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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 the
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 ourselves. 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, okay? You keep holding onto it. 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 (sampajañña), 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 by 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 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 of the anger that way,
and this can really weaken its power over you.
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 get 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.
Once, when I was in college, I wrote home complaining
about the food, and my mother sent me a Julia Child cookbook. In the
book was a section on dealing with eggs in which she said that the sign
of a really good cook is knowing eggs. And so I took an egg out. You can
watch an egg -- you can learn certain things just by watching it, 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. If 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
similar with clay: you really don't know clay until you become a potter
and actually try to make something out of the clay.
And 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 your own mind. You don't know
the processes of cause and effect within the 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 clay, 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 or pot you want to make with the mind. The factors of
pleasure, ease, and sometimes even 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, and in particular, the
cleavage line between awareness and the objects of awareness.
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 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 concentration, this
state of equilibrium 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
get to the point where you're not really contributing anything more to
the present moment. You unravel your participation in it. That's when
things open up in the mind.
Many people want to jump right in and begin at this
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.
Just as you don't really understand a herd of cattle until you've
successfully herded them -- learning from all your failures along the
way -- you can't get a sense of all the cause-and-effect currents
running through the mind until you've learned from your failures and
successes in getting them to gather in a state of concentrated
mindfulness and mindful concentration. And only when you've really
understood and mastered these currents -- 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 freedom
from them.
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