Buddhist Meditation
Dr. Amartya Kumar Bhattacharya
BCE (Hons.) ( Jadavpur ), MTech ( Civil ) ( IIT Kharagpur ), PhD ( Civil ) ( IIT Kharagpur ), Cert.MTERM ( AIT Bangkok ), CEng(I), FIE, FACCE(I), FISH, FIWRS, FIPHE, FIAH, FAE, MIGS, MIGS – Kolkata Chapter, MIGS – Chennai Chapter, MISTE, MAHI, MISCA, MIAHS, MISTAM, MNSFMFP, MIIBE, MICI, MIEES, MCITP, MISRS, MISRMTT, MAGGS, MCSI, MMBSI
Chairman and Managing Director,
MultiSpectra Consultants,
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Kolkata – 700029, West Bengal, INDIA.
E-mail: dramartyakumar@gmail.com
Man's quest for an end to his suffering has led him into an exploration of his inner self, its working and its dysfunctional behaviour under certain circumstances. Under such conditions,a radical shift in consciousness, perception and attitude is the only succour for a tormented mind. This process, involving the destruction of suffering, is based on the Four Noble Truths enunciated by the Buddha which are as follows:
1. Life contains suffering.
2. Suffering has a cause, and the cause can be known.
3. Suffering can be brought to an end.
4. The path to end suffering has eight parts.
The Buddha also laid out the Noble Eightfold Path which is given below:
Right view
Right intention
Right speech
Right action
Right livelihood
Right effort
Right mindfulness
Right concentration
As a Buddhist, the author is an “insider” and though he is well conversant with Buddhist tenets, his purpose here is not to explain them. Rather he would prefer to deal with meditation which lies at the heart of the spiritual practice of dharmic ( spiritual, Sanskrit dharma, Pali dhamma ) people. Atma dwipa bhava (Be your own island, that is,refuge) : this saying of the Buddha resonates among His followers whose number and geographical spread has made Buddhism a world faith.
Named Siddhartha by His parents when He was born, the Buddha was the only founder of a faith who claimed He was a human being, pure and simple. He always denied that He was divine. His family name was Gautama ( Pali Gotama ). However, His encounter with Angulimala, the robber, reveals to us who He really was. According to the Buddha, man sits in command over his destiny; he is however unaware of this fact and abdicates his responsibility of controlling his future, even death. This is so because man is, in a deep philosophical sense, deluded, asleep and unaware of his true nature. He normally identifies himself with his body, which was born and hence will die, some day. This gives rise to vices, insecurity and belief in that what is not. He also believes that he has relatives and friends and, if he clings onto them tightly enough, he will one day, after death, go to the nebulous place called heaven. But it is not true. The lacuna in man's thinking becomes disturbingly clear to him when he finds that he is suffering. Man needs to be awakened and when this awakening process is complete, man will rise from the ashes of the world of the senses that he has just burnt to the world of pure consciousness. Buddhism is a journey where a man starts asleep and wakes up awake. In doing so, he sheds aside nothingness to awaken to a single state of Being. The process by which this takes place is meditation. Books have been written on meditation and it would be futile for the author to be didactic; so he will try to be brief. But one thing must be said. Buddhism represents the crème de la crème of Indian religious thought and philosophy.
The Buddha, unlike Christ, did not project Himself as a saviour of man. The Buddha did not refer to God either, as a supreme dispenser of justice and did not claim to be a son or some other relation of God. Rather, His title, Buddha, means one who is awake. He is considered to be the messiah who showed the path to eternity. The Buddha gave his teaching 'for the good of many, for the happiness of many, for showing compassion to the world, for realising the spiritual purpose of life' ( bahujanahitaya bahujanasukhaya lokanukampaya, arthaya hitaya ). He told man that though he is asleep, the capacity to be awakened is in him and also taught man the path to awakening. But man must walk that path himself, alone. Man must realise that he is always alone, whether it be high atop the mountains, in the company of his relatives or in the morning crowd in the downtown of a metropolitan city. A positive attitude to aloneness can develop in man when he can take a mental sword and cleave a distinction between aloneness and loneliness. Loneliness has a negative connotation in the sense that it implies a craving for company of other human beings, the exact opposite of the self-sufficiency implied by aloneness. The capacity to tread the path to nirvana ( Pali nibbana ), which means freedom, is already in man, he just has to use it.
He searched, He meditated, He found: this aptly summarises the awakening of the Buddha. When a man suffers, it is useless for him to talk of God, or to fast and otherwise to torture his body if his suffering is not reduced by any or all of these. The Buddha realised this fact and after His awakening promulgated the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. What is required of man is to effect a radical shift in consciousness from the finite to the infinite using right concentration. The concentrated focus is always on suffering and its elimination. The law of cause and effect is at work here too. If one is deluded, one suffers. If one studies the Four Noble Truths, one sees that man should identify the cause of suffering and systematically go about destroying it using the Noble Eightfold Path. The result of meditation is tremendous. One transcends the boundaries of his body; he senses that the entire universe has become his body. He senses that he has exchanged a weak mind for a strong one. He senses that though he may continue to reside in his mortal body, his consciousness has become irreversibly altered. He feels himself being pervaded by peace. He does not become a bird soaring in the sky; he becomes as boundless as the sky itself. He becomes awakened; prabuddha. The Buddha did not give His doctrine for strong wills only; His statements are just as applicable to weaker minds provided they have the determination to follow Him. He asked for nothing more than courage and promised eternity.
In response to questioning by devotees in the kingdom of Kosala as to the importance or unimportance of belief, the Buddha pointed out the distinction between knowing and believing. Believing always connotes a second-hand approach to Truth; knowing about something through the experience of someone else. Knowing means a first-hand direct knowledge of Truth and the result of this distinction is that the modicum of doubt that always accompanies belief is absent in knowledge. Freedom of thought is permitted by the Buddha to His devotees so that they can discriminate and find Truth.
Thoughts flow like an endless stream in the mind of man. Several of these are highly disturbing and cause a man to become restless or worse. There is absolute tranquillity in meditation because the suffering has been clinically identified, its cause clinically identified and now the sole mission is to remove both the cause and the effect. It must be remembered that cause and effect are not meant here in the Christian sense of the term with a benign God sitting and evaluating each thought or action of a man and delivering an effect of each cause. According to Buddhism, the universe is in a state of flux and, in Japan, a circle or ensho is drawn to represent this eternal rule of cause and effect. Modern science and technology liberate but also trap man in fields such as astrophysics. When one looks up at the night sky, one is looking backwards in time because light has a finite speed however great that speed may be. However, we cannot see the extremities of the universe and logic tells us that the universe cannot have a spatial extremity. Similarly, the universe cannot have a zero-time extremity. Man lives in a space-time frame.
An explanation as to the types of meditation in vogue is in order here. Vipashyana ( Pali vipassana; passana means seeing ) meditation is practised in south Asia and other countries which practice Theravada Buddhism ( literally, the way of the Elders ), which is also called Hinayana Buddhism. Zen meditation is practised in East Asia, that is China, Korea and Japan, which are among the countries that practice Mahayana Buddhism ( literally, the greater vehicle ). Meditation is something that cannot be fully explained in words, it has to be experienced to be understood completely. Knowing about meditation is one thing; knowing meditation is quite another. A man can sit alone, cross-legged, in a quiet room in the full lotus posture ( padmasana ) or, failing that, in the half-lotus posture ( bhadrasana ) and try to enter into vipashyana meditation ( the third posture of sitting is called sukhasana )and yet there may be something in the world of the senses lurking in the mind that must be thrown aside from the mind before he can meditate. In zen meditation ( the Sanskrit word dhyana means the same thing as the Pali word jhana, the Chinese word chaan and the Japanese word zen ), one can take the help of koans or spiritual puzzles, which are in prevalence in China, Korea and Japan, on which he can ruminate just prior to meditation in an attempt to propel the mind to a transcendental state in which he can meditate. If one is unable to start doing meditation oneself, one should take the help of a guru ( literally, one who dispels darkness ) who will guide him in the initial stages. One must sit, preferably, in the lotus posture with one's spine erect. There must be no slumping of the back, the head should be straight as if suspended by means of a string. Another analogy adopted is that the head should be straight as if bearing the sky on its top. The hands may be placed in the bhumisparsha mudra ( bhumisparsha gesture ), a mudra in which we find so many statues of the Buddha. This gesture is also called sakshi ( Sanskrit for witness ) mudra. Alternatively, a man's hands may be placed on his lap, all fingers except the thumbs interlocked and the thumbs touching each other. This gesture is very popular in East Asia, that is, in China, Korea and Japan. Yet another mudra consists of the hands straight, placed on the knees, and the thumb and the next finger touching each other with the other fingers straight. This gesture of the hands is called jnana mudra. After one has sat correctly, he must close his eyes and focus on the inhalation and exhalation of his breath. In all meditation, the next step is samadhi, which is a transcendental state. It may be described by sat( being ), chit ( consciousness ) and ananda ( bliss ). In vipashyana meditation, he must then enter into vipashyana in which awareness is focussed on all parts of the physical body in turn and the sensations felt by those parts of the body are consciously sensed. Awareness and equanimity together, symbolise vipashyana meditation. If either part is missing, one cannot attain enlightenment. Zazen ( the practice of zen meditation ) also leads to enlightenment but by a somewhat different procedure. Zen has always positioned itself as quintessential Buddhism, implying that what is not zen is not Buddhism. This position of zen is untenable but it is undeniable that prajna ( wisdom ) and samata ( equanimity ) are essential in zen. Zen poses spiritual puzzles called koans to its followers; spiritual puzzles verging on the nonsensical. At the usual existential level, koans cannot be said to have any coherence and an existential leap is needed to bring harmony. This usually involves satori ( another word is kensho which means seeing into one's own nature ). The spiritual puzzle posed by a koan may be such that even a strong will may be unable to go to the transcendental plane. The role of the zen master is important here. He can deliver a shock, an emotional one usually suffices but a physical blow or other corporal shock may be needed so that the spiritual aspirant is propelled into a higher level of consciousness. The author's feeling is that if one is able to reside in kshana ( this moment ), that is, the 'now' prolonged forever,that is, in an infinite series of 'nows', man would be much happier. Vipashyana also leads to enlightenment. Meditation is ultimately a do-it-yourself project where a man must shed his ego and much else and discover at the end of his solitary journey that he is awake.
In this context, it would be in the fitness of things to look at the Yoga Sutra ( method of Yoga ) written by Patanjali in India, who came a few centuries after the Buddha, in the light of the teachings of the Buddha.
The Yoga Sutra deals with meditation leading to samadhi. It has eight steps, the first three of which are preparatory and the next five of which gradually lead to meditation. The eight steps are yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana and samadhi. The first two steps deal with a clean and virtuous lifestyle. The third step is taking a seat and a posture conducive to meditation. After one has sat correctly, he must close his eyes and do pranayama which is focussing on the inhalation and exhalation of his breath. The next steps lead to samadhi.
It is evident that the writer of this Sutra was heavily influenced by Buddhism and may have been a Buddhist. The focus on attentiveness towards breath, the description of the state of samadhi, the absence of any reference to God or any superhuman power, the stress on one's own effort to attain liberation, the focus on prajna ( wisdom ) and samata ( balance ) and some other facets in the Sutra are in accordance with the teachings of Buddhism.
Ordinarily, animal instincts bind a man to the world of the senses. Man lacks the initiative to free himself from them. Rather, he reposes his faith on some superhuman power whom he tries to propitiate in the hope that he may be rescued from his troubles. Patanjali does not theorise much; rather he goes straight to the action of meditation. Meditation may also be described as a tapasya ( a Sanskrit word whose root lies in the Sanskrit word tapah which means heat ), a burning of the impurities in the mind. In medieval India, the great scholar Shankaracharya has been described as a prachchhanna ( Sanskrit 'in essence' ) Buddhist.
Before the advent of Buddhism in China, the teachings of Confucius and Lao-tzu were mainly prevalent and and while they gave a certain moral order, true spirituality was absent. This inchoate body of teachings had and still has many followers. However, the arrival of Buddhism in China from India resulted in a spiritual awakening in the Chinese hsin ( mind ).
The result of the awakening of man due to meditation is drastic. It is as if the universe had always existed but one had been going about with his eyes closed and has now suddenly opened them. In the plane of the senses, his external world does not change but his way of processing his external world undergoes a drastic change. He becomes more peaceful with himself and with others. This is the significance of the koan uttered in zendos ( temples and other places where zen is performed ):
Before enlightenment, chopping wood, carrying water;
After enlightenment, chopping wood, carrying water.
An awakened person feels that he is surrounded by peace at all times. It is important to understand that nobody tells him this; he feels it himself. He goes about doing his daily activities, but his way of processing his world has fundamentally altered for the better. He realises that he cannot and need not control all aspects of his external physical world. He realises that he gains more by letting go. He becomes aware of the non-peaceful moments in his life. He opts for shifting his consciousness to his mind and becoming aware of his internal mental processes when waiting, for example, in a traffic jam or while waiting in a queue. He opts for harmony in his mental processes rather than chaos. Genjo Hsuan-tsang, the great Chinese monk who visited India during the time of Emperor Harshavardhana, once made the following remark about the state of realisation : 'It is like a man drinking water; he knows by himself whether it is cold or hot'.
Buddhism disagrees with Christianity on the issue of birth-and-death. Since it does not believe in zero-time, it does not believe in the Christian perception of creation. Also, the two world faiths differ, as has been mentioned and implied before, on their views regarding a supreme God and the presence or absence of a soul ( Sanskrit atman, Pali atta ). Christianity believes in the presence of an individual soul inside each man; Buddhism does not.
Meditation has been performed by theoreticians and philosophers as well as by rank empiricists. While their emphasis may have been different, it has been universally recognised that they have all contributed to the dharma. Also, meditation is now spreading to the West as well. It is said that Buddhism can be taught to people of any cultural background. That is why in spite of not having any tradition of meditation, the knowledge and traditions of the East are now spreading to the West. Westerners are learning that meditation is not a kind of mental suicide, as some were ought to believe, but an active mental process.
Buddhism transformed the life of Emperor Ashoka of India. The greatest Indian Emperor ever, ruling over a territory much larger than the current Republic of India, he did much to spread Buddhism. In his younger days, he was a warrior and conquered many territories. After he conquered Kalinga, or the modern east Indian state of Orissa, he was moved by the suffering of the people. Mentally tormented, he found peace after embracing Buddhism. Emperor Kanishka of the Kushan dynasty was another great Buddhist ruler whose vast empire encompassed a large part of India as well as a vast territory in western China ( modern Sinkiang ) and Central Asia.
One dictum in Chinese summarises the essence of zen: wu shih yu hsin, wu hsin yu shih. The meaning which is very deep is “Be business-less in mind, be mind-less in business”. The sentence is self-explanatory.
The Buddha showed how man can integrate himself to the cosmos. In this and in many other aspects, He was a student of life and a leader of men. In a caste-ridden society, the Buddha strove to establish the equality of all men. In this, He was the world's first great socialist. Lao-tzu of ancient China in his book Tao Te Ching ( The Way ) described the qualities a true leader should have; leaders tread fresh grass amongst other things. The Buddha possessed all of them and much more. He was the ultimate tyagi, that is, renunciant; renouncing a throne, comforts of a palace, a wife and a son to leave his palace on horseback in search of Truth at night. In this, He showed Himself to be an exemplar of Holiness inspiring millions of others to follow suit. He elevated Himself to the level of a Purushottama (Sanskrit a Superhuman Man ).
Buddhism preaches ultimate tolerance to all faiths, even those which are incoherent and self-contradictory. A Buddhist hates none, loves all. The overarching philosophy of Buddhism encompasses love for all creatures on earth. Once, the Buddha said 'Whoever sees me, sees the teaching'. That is the reason why it is invigorating to keep a statue of the Buddha in one's place of meditation just as a Christian keeps a crucifix in his room.
Buddhism is particularly relevant in the violence-ridden world today. As said before, Buddhism treats all men as equal. Faith in justice; faith in the power of reason; faith in the bona-fide standing of any petitioner in a court of law; faith in the ability of people to govern themselves ensuring equality of every human being; faith in glasnost, that is openness, are the premises on which a civilised society is built. The unpleasant truth is that these premises are now under assault in some parts of the world from some quarters. As a Buddhist, the author feels that mankind can do much better.
The Buddha preached sometimes through formal sermons and also sometimes through answers to questions posed by devotees. Some non-Buddhists have sought to attack His teachings on the ground that He was silent on the issue of presence or absence of God. These people fail to realise that if the Buddha was silent on the issue of God, He was only reposing His faith in man and man's ability to gain enlightenment through his own efforts.
With sambodhi ( supreme enlightenment ) of a man, he realises that death can be defeated only if it can be made unreal. His false self, or nothingness, dissolves into a vibrant awakened being.
