Table of Contents
Publishers Acknowledgment
T he publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous help of the Hershey Family Foundation in sponsoring the publication of this book.
Preface
M any teachers brought insight meditation, vipassana , to the
West in the 1970s, and it proved to become very popular. A part of vipassana is the mindfulness practice that has come to such prominence today. In the 1980s, many students wanted to read a clear introduction to the practice, but most of the books they could find tended to be scholarly and not very accessible to laypeople. And thus, I wrote Mindfulness in Plain English , a how-to book on mindfulness technique and its underlying principles. That book, like this one, was written for ordinary people in straightforward language.
While the words mindfulness and even vipassana have grown increasingly common and the practice itself has received lots of attention, deep concentration meditation, shamatha , seems to have received less. In fact, it was widely considered a kind of meditators Olympics, a pursuit suited only to extraordinary beings who lived in caves or monasteries, far beyond the ken of normal people, folks with busy daily lives.
In the first decade of this century, interest seems to be turning toward the concentration path. And that is a good thing, because it is truly a parallel yet complementary path to insight meditation, to mindfulness. The two are intertwined and support one another. Over the last two millennia, these two path were codified and refined as parallel paths for a very good reason: they both work, and they work best together. In fact, the two are really one. In truth, the Buddha did not teach shamatha and vipassana as separate systems. The Buddha gave us one meditation path, one set of tools for becoming free from suffering.
This book is intended to serve as a clearly comprehensible meditators handbook, laying out the path of concentration meditation in a fashion as close to step-by-step as possible. Also, this book assumes you have read Mindfulness In Plain English or something similar, that you have begun to cultivate a mindfulness practice, and that you are now ready to take the next stepbeyond mindfulness.
One note about the structure of this book: throughout it (and especially where talking in detail about the jhanas), I have offered a number of quotations from the canon of Pali suttas, our best record of what it is the Buddha himself taught. Since this is not an academic work, we have not used endnotes. Nonetheless, Id like to acknowledge the many fine translators whose work Ive drawn on in this volume: Bhikkhu Bodhi, Nyanaponika Maha Thera, Bhikkhu Nanamoli, John D. Ireland, and Gil Fronsdal. Additional there are a few translations which are my own, and several that come from the Visuddhimagga by Buddhaghosa, translated by Bhikkhu Nanamoli.
And one final note: one of the essential parts of any study is the meaning of the basic terms. There is an extensive and detailed glossary of terms at the back of the book. Please make use of this glossary as you read. Indeed, you can get a very fine review of the material in this book just by reading the glossary.
I am profoundly grateful to John Peddicord for the generous gifts of his time and patience. This book, like Mindfulness in Plain English , could not have come into being without his extensive hard work in its development.
I am also thankful to Josh Bartok of Wisdom Publications for making many valuable suggestions to complete the work. Others who contributed their time and effort include Barry Boyce, Brenda Rosen, Fran Oropeza, Bhante Rahula, Bhante Buddharakita, and Bikkhuni Sobhana. I am grateful to all of you.
Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
CHAPTER 1
The Concentration Path
HOW MUCH FAITH DO YOU NEED?
Though Buddhism is quite different from most religions, and is in some ways more akin to a kind of practical philosophy, the practices and teachings we will be exploring do come from a religious context, namely from Theravadan Buddhism. All you need to do is render the hindrances dormant. All religion depends on some kind of faith, which at heart is nothing more than the willingness to accept provisionally something without yet having proved or verified it for oneself. And this is true with this material as well. But you dont have to be a Buddhist, in any religious sense whatsoever, to gain absorption concentration. Anybody can do it.
So, how much faith do you need? Do you need to convert to Buddhism? Do you need to abandon the tradition in which you were raised or the ideals to which you have deep commitment? Do you need to cast aside anything that your intellect or understanding of the world tells you is true?
Absolutely not. You can retain your current frame of reference and accept only what you are prepared to accept, a piece at time, and only what you in fact find helpful. Yet you do need some faith.
You need the same kind of faith that you need to read a good novel or conduct a scientific experiment. You need a willing suspension of disbelief. I invite you to, as an experiment, put any automatic rejection you may have on hold long enough to see if this path works for you, to see if you yourself can verify what generations of people just like you have verified for millennia.
That temporary suspension of disbelief is all you need herebut even that is not easy. Our conditioned preconceptions are deep and often unconscious. We frequently find ourselves rejecting something without really inspecting that judgment, without even knowing that we have made a judgment. And indeed, this is one of the beauties of the concentration path that well be exploring together. It trains us to look at our own minds, to know when we are judging and simply reacting. Then we can decide how much of that instantaneous reaction we wish to accept. You are completely in control of that process.
There is, of course, a snag. You need to be able to suspend your disbelief deeply enough and long enough to give concentration meditation a real, honest, best-effort try, and the deep results are not instantaneous. Do not expect that you can give this a half-hearted effort and two weeks later the heavens will open and the golden sun-beam of inspiration will pour down upon your head. This will almost certainly lead to disappointment.
We are dealing with the deepest forces in the mind, and epiphany is seldom immediate.
WHY DEEP CONCENTRATION IS IMPORTANT
There is no concentration without wisdom, no wisdom without concentration. One who has both concentration and wisdom is close to peace and emancipation.
The wisdom referred to in this passage is of two varieties. First, there is ordinary wisdom, the kind that can be expressed in words, the kind we know with our ordinary minds. Then there is the wisdom of knowing things at the deepest level, a knowing beyond words and concepts. This book presents you with wisdom of the first kind so that you can seek and find the higher wisdom on your own.
To seek this deep understanding we must quest into the basic nature of the mind itself. In the following passage from the Pali scriptures, the Buddha speaks to his primary disciples and explains the nature of the mind, what makes it ill, and what we have to do to correct that.
This mind, O monks, is luminous, but it is corrupted by adventitious defilements. The uninstructed worldling does not understand this as it really is. Therefore, for him, there is no mental development.
This mind, O monks, is luminous, but it is free from adventitious defilements. The instructed noble disciple understands this as it really is. Therefore, for him, there is mental development.
