Before we dive into how shamatha (calming the mind) and vipassana (inquiring into the true nature of phenomena) complement one another, I would like to begin with a short teaching by the Buddha from the Anguttara Nikaya:

Two things will lead you to supreme understanding. What are these two? Tranquility and insight. If you develop tranquility, what benefit can you expect? Your mind will develop. And the benefit of a developed mind is that you are no longer bound to your impulses. If you develop insight, what benefit will it bring? You will find wisdom. And the point of developing wisdom is that it brings you freedom from the blindness of ignorance. A mind held bound by unconsidered impulse and ignorance can never develop true understanding. But by way of tranquillity and insight, the mind will find liberation. 

This practice is so rich because there can sometimes be a hierarchy in the practice, in which we think certain practices are baby practices and others are more advanced. In reality, we just need different practices at different times in our lives depending on the conditions that arise. Calmness and tranquility are a springboard out of which it is easier for wisdom to naturally emerge. For beginners in the practice, it is beneficial to begin by calming the mind, by harmonizing and unifying the body and the mind. This grounding of oneself serves as a foundation out of which everything else can emerge and develop. Out of tranquility, wisdom develops, and out of wisdom, a transformative understanding that brings about inner freedom emerges too. 

For experienced and seasoned practitioners, it can be helpful to encourage a deeper kind of calm. If you are inclined towards more traditional wisdom practices, it can help tremendously to back up at times and refocus on bringing in deeper calm. One can move in leaps and bounds in wisdom if there is a greater capacity for calm. When facing difficulty or challenges in life, find refuge in the calm. It is essential to remember that it is there to be found.

It’s also important to realize when one is not taking refuge in calm, but one is trying to escape into calm because it feels good and because of the meditative pleasure that arises when the mind is calmer. This is critical to take note of because practice is not an escape. The only way we can “escape” is via real wisdom. The only way to uproot the torments of the heart—greed, hatred, and delusion—is by facing ourselves, facing conditions, and facing life as it is.

When we notice ourselves using practice as an escape, this is when we need to summon up a kind of courage and dare ourselves to move toward the arena of wisdom. The only way wisdom can arise is by being with what is from moment to moment, whatever it is, undaunted by dukkha. I know that’s a big thing to say—undaunted by dukkha, by the fragility, difficulties, and unsatisfactoryness of conditions. Luckily, we don’t have to do it all at once. Step-by-step, we walk this path, with what is available to us—with our allies of lovingkindness and compassion, with the strength that calm offers. With shamatha, with calm, our hearts are strengthened. And then with this strength of heart, we can more easily bear the difficult and see things as they are, which is vipassana. 

Shamatha is translated as calmness or tranquility. Vipassana means to see into conditions as they are, not as they appear to be, how we would prefer them to be, or as we want them to be. Seeing things as they are means to see into the instability, the impermanence of all conditioned phenomena. Seeing things as they are means to see into the non-solidity, the substanceless nature, the not-self nature, of all conditions.

Seeing things as they are means seeing into the reality that all conditions—no matter how seemingly terrific or wonderful, and many conditions are wonderful, which is to be seen as well—are limited. We see into conditions as a bridge into the unconditioned, the deathless, our own buddhanature, and the buddhanature of every being in this world, despite how things appear to be. This is vipassana. 

The direction of this noble path is from impulse to aliveness and spontaneity. It is from ignorance to wisdom. The direction of this path is out of confusion and into clear-seeing, out of agitation and into tranquility. From tranquility to wisdom, and from wisdom into liberation of heart, inner liberation. So, as the Buddha says, tranquility (shamatha) and insight (vipassana) lead to inner liberation. Other translations include calmness and wisdom, peacefulness and transformative understanding, silence and illumination. 

Now, with calmness as our foundation, as the mental chatter begins to calm itself and cease, wisdom has a greater chance of emerging, of thriving, of growing. But I do want to make the point that the opposite is true as well. It is important to be aware whether our minds tend towards curiosity and interest rather than towards calmness and tranquility. For some of us to move towards wisdom, we can see that wisdom brings tranquility. The two play back and forth, they work with one another, they’re interwoven. When we see something more clearly as it is, a greater tranquility comes in. Greater peacefulness is possible in our lives, but we will need both shamatha and vipassana to access it. 

We need enough peace to look into our agitation. We need to develop enough of a sense of inner happiness to be able to look into our unhappiness. We need enough steadiness to bear looking into the fragility of all conditioned phenomena. Because in being curious and openhearted, we do want to encounter the pleasant as well as the unpleasant, the difficult as well as the easy, the terrors as well as the enormous beauties possible in this life and this path that we are on. We want to open our hearts to it all. Slowly, slowly, step-by-step. 

⧫

Excerpted from Narayan Helen Liebenson’s Dharma Talk, “The Principles and Practices of Shamatha Vipassana.”

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Meditation is something you do on a cushion, right? Okay, maybe at a retreat center like the Insight Meditation Society you also do it walking slowly back and forth, and maybe even while standing, lying down, and eating. But at work? Work is what you come back to (usually quite reluctantly) after you have been on retreat, right? Or, maybe it is possible to meditate doing some kinds of work, like chopping wood or carrying water. The slow, steady repetition of simple manual tasks might be a fruitful field of practice. But a fast-paced, high-powered, high-stress professional job? Couldn’t be. How can a busy executive or office worker practice meditation without leaving the office or even holding all calls? There is, I submit, a simple answer: By doing Vipassana.

When most people think of meditation, they probably think of someone sitting serenely on a cushion in some pristine setting—beside a brook, in a Zen garden, or at a retreat center. Everything is calm and still; a half-smile on one’s face hints at the bliss one feels while breathing in and savoring the serenity. This is indeed an ideal setting for samatha or concentration meditation, but Vipassana, or insight meditation, is something different. Insight meditation is about mindfulness, whether or not it is accompanied by deep concentration.

Is it possible to perform at high speed in complex situations with mindfulness? I think it is. A challenging—even overwhelming—job can be an ideal practice ground for insight meditation. In my own experience, I have found it makes all the difference to keep in mind three basic things:

Change is OK

The first is that change—even high-speed change—is OK. It is inevitable, unavoidable, inescapable, natural. Constant change is the medium within which we work, the very ocean in which we swim. Recognizing this, we can embrace it. It is our friend, not our enemy. So much of our stress, and therefore our suffering, comes from resistance to, or resentment of, change.

If we accept at a very basic level that things will always come up, that we will always be interrupted, that each moment is born anew and nothing intrudes on anything else, then stress never has a chance to develop. If we pay attention—are mindful—in that narrow instant between the change and the attachment or aversion with which we respond to the change, then we have undermined the entire apparatus which produces and nurtures stress.

The Whole World is Imperfect

The second thing I find enormously helpful is recognizing that the whole world—including myself—is imperfect. Everything is so subtly but profoundly flawed that nothing will ever be “just right.” You will never “get there.” Something will always go wrong. Anything that works will surely break. This truth is sometimes called the law of entropy, sometimes “Murphy’s Law,” and, in ancient Buddhist texts, the noble truth of suffering. It is not a form of pessimism, for it is not to say that anything is bad or evil, just that our tendency to want to perfect things is unrealistic.

For the busy professional, or for anyone doing any kind of work, recognizing the limitations of our own capabilities, of our abilities to influence the environment, and of the environment itself in which we work, can be very liberating. It is not an excuse for shoddy work, and it leaves plenty of room for the notion of excellence. But knowing when to stop, when to let go of something, when to say (as carpenters do) “close enough, nail it!” frees us up to face the next moment, the next challenge, the next project. The tendency in many of us towards perfectionism can be debilitating. Either we get so bogged down on one thing that something else is neglected and we lose perspective, or we get so discouraged by the result of our labors not turning out good enough that we often do not get from our work the sense of satisfaction we deserve.

Everything is Empty

Thirdly, and probably most importantly, I find it helpful to recognize that everything in the world—including myself—is empty. Everything we are dealing with in our universe of experience is an idea, a construction, a fabrication. Words, symbols, money, plans, thoughts—all of it is just a mirage, an illusion, a theatrical performance we conjure up and participate in moment after moment. One of my favorite expressions, attributed to Chuang-tzu, comes in a discussion of epistemology when he says (in Burton Watson’s translation): “What makes things so? Making them so makes them so.” In other words, this whole world we’ve put together is all thoroughly arbitrary.

It can be profoundly comforting to realize that there is no intrinsic value to anything. Everything has only as much value as we decide to give it. Again, this is not a teaching of despair; it is not to say that everything is meaningless and therefore there is no point in getting engaged. Quite the contrary. Giving value to what we are doing is crucial, precisely because it has no intrinsic value of its own. Everything we do, everything we say, and even every little thing we think, is tremendously important—it just, ultimately, doesn’t matter all that much.

If we attend to everything we do in our lives with great care and precision, with mindfulness and clear comprehension, then we are investing our work with meaning. If we lose sight of the fact that it all has no meaning beyond what we give it, then we can get caught—very caught—by our affairs. If the work we do takes on too much significance, especially if it takes on significance we are not aware of having given it ourselves, then we become the slaves of our work. Our happiness, our very sense of meaning and self-worth, then rises or falls on the shirt-tails of something “out there” over which we often have almost no control.

In moments capable of creating the greatest amount of stress, when things are almost overwhelming, I often remark to myself or to a colleague, “Boy, it’s a good thing everything is empty!” With those words comes a great sense of relief, a great lightening of the load. If it were not all empty, then we would have to take everything so seriously and get so locked in to things that there would be no room for freedom. Recognizing the emptiness of everything does not diminish what we have to do to attend to a matter with responsibility and excellence, but it does dramatically change our relationship to what we have to do.

A busy, challenging work situation is like one of those video games where everything is rushing at you at immense speed and you are called upon to respond instantaneously. The pace and complexity of things are in your face, demanding your full attention and calling upon you to be present at every moment. What a gift for the practice of mindfulness! If you are sincere about developing and nurturing Buddhist values, you do not have the luxury of losing your temper, of treating people harmfully, of using wrong speech, or of a whole array of unhealthy states. And if you are not right there with every experience, it is so easy to lose your freedom.

If you are tied in to everything, without accepting change, without realizing the imperfection of it all, without the space between yourself and the world given by the perspective of emptiness, then you can’t help but react to events with those latent tendencies that incline you to cling to the things that give you pleasure and resist the things associated with pain. But when you embrace change, accept the inherent limitations of oneself and others, and use mindfulness to access the space of freedom, then you can survive and even thrive on the challenging complexity of a busy life. Every little detail, every thought, word, and deed, becomes immensely important—but, with the right perspective, they become our playthings rather than our tormentors.

⧫

From the Spring 1995 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 11, No. 2) Text © 1995–2020 by Andrew Olendzki

Related Inquiring Mind article:

• “Getting Real About Exhaustion”
  

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Maybe you didn’t realize you could have scary experiences while sitting on a cushion meditating. You can. A fundamental truth that we’re terrified to admit is that our bodies don’t exist as substantial things, and meditation can lead to this realization. Our minds aren’t the stable entities we think they are either—another insight that’s possible to gain, and potentially scary to confront, during meditation. As you watch the flow of your thoughts and feelings, and turn the lens on the thinker, you can begin to experience how insubstantial and ever-changing this tenuous “I” is. 

We do a lot of what we do to distract ourselves from that fact—to bargain or negate it. Yet deep down we secretly know it to be true.  When you start to peer into the truth, be gentle with yourself and take it in sips until you adjust to it a bit.

One small sip might be to think back on who you were ten years ago. You weren’t quite the same person as you are today. How about five years ago? Do you think you’ll be exactly the same next year? Might you not change just a little bit in even shorter periods of time? Might you be like a river that’s constantly changing as it flows along? In that case, who are you? You might try sitting with that for some of your shamata (calm abiding) or Vipassana sessions for a while.

Or, when you’re ready, go a step further. Years ago, when Vipassana—a Buddhist meditation technique that helps us see the true nature of existence—was my main practice, my favorite method of “looking at the thinker” was a particular exercise that took away all that wasn’t “me” to see what was left. The time that this naturally happens for all of us is at death. So I rehearsed my own death. Of course this also serves well for understanding the principle of impermanence. 

It’s not for the fainthearted, but it’s a really good glimpse into the truth. The more we’re living at odds with the truth, the more we suffer. The more we live along with it, the happier we are. I find that any worry I have is actually scarier looming from behind than when I bring it right out in front and take a good look. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. noted, “I submit to you tonight, no man is free if he fears death. But the minute you conquer the fear of death, at that moment, you are free.”

***

My “Looking at the Thinker” Practice

I begin by imagining I’m lying in a bed, no longer able to walk. I can’t even go to the bathroom. So the “me” that is active, nimble, and rather athletic is gone.

Who/what am I? What’s left?

Now I can’t even lift my hands to grab the water glass or even gesture.
What’s left?

Now my senses of smell, taste, sight, and hearing become dim.
What’s left?

There go all those years of learning Tibetan. Who/what am I?
What’s left?

My skills as a psychotherapist, gone.
What’s left?

The piano lessons, singing.
What’s left?

My tendency to get lost even with the best of directions.
What’s left?

I see those and thousands of other “me” things all floating away.
What’s left?

The personality I identified as “I”: Is any of that left? It’s my history and mental tendencies.
Those leave, too.
What’s left?

Even English.
Even being an American.
And even my name.
Gone.
What’s left?

Perhaps it’s my awareness. Just that—my awareness.
But what’s this “my”? What container or boundary is there around this awareness?

I look, but I can’t find one.

There’s just awareness. Vast, universal awareness. It’s not a vacuum, it’s clear. It’s pure potential for all and everything. It’s unity. It’s warm, with pure, total connection—love. Joy.

♦

Adapted from Deepening Wisdom, Deepening Connection (October 11, 2022), part three of Lama Tsomo’s “Ancient Wisdom for Our Times” series.

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The Pali word vipassana (Sanskrit, vipashyana) is commonly translated as “insight,” and this is a good fit for both its literal and general meanings. To the verbal root pash, meaning “to see,” the prefix vi- is added, which can be taken here as an intensifier, indicating seeing well or seeing clearly. The prefix can also mean “apart” or “away,” suggesting that one is seeing something different from or beyond what is immediately apparent in order to recognize a deeper significance. With this interpretation in mind, we can see why vipassana as “insight” is regularly used as a synonym for wisdom (Pali, panna; Skt., prajna).

When the word is used in the compound samatha-vipassana, it denotes two kinds of meditation. The first, samatha, means calming or tranquility meditation, and refers to concentration practices such as one-pointed awareness on a fixed object. By contrast, vipassana meditation involves pointing a concentrated mind at a flowing stream of experience, with each moment presenting a different object. By watching the ongoing rise and fall of phenomena at the point of contact with the senses, rather than through the filters of narrative and conceptual thought, the meditator is able to see beyond appearances.

In the modern context of mindfulness practice, focusing the mind on an object, whether fixed or moving, provides temporary alleviation of the symptoms of suffering, while insight into the nature of experience accesses a more fundamental understanding that addresses and heals the root causes of suffering.

Any practice that gets the mind out of its default wandering mode and engages conscious awareness with an object in the present moment will offer an immediate refuge from the onslaught of anxiety, depression, addiction, aversion, and confusion that regularly assails us. This is one of the reasons for the current popularity of vipassana practice and for the success of the mindfulness movement.

Allowing us to see with wisdom into the deeper truths that can not only treat but cure suffering, insight shows us that all things arise and pass away in a radically changing stream of experience, that both internal and external phenomena are interdependently conditioning one another, and that the sense of self we create to navigate this process is an arbitrary and contingent construct. Knowing this allows us to abide in the world without resistance, without clinging, and with equanimity. Only when we clearly see the thirst of craving—the underlying cause of suffering—are we able to quench it.

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A charismatic meditation master who fashioned a global movement, S. N. Goenka had a profound impact on modern spiritual practice. Daniel Stuart’s introduction to him in S. N. Goenka: Emissary of Insight is bound to attract a lot of interest, and there is much fascinating and useful information in the book. But as I will describe below, Stuart overlooks key aspects of Goenka’s practice and philosophy. These oversights lead Stuart to misconstrue the book’s subject, undercutting its value for readers looking for an authoritative study of this seminal figure.

In his introduction, Stuart refers to three obituaries of Goenka—one that I wrote for this magazine, one from the Huffington Post, and another from the New York Times—as he frames the purpose of the biography. Finding myself mentioned at the start of the book put me on guard to assess it with generosity, but, unfortunately, that same spirit of generosity is missing here and elsewhere in Stuart’s analysis. All three obituaries, he says, show an “asymmetrical” concern for Goenka only in so far as he fulfills a Western desire for a rational or pragmatic vision of Buddhism. The problem with this critique is that the obituaries are simply reporting Goenka’s own desire. He celebrated the Buddha as a “super-scientist of peace,” explained the Buddha’s teachings in terms of modern atomic theory, and likened meditation to a “deep surgery” on the mind—to give just a few examples. I don’t mean to suggest that these brief obituaries or any other writings on Goenka have adequately captured the significance of his life. More work rooted in Asian sources and perspectives is sorely needed. But as his captious take on these obits suggests, Stuart’s book takes such a narrow (and often peevish) approach to what matters in understanding Goenka that it distorts his crucial role in the formulation of meditation across the world.

The first half of Emissary of Insight traces the arc of Goenka’s life. He was born in Burma in 1924, where he spent his early years until he and family members fled invading Japanese soldiers, settling on the Indian subcontinent from 1942 to 1947; in the mid-1950s he met his Burmese Buddhist teacher, U Ba Khin, and began practicing; in 1969 he moved back to India and soon after embarked on a global career of teaching meditation. The final biographical chapter focuses on the last years of his life before his death, in 2013, at the age of 89.

As is standard in Shambhala’s Lives of the Masters series, the latter half of the book is a collection of extracts from Goenka’s writings, mostly translated from Hindi. While they do not alter the impression of Goenka provided by English sources already available to us, they are a valuable supplement. Selections include poems and prose pieces on such matters as faith, the positive influence of the Buddha’s teachings on ancient Indian society (both morally and politically), life in Burma, the global spread of doctrinal teachings, concentrative versus insight-based practices, and the construction of the huge Global Vipassana Pagoda near Mumbai.

Goenka’s own words showed that a belief in psychic forces fits with a rational perspective on meditation.

Yet although many details in the book are illuminating, Stuart has elected not to describe the nature of Goenka’s practice and the detailed (and easily accessible) theory that underpins it. This decision creates a distorted narrative that comes to a head in Stuart’s notion of Goenka’s most important role as a meditation teacher. Calling him, fundamentally, “cultic,” the biographer describes Goenka as “dedicated to serving as a powerful channel for his teacher’s [U Ba Khin’s] vijjadhatu, . . . the psychic force of the wisdom of vipasyana [insight meditation] made available to Goenka and his students by the grace of U Ba Khin and his enlightened nonhuman guides.” Later in the book, Stuart even claims Goenka believed that by virtue of his role as a channel for his teacher’s power he was himself “a guru worthy of worship.” It is true that the Burmese Buddhist vision of practice is not just as a form of self-improvement in a secular framework. But Goenka’s own words show that belief in nonhuman agents and psychic forces fit with a rational perspective on meditation. He spent much of his life laying out in great detail the technique—to his way of thinking, eminently logical—that a person could use to purify his or her own mind. Stuart runs roughshod over the fact that Goenka explicitly dismissed the idea of a saving guru’s grace and stressed self-cultivation, even in a world of spiritual forces. If Stuart had given more attention to his subject’s explanations of practice, these facts would have been evident.

Besides constructing the problematic characterization of Goenka as a sort of shaman-guru, Stuart often makes disparaging claims with little proof to back them up. For instance, he writes that Goenka created his special course on the Satipatthana Sutta (“The Establishing of Mindfulness Sutta”) as a ploy to establish scholarly bona fides; that Robert Hover and other U Ba Khin students were indispensable participants in the founding in 1975 of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, but were written out of its history; and that the Vipassana Research Institute established by Goenka in 1985 to research the origins and applications of vipassana was largely a bait-and-switch gambit to gain tax advantages and serve missionary impulses. At the same time, Stuart never seriously considers psychological motivations or tensions in Goenka’s life. This was a man who was adopted by his uncle at 13 so that the uncle would have an heir, married by arrangement to a 12-year-old when he was 18, and denied by his family the university education he sought; who trekked over the mountains out of Burma with the Japanese on his heels and lost his thriving business to a government takeover. The role of cultural context means that these events would not necessarily have had the same effects on him as they might have had on, say, an American, but they surely shaped his life and the choices he would make.

Orwell said that saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent. Possibly so, but in this book Goenka never really gets a chance to make his case. Perhaps not everything he did was wise or purely for spiritual purposes. But by not taking him seriously on his own terms and considering all the evidence, the biographer turns him into an apparently passive recipient of ideas and events, not formed within a context but reduced to it. Stuart’s biography will provide much of interest to those drawn to Goenka’s story, but they will have to wait for another book for a more reliable picture of the man.

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The Buddha encouraged us to investigate our experiences, but some ways of questioning mire us in confusion while others are liberating. How can we avoid the trap of habitual discursive thinking when investigating our experiences? When we ask wise questions, we can end our conditioning rather than perpetuate it. Dharma and Insight Meditation teacher Narayan Helen Liebenson will help us distinguish skillful from unskillful types of inquiry and approach life’s deepest questions with a spirit of wholesome curiosity.

Narayan Helen Liebenson is a guiding teacher at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, where she has taught since 1985, and at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS). She is the author of The Magnanimous Heart: Compassion and Love, Loss and Grief, Joy and Liberation and When Singing, Just Singing: Life As Meditation. 

The post Good Question! The Art of Meditative Inquiry appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

City: Charlottesville, Virginia
Tradition: Insight Meditation (Vipassana)
Year Founded: 1996
Number of Members: 175
Meeting Place: Rented room at an adult care center

Tricycle talks with Jeffrey Fracher, the president of Insight Meditation Community of Charlottesville (IMCC) and one of the sangha’s 13 teachers:

You have a large sangha—approximately 175 members—for a modest- sized city of 60,000. What are your regular offerings, and how many people show up? Our regular meeting is on Tuesday night. We have a 40-minute sit, followed by announcements and housekeeping, then a 35- or 40-minute dharma talk by whoever led the meditation that night. About half of our teachers went through Spirit Rock’s Community Dharma Leaders program; the others have trained with Tara Brach. We probably average 40 to 60 people on any given Tuesday night.

We offer four “introduction to meditation” classes a year. We also have two weekday sits downtown at a nonprofit community healing center called Common Ground. It’s quite a distance from our regular meeting place at an adult care center. About 10 or 20 people come, and they have sort of become their own sangha.

We also hold two residential retreats a year at a center in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

How did your sangha respond to the “Unite the Right Rally,” which brought thousands of white nationalists and white supremacists as well as counterprotesters to Charlottesville in August? We became part of the Charlottesville Clergy Collective, a group of faith communities that came together on both days of the rally, bearing witness to the violence. It was powerful. Being on the front lines goes to our own mission of trying to relieve suffering and push back on hatred. It got people off their rear ends and wanting to do something about this whole thing that descended on our quiet little city. In addition, we had a bunch of sits during the rally at our downtown center.

The rally protested the planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.  at weekend, crowds marched through the street with torches, chanting things like “White lives matter” and “Jews will not replace us.” There were violent clashes between the white nationalists and the counterprotesters. A man drove a car into a crowd, killing one counterprotester and injuring 19 others. A helicopter monitoring the scene also crashed that day, killing two state troopers. How did these tragic events affect the work your sangha is doing? About a week or two after the Klan and the Nazis were here, we brought in David Campt, an author and speaker who teaches a “white ally toolkit”—a way to engage with white people on racial issues without offending, scaring, shaming, or judging them. We had about 100 people come. But this is still within the realm of dealing more with our white peers. Some members are more engaged in the minority communities here, but we’ve got a lot of work to do in that area.

After the Klan was here, the police department contacted me about doing something with the officers. Some of the young ones especially had been traumatized and subjected to horrible stuff during the rally. We’ve been teaching the officers basic meditation and emotional resilience, including how to breathe when you’re in a high-intensity situation.

Did you see any breakthroughs beyond your sangha after the rally? Charlottesville has a tendency to be self-congratulatory when it comes to how liberal we are, but the truth is that not much has changed in terms of racial dynamics. The rally brought a lot of people off the sidelines and engaged in more dialogue with folks in lower-income and minority communities. But that is very much in its infancy.

About three years ago, my wife and I moved from a typical white neighborhood downtown to a predominantly black neighborhood. We have Section 8 housing next door and public housing across the street. This isn’t just me; others have made an effort to get to know people and try to understand what the experience of growing up black in the South and Charlottesville in particular is like. So this is an ongoing priority. It’s also an ongoing challenge.

How diverse is your sangha? We don’t have the degree of diversity that we’d like. Our members are largely middle- and upper-middle-class white, skewed toward the slightly older demographic, although we have started to get more young people. We do have a lot of University of Virginia faculty, staff, and students who participate, as well as a fairly active LGBTQ contingent.

I think we’re not unique in this way, and it’s something we’re actively trying to address.

How so? We’ve had Ruth King, an African American Insight Meditation teacher who does race awareness training, come six times to work with our sangha. Her message to us was this: “You’ve got to do your own work as white people. Don’t tell us what we need. Don’t try to fix us. You need to fix yourself.” Out of her trainings we’ve developed about ten small “White Awake” groups of people who work on racial justice and outreach. This has borne fruit in terms of raising awareness among white folks about the level of racial oppression all over the country, and here as well, since Charlottesville had its own terrible racial history, even before the Klan came.

—Wendy Joan Biddlecombe, Web Editor

Tricycle wants to learn about your sangha! Write news@tricycle.org to be considered.

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Burmese Vipassana master Sayadaw U Pandita died last Saturday at a Bangkok hospital. He was 94 years old, and served as the abbot Panditarama Monastery and Meditation Center in Yangon (Rangoon).

U Pandita gained many Western followers after he traveled to the United States in 1984 to lead a three-month silent retreat at Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. IMS co-founders Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein remain deeply influenced by his teachings, which were characterized by rigorous attention to the present moment and an uncommon perseverance. U Pandita is the author of several books, including In This Very Life: The Liberation Teachings of the Buddha.

“Within minutes of meeting him at the Mahasi Meditation Center in Burma in 1979 I knew that I had met the reason I was born,” Alan Clements, one of U Pandita’s first Western students, told Tricycle. “He engaged me in truth, beauty and freedom like no other; bringing out the best in me, inspiring the courage to polish the rest. He remained my most trusted source of wisdom-guidance for the next 37 years.”

In February, Clements spent eight nights interviewing U Pandita at the monastery, and Clements said his teacher spoke about lovingkindness in action and his student Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s de facto leader, whom he supported spiritually during her house arrest.

Devotees can pay their respects at Shwe Taun Gon Sasana Yeiktha until April 20. After that, his body will be taken to the Panditarama Hse Mine Gon Forest Meditation Center for his cremation and burial on April 22.

Read more from Sayadaw U Pandita:

A Perfect Balance: Cultivating equanimity with Gil Fronsdal and Sayadaw U Pandita

Cutting to the Case: Sayadaw U Pandita provides straightforward instructions for the personal interview process typical during a Vipassana retreat 

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Awareness cannot be taught, and when it is present it has no context. All contexts are created by thought and are therefore corruptible by thought. Awareness simply throws light on what is, without any separation whatsoever.

Awareness, insight, enlightenment, wholeness—whatever words one may pick to label what cannot be caught in words—is not the effect of a cause. Activity does not destroy it and sitting does not create it. It isn’t a product of anything—no technique, method, environment, tradition, posture, activity, or nonactivity can create it. It is there, uncreated, freely functioning in wisdom and love, when self-centered conditioning is clearly revealed in all its grossness and subtleness and defused in the light of understanding.

Can the inner noise be entirely left alone while attending? When the changing states of body-mind are simply left to themselves without any choice or judgment—left unreacted to by a controlling or repressive will—a new quietness emerges by itself.

Sitting motionlessly quiet, for minutes or hours, regardless of length of time, is being in touch with the movements of the body—mind, gross and subtle, dull and clear, shallow and deep—without any opposition, resistance, grasping, or escape. It is being in intimate touch with the whole network of thoughts, sensations, feelings, and emotions without judging them good or bad, right or wrong—without wanting anything to continue or stop. It is an inward seeing without knowing, an open sensitivity to what is going on inside and out—flowing without grasping or accumulation. Stillness in the midst of motion and commotion is free of will, direction, and time. It is a complete letting be of what is from moment to moment.

Sitting quietly, doing nothing, not knowing what is next and not concerned with what was or what may be next, a new mind is operating that is not connected with the conditioned past and yet perceives and understands the whole mechanism of conditioning. It is the unmasking of the self that is nothing but masks—images, memories of past experiences, fears, hopes, and the ceaseless demand to be something or become somebody. This new mind that is no-mind is free of duality—there is no doer in it and nothing to be done.

♦

“Awareness,” by Toni Packer. www.springwatercenter.org

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Recently I was thinking about some close friends who are younger than I am, raising families, with busy lives in the world. I could appreciate that it might be quite some time before they would be able to sit a long retreat. So I started wondering if there was a way for people in those circumstances to integrate some kind of meditation technique into their daily activities that could really touch the transformative power of the practice. On longer retreats it’s easier to access meditative depths, but when we’re otherwise intensely engaged, it can be quite a challenge.

The foundation of the Buddha’s path to liberation is known as right understanding, and it consists of two main strands. One is the understanding and application of the teachings on the law of karma—that is, that our actions have consequences. Seeing this, we undertake the practice of generosity and the practice of the precepts. We take care with what we do so that we’re creating conditions for happiness rather than suffering, both for ourselves and others. This strand is frequently talked about, and it covers a lot of what people who are committed to the path usually practice.

But in the context of one’s daily life, the second strand is more difficult to work with. This is the basic understanding of anatta, or “no-self”—the absence of an inherently existing self. In Pali, the language of the oldest written Buddhist teachings, the belief in some core notion of self is called sakkaya-ditthi; this is sometimes translated as “personality belief.” It’s said to be the most dangerous of all the defilements, more dangerous than greed or even hatred, because these are rooted in this mistaken belief. This wrong view of self is central to how we go about in the world, and all kinds of unskillful actions come out of it.

Of course, the Buddha is talking about the unwholesome effects of acting out of this wrong view—this personality view—not only in terms of one life, but of many lifetimes. It’s an extremely powerful conditioning force. And the aim of the practice, central to everything we’re doing, is to free the mind from this misconception.

So the question then arose: how can we really address this issue as laypeople caught up in our day-to-day activities? Quite spontaneously a nine-minute-a-day plan came to me, a way to “turbo-charge” our ongoing practice by doing three short meditations a day, each three minutes long. Each of these sessions targets a particular area of identification where the mistaken sense of self is created and strengthened.

Session I: Who Is Knowing?

During the first three-minute session we simply sit and listen to sounds, in whatever surroundings we find ourselves. It makes no difference whether we’re on a noisy street or in a quiet room. As we open and relax into the awareness of the various sounds, we ask ourselves a question: “Can I find what’s knowing these sounds?” Clearly, we’re aware of them. But can we find what is knowing? When we investigate, we see there’s nothing to find. There’s no knower, even though knowing is happening.

This seems a very straightforward way of loosening and hopefully breaking the identification with the knowing as a knower. All that’s going on is just hearing. There’s no “I” behind it. No knower can be found.

So that’s the first three-minute exercise: listen to sounds, see if you can find what’s knowing them, and then explore the experience of not being able to find a knower, even though knowing is still there.

Session II: Breaking Identification with the Body

The second three minutes helps break through the very deep identification with the body. For this there are two exercises that could be alternated, or the time could be divided between them.

The friends I had in mind had both lost one parent recently, so the focus of one session is to reflect on anyone we know who has died. If we were with them during that process, what was happening as they were dying, during their last days? Or if we don’t have this personal experience, we can reflect on the great sweep of generations over time, that birth inevitably ends in death. Really try to take in the truth of the body dying, take in what our bodies are and what happens to them. This is something that will come to pass for us all.

The idea of this exercise is to reflect on dying in as vivid a way as possible, and to apply it to our partner, to our children, to our friends—seeing that this is what naturally happens to all of us. It isn’t morbid, but rather a way of keeping front and center the truth that we all die. This can serve as a powerful reminder that our body is not “self.” It is simply going through its own process. One day, it’s going to decay and die—that’s nature. It’s just how it is.

The other exercise for loosening identification with the body is carried out in motion. When I walk somewhere, for example, if I’m mindful and really feeling the body moving, I notice that I’m simply experiencing sensations in space— pressure, motion, lightness. That’s all that’s happening. There’s not the sense of a solid body, and certainly not the sense of an “I” that’s doing the walking.

When sensations in space are being known, through the act of walking or any other movement, we begin to get a sense of the body as a fluid energy field. This can be illuminating—it can free the mind from being caught in the notion of the solidity of the body.

These two approaches are a good way of weakening the identification with the body as being self.

Session III: As the Thought Arises…

The last area where we get caught a lot in terms of self is the identification with our thoughts. We have thousands of thoughts a day, most of which are casual and low-key. Often we’re not even aware of them. And almost all have to do with self—our activities, our future projects, our memories, and the imagined events that involve us.

During an earlier retreat, I noticed that this more subtle stream of thought is like a dream state, and the thought arose, “I’m just dreaming myself into existence.” Reflecting on this in the time since then, I see that we’re continually dreaming ourselves into existence because we’re not aware of thoughts as they’re coming through. So the sense of self is continually being reinforced.

For the third three minutes, then, we simply watch for thoughts arising and passing, as we often do in meditation, but with a further turbo-charge: we pay more careful attention so that we’re right there, precisely as the thought arises. If the awareness is sharp, we’ll observe a thought arise and vanish in the moment. That experience repeatedly weakens the identification with thought. We discover that there’s hardly anything there, just a wisp. In our normal lives, with our usual level of attention, we’re not conscious of this. But for three minutes we can bring in enough focus so that we actually see it.

This is what I call “the nine-minute-a-day, turbo-charged path to enlightenment.” It’s important to add, though, that nine minutes a day by itself won’t be enough. It needs to be built into the foundation of a daily meditation practice, together with the cultivation of the first strand of right understanding mentioned earlier: the awareness that our actions have consequences. If this nine-minute-a-day program is combined with other aspects of a daily practice, then I believe it can really enliven our understanding of how to apply the teachings in the midst of a very busy life. 

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