicit reasons for his attitude. He had told me once about his own experiences as a young meditator: “Back in those days you didn’t have books explaining everything the way we do now. When I first studied with Ajaan Lee, he told me to bring my mind down.

Bringing it up

So I focused on getting it down, down, down, but the more I brought it down, the heavily and duller it got. I thought, ‘This can’t be right.’ So I turned around and focused on bringing it up, up, up, until I found a balance and could figure out what he was talking about.” This incident was one of many that taught him some important lessons: you have to test things for yourself, to see where the instructions had to be taken literally and where they had to be taken figuratively; that you had to judge for yourself how well you were doing; and that you had to be ingenious, experimenting and taking risks to find ways to deal with problems as they arose.

So as a teacher, he tried to instill in his students these qualities of self-reliance, ingenuity, and a willingness to take risks and test things for themselves.

He did that not only by talking about these qualities, but also by forcing you into situations where you would have to develop them. Had he always been there to confirm for you that, “Yes, you’ve reached the third jhana,” or, “No, that’s only the second jhana,” he would have short-circuited the qualities he was trying to instill. He, rather than your own powers of observation, would have been the authority on what was going on in your mind; and you would have been absolved of any responsibility for correctly evaluating what you had experienced.

At the same time, he would have been feeding your childish desire to please or impress him, and undermining your ability to deal with the task at hand, which was how to develop your own powers of sensitivity to put an end to suffering and stress.

Undermining

As he once told me, “If I have to explain everything, you’ll get used to having things handed to you on a platter. And then what will you do when problems come up in your meditation and you don’t have any experience in figuring things out on your own?” Still, Ajaan Fuang didn’t leave me to reinvent the Dharma wheel totally on my own. Experience had shown him that some approaches to concentration worked better than others for putting the mind in a position where it could exercise its ingenuity and accurately judge the results of its experiments, and he was very explicit in recommending those approaches. Among the points he emphasised were these:

Strong concentration is absolutely necessary for liberating insight. “Without a firm basis in concentration,” he often said, “insight is just concepts.” To see clearly the connections between stress and its causes, the mind has to be very steady and still. And to stay still, it requires the strong sense of well being that only strong concentration can provide.

Concentration

To gain insight into a state of concentration, you have to stick with it for a long time. If you push impatiently from one level of concentration to the next, or if you try to analyse a new state of concentration too quickly after you have attained it, you never give it the chance to show its full potential and you don’t give yourself the chance to familiarise yourself with it. So you have to keep working at it as a skill, something you can tap into in all situations. This enables you to see it from a variety of perspectives and to test it over time, to see if it really is as totally blissful, empty, and effortless as it may have seemed on first sight.

The best state of concentration for the sake of developing all-around insight is one that encompasses a whole-body awareness. There were two exceptions to Ajaan Fuang’s usual practice of not identifying the state you had attained in your practice, and both involved states of wrong concentration. The first was the state that comes when the breath gets so comfortable that your focus drifts from the breath to the sense of comfort itself, your mindfulness begins to blur, and your sense of the body and your surroundings gets lost in a pleasant haze. When you emerge, you find it hard to identify where exactly you were focused. Ajaan Fuang called this moha-samadhi, or delusion-concentration.

Refined

The second state was one I happened to hit one night when my concentration was extremely one-pointed, and so refined that it refused to settle on or label even the most fleeting mental objects. I dropped into a state in which I lost all sense of the body, of any internal/external sounds, or of any thoughts or perceptions at all - although there was just enough tiny awareness to let me know, when I emerged, that I hadn’t been asleep. I found that I could stay there for many hours, and yet time would pass very quickly. Two hours would seem like two minutes. I could also ‘program’ myself to come out at a particular time.

After hitting this state several nights in a row, I told Ajaan Fuang about it, and his first question was, “Do you like it?” My answer was no because I felt a little groggy the first time I came out. “Good,” he said. “As long as you don’t like it, you’re safe. Some people really like it and think it’s Nibbana or cessation. Actually, it’s the state of non-perception (asanni-bhava). It’s not even right concentration, because there’s no way you can investigate anything in there to gain any sort of discernment. But it does have other uses.” He then told me of the time he had undergone kidney surgery and, not trusting the anesthesiologist, had put himself in that state for the duration of the operation.

Limited range

In both these states of wrong concentration, the limited range of awareness was what made them wrong. If whole areas of your awareness are blocked off, how can you gain all-around insight? And as I’ve noticed in years since, people adept at blotting out large areas of awareness through powerful one-pointedness also tend to be psychologically adept at dissociation and denial. This is why Ajaan Fuang, following Ajaan Lee, taught a form of breath meditation that aimed at an all-around awareness of the breath energy throughout the body, playing with it to gain a sense of ease, and then calming it so that it wouldn’t interfere with a clear vision of the subtle movements of the mind. This all-around awareness helped to eliminate the blind spots where ignorance likes to lurk.

Verses for Thudong-faring

From the Sutta-Nipata

Put by the rod for all that lives,

Nor harm thou anyone thereof;

Long not for son - how then for friend?

Fare lonely as rhinoceros.

Love cometh from companionship;

In wake of love upsurges ill;

Seeing the bane that comes of love,

Fare lonely as rhinoceros.

In ruth for all his bosom friends,

A man, heart-chained, neglects the goal;

Seeing this fear in fellowship,

Fare lonely as rhinoceros.

Tangled as crowding bamboo boughs

Is fond regard for sons and wife:

As the tall tops are tangle-free,

Fare lonely as rhinoceros.

The deer untethered roams the wild

Whithersoe’er it lists for food:

Seeing the liberty, wise man,

Fare lonely as rhinoceros.

Casting aside the household gear,

As sheds the coral-tree its leaves,

With home-ties cut, and vigorous,

Fare lonely as rhinoceros.

Seek for thy friend the deeply learned,

Dhamma-endued, lucid and great;

Knowing the needs, expelling doubt,

Fare lonely as rhinoceros.

The heat and cold, and hunger, thirst,

Wind, sun-beat, sting of gadfly, snake:

Surmounting one and all of these,

Fare lonely as rhinoceros.

Crave not for tastes, but free of greed,

Moving with measured step from house

To house, support of none, none’s thrall,

Fare lonely as rhinoceros.

Free everywhere, at odds with none,

And well content with this and that:

Enduring dangers undismayed,

Fare lonely as rhinoceros.

Snap thou the fetters as the snare

By river denizen is broke:

As fire to waste comes back no more,

Fare lonely as rhinoceros.

And turn thy back on joys and pains,

Delights and sorrows known of old;

And gaining poise and calm, and cleansed,

Fare lonely as rhinoceros.

Neglect thou not to muse apart,

‘Mid things by Dhamma-faring aye;

Alive to all becomings’ bane,

Fare lonely as rhinoceros.

As lion, mighty-jawed and king

Of beasts, fares conquering, so thou,

Taking thy bed and seat remote,

Fare lonely as rhinoceros.

Poise, amity, ruth and release

Pursue, and timely sympathy;

At odds with none in all the world,

Fare lonely as rhinoceros.

Leaving the vanities of view,

Right method won, the Way obtained:

“I know! No other is my guide!”

Fare lonely as rhinoceros.

Selected verses of the Rhinoceros Sutta from ‘Woven Cadences’ (Sutta Nipata), translated

by E. M. Hare, and published in Sacred Books of the Buddhists Series by the Pali Text Society

ABHIDHAMMA IN A NUTSHELL - XXIII:

What is Mind? - Third review

Shamika SOYSA

The inaugurating episode of this series was ‘What is Mind?’. It has been reviewed twice so far.

First Review: What types of Mind?

The first review was done at the end of first Reality/Paramaththa. That is ‘The Reality of Consciousness’ or Chiththa Paramaththa. The types of minds and their application at various places depending on various situations were described in that reality. In one classification there are 89 types of Chiththas. A more detailed classification illustrated 121 types of consciousness. These Chiththas were of many types such as Moral (Kusala), Immoral (Akusala), Functional (Kriya) and Resultant (Vipaka). There were four places where these Chiththas arise as Sensuous-Sphere (Kamavachara), Form-Sphere (Rupavachara), Formless-Sphere (Arupavachara) and Supramundane (Lokuththara). The bottomline was that mind was not just one thing. It has many features and arises in many ways depending on the situation.

Second Review: What contains in Mind?

The second review was done at the end of second Reality or ‘The Reality of Mental States’ or Chethasika Paramaththa’. This illustrated various features and containments of Consciousness described in the first Reality. The following answer was given to the question ‘What is Mind?’ at the second review:

‘Mind or the Consciousness arises at a certain fraction based on some cause or an object. Depending on the cause or the object there are many types of consciousness arise and there are resultants of those consciousnesses as well if they were rooted by Moral or Immoral causes. A particular consciousness arise at a particular moment contains many features called Mental States. Mental States are sort of qualities possessed by one who is receiving objects externally and internally.

Thus Consciousness and Mental States, that is Chiththa and Chethasika, together elucidate everything about Mind, its types, features and behaviours.’

Third Review: How Mind works?

Having illustrated the types of mind and the containments of mind, during last three episodes it was explained the sequential manner in which mind works. Millions and billions of thought moments are instances of mind. In a fraction of second thousands of mental states features these thought moments.

Answer to the question ‘What is Mind?’ encompasses the entire bundle of illustrations done in Chiththa Paramaththa, Chethasika Paramaththa and Chiththa Vithi. This concludes all about Mind for this series.

What’s Next?

“Abhidhamma Pitaka provides a theoretical framework for the doctrine principles in Suthra Pitaka which could be used to describe ‘Mind and Matter.”

The above statement was quoted from the introductory article of this series called ‘Introduction to Abhidhamma’. Almost 23 episodes were dedicated to describe and illustrate ‘The Mind’. Now it is time to illustrate ‘The Matter’.

Next Reality, ‘The Reality of Matter’ or Rupa Paramaththa, is entirely to describe ‘What is Matter?’.

In the coming episodes the ‘Matter’ would be illustrated in detail and look forward to touch some debating topics in many religions such as the origin of the world and living beings.

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Buddhist conference in Myanmar

An International Theravada Buddhist universities conference will be held at the Sitagu International Buddhists Academy in Sagaing, northwestern division of Myanmar, executive secretary of the Association of Theravada Buddhist Universities (ATBU) Vulnerable Dr. Khammai Dhammasami told the press Monday.

At the second biennial conference, which will last from March 5 to 8, about 70 papers relating to engaged Buddhism, religious teachings in Theravada Buddhist countries, monasticism in Theravada countries, and Pali literature since the 19th century will be presented mainly in English and Pali languages for discussion.

According to the executive secretary, 290 representatives from 30 universities and colleges from 11 countries including observers from seven other countries as well as 300 domestic monks and nuns are expected to attend the session.

These countries include Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Mexico, Argentina, Uganda, Jamaica, Nepal and host Myanmar.

The conference is aimed at building a network of Theravada Buddhists and intellectuals from across the world to enable cooperation in religious teachings and education and disseminate Buddhist laws to the world, he said.

The first conference of its kind was also held in Myanmar’s Bagan Popa resort, in which representatives of Theravada Buddhist universities and colleges from 13 countries attended, followed by the establishment of ATBU.

ANGON, Feb. 23 (Xinhua)

A Buddhist film festival

Vesak is the most important festival for Buddhists, commemorating the Birth, Enlightenment and Parinibbana of Gautama Buddha.

Sri Lanka has been celebrating this festival in the grandest scale like no other country. It is therefore calling to turn the eyes of the worlds towards Sri Lanka during the festival month of May, to showcase not only the magnificent celebrations, but also the treasure trove of Buddhism which can benefit so many around the world.

Light of Asia Foundation and National Film Corporation of Sri Lanka have therefore undertaken to organise a unique spectacle as part of a greater national endeavour to organise a more integrated Vesak in 2009.

Call for entries and papers is open till March 12.

Bhikkhuni order in Sri Lanka

Janaka Perera

Let me explain some facts relating to the Bhikkhuni Order which has been revived in Sri Lanka in recent times, although it is not so well-known.

The Order of Buddhst Nuns was first introduced to Sri Lanka by Indian Bhikkhuni Sanghamitta who belonged to the Theravada (Buddhist orthodox) tradition of Buddhist nuns going back to the Buddha’s time.

Sri Lanka’s Bhikkhuni Order flourished during the fourth Century AD. During this period a delegation of Buddhist nuns from Sri Lanka, headed by Bhikkhuni Devasara (also known as Tisara) visited China and established a Bhikkhuni Order which survives (both in the mainland and Taiwan) to this day.

However by the time of the arrival of European colonialists Sri Lanka’s Bhikkhuni Order had already disappeared due to various factors. What has survived since is a lesser order known as Dasa Sil Mathas (Nuns observing the 10 precepts).

The revival of the Bhikkhuni order here began with its first members receiving ordination from Chinese Bhikkhunis in Singapore and elsewhere. Although general Buddhism in China is Mahayana the community of nuns of the same religion there belongs to the Theravada tradition (‘A History of the Cultural Relations between Sri Lanka and China’ by Prof S G M Weerasinghe). Their Vinaya rules or code of conduct is exactly the same that was introduced by the Sinhala Bhikkhunis although the attire of the Chinese nuns differs from the Theravada tradition due to cultural and climatic factors. The similarity of Vinaya rules is also confirmed by Buddhist scholar Dr Hema Goonatilleke who has travelled to China and studied the Bhikkhuni Vinaya there.

As far as I am aware all the Chinese Bhikkhunis (and for that matter the monks too) are strict vegetarians no matter that lay Chinese eat all kinds of flesh. One Sinhala Buddhist nun I personally knew was Bhikkhuni Kamala who was a cousin of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and mother of Sri Lanka’s Ambassador Designate to USA Jaliya Wickremasuriya. She has an in-depth knowledge of the Dhamma and used to write on the subject. She passed away a few years ago.

There is however a difference of opinion among some Sri Lankan Bhikkhus on this issue. While some of them endorse the idea of women entering the Buddha Sasana having received ordination in the Chinese tradition, others reject it saying that it is Mahayana that differs from the Theravada concepts.

Among those who opposed the present Bhikkhuni Order was the late Venerable Gangodawila Soma. A Bhikkhu who supports order is Vene Kirama Wimalajothi, head of the Buddhist Cultural Centre, Nedimala, Dehiwala, Sri Lanka. Personally, I do not see anything wrong with a woman entering a Bhikkhuni Order as long as it observes the same Vinaya rules that the Buddha introduced. I think some Buddhists are not acting wisely by over-emphasising the differences between the two schools of Buddhism although it may be necessary to maintain separate identities since some Mahayana practices are not acceptable to Theravadins.