The Vocabulary of Meditation

Today we’ll have a vocabulary lesson and a history lesson.

In the Canon, the Buddha talks about developing two qualities while you meditate. One is tranquility or samatha, and the other is insight or vipassanā. He says that you develop both of these qualities while you’re doing jhāna.

As you’ll remember, jhāna is right concentration, and the instructions for right concentration are contained in the description for right mindfulness. For example, for the body, the instruction is to keep track of the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.

So there are three qualities that you bring to the practice: mindfulness, ardency, and alertness.

As you practice right mindfulness and can keep the mind on its object—you’re aware of what you’re doing, getting rid of any distractions and developing the qualities that help you stay more stably there—that’s when you get the mind into right concentration.

Now, the Buddha says that when you get the mind into jhāna, it requires tranquility and insight to get it there. Then, as the mind grows still in jhāna, the result is that the jhāna provides a basis for your insight and tranquility to get even stronger.

At that point, it’s a matter of which quality you need to develop at any particular time. Sometimes you notice that you need to get the mind more tranquil, and the questions you ask in that case are, “What do I do to get the mind to settle down?” and “What can I do to get it to be more unified?” First, of course, you have to deal with any distractions that might pull you away.

If you’ve been to any of our past retreats, you may remember that there are five techniques that the Buddha recommends for dealing with distractions.

The first is that you simply notice that you’ve lost track of your object and you bring your mind right back.

The second, if the mind keeps going to a particular thought, is that you have to talk to yourself about the drawbacks of that kind of thinking. The Buddha says that you want to get to the point where you feel really disgusted with it. The image he gives is of a young man or woman fond of ornament, looking into a mirror and seeing that a dead snake or a dead dog is tied around his or her neck.

Sometimes you don’t have to get that disgusted. You just want to convince yourself that that kind of thinking has no appeal. My favorite way of using this type of approach to distractions is to ask myself, “If this were a movie, would I pay to see it? The acting is horrible, the script is miserable, and I’ve seen this many times before.” That’s often enough to say, “I’ve had enough of this.”

A third approach for getting the mind to drop its distractions is basically to tell yourself, “I don’t have to pay attention to this.” It’s as if a crazy person has come up to talk to you when you’re walking along the street. If you try to drive the crazy person away, he’s got you. So the best approach is simply to ignore him and keep on walking. He may yell at you for a while and say outrageous things, but eventually he’ll give up.

A fourth approach is to relax around the tension that arises in the body along with the distraction. When there’s tension around that thought, you allow that tension to relax, and then the thought doesn’t have the place to stand.

The fifth approach is to just tell yourself, “I will not think that thought,” clench your teeth, put your tongue on the roof of the mouth. I’ve found with this approach that it’s often effective to repeat a meditation word really, really fast.

Those are the five techniques given in the Canon.

But even when you find yourself settling down with your object, sometimes there still will be commentary going on in the mind about what you’re doing. Now, in the beginning, that commentary is part of the first jhāna. It’s called directed thought and evaluation, and it’s a necessary part of the concentration. It allows you to adjust the breath and the mind so that they can settle in and feel snug with each other.

But there comes a point where you don’t need that commentary any more. Ajaan Fuang compares this to having a big jar of water: You pour water into the jar, and there comes a point where the jug is full. No matter how much water you add, you can’t get the jar any more full than that. In other words, there are times when the mind has a compulsion to keep on talking to itself. It keeps on pouring the water in. What I’ve found works here is to try to locate where in the body this talking part seems to be located. Then, wherever you’re talking to yourself, just think of the breath going right into that spot and dispersing the thought. You’ll find, however, that there can be many levels of conversation going on in the mind, so wherever you locate any words, breathe right into them, disperse them, explode them away.

Now, those are ways of getting the mind to settle down and be one with itself and unified with its object as well. They count as ways of getting the mind into tranquility, but they also involve a little bit of insight because you’re beginning to see the process of fabrication in your mind.

That’s the topic of vipassanā or insight: the processes of fabrication, what to do with them, and also how to get rid of unskillful ones.

Now, the questions you ask for getting the mind to gain more insight go back to the five steps that we’ve been talking several times about already: to see how these fabrications originate, how they pass away, what their allure is, what their drawbacks are and—when you compare the drawbacks with the allure and see that the drawbacks outweigh the allure—how you develop dispassion for them.

Often the hardest steps of those five will be seeing the allure, because we tend to find ourselves attracted to things we know we shouldn’t be attracted to—for example, lust for someone we shouldn’t feel lust for. So, if you’re ashamed of why you like this particular defilement, you tend to hide the reasons from yourself. This is why you have to be extra honest with yourself. It requires a lot of tranquility and stillness in the mind to see these things and to admit them to yourself.

So you can see that tranquility and insight have to work together to get the mind into concentration and to develop discernment. This is why, when the Buddha told the monks to meditate, he didn’t say, “Go do vipassanā” or “Go do samatha.” He said, “Go do jhāna.” That covers both.

Sometimes vipassanā will lead the way before tranquility, and sometimes tranquility will lead the way. Ideally, you want to get them both to work together. You’ll also find that you may be more talented in one side or another, in which case you have to really work the side where you’re not talented, so as to bring things into balance.

This is why Ajaan Fuang described his students as being of two sorts: those who think too much and those who don’t think enough. The ones who don’t think enough can get into concentration really easily, but the problem there is that they don’t notice how they get into concentration. The mind seems to settle down naturally. If there ever happens to be a day where they can’t get into concentration, they don’t know what to do. As for those who think too much, it takes a long while for them to get into concentration. The problem there is that they may get discouraged and give up. But if they finally do get the mind to settle down, they’ll understand all the obstacles to concentration. So when they have trouble getting into concentration the next time, they’ll have some idea of what to do.

The Buddha said that, ideally, you want to get the two qualities of tranquility and insight to work together. His instructions for breath meditation are precisely instructions for how to do that. As you may remember, he talks about getting sensitive to bodily fabrication and mental fabrication: That’s the insight side. Then he talks about calming bodily fabrication and calming mental fabrication: That’s the tranquility side. As you get more and more advanced, the emphasis gets more and more on the insight. When he talks about releasing the mind, contemplating inconstancy, contemplating dispassion, these steps are insight steps.

That’s basically how the Buddha explains meditation in the Canon.

When we get to the commentaries, though, we find that the meanings of the words have shifted. For example, insight and tranquility now become not just qualities of the mind but actual meditation techniques. And they’re quite distinct: You do one or the other, but not both together. As for the qualities of mindfulness, mindfulness as explained in the commentaries becomes something very separate from concentration and gets more and more aligned with just insight. As a result, the three activities of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency get redefined. Mindfulness becomes the act of being aware of things as they happen, identifying states of mind, good or bad, and just accepting when they’re there, accepting when they’re gone. Sampajañña or alertness becomes what they call clear comprehension, in which you see things in terms of the three characteristics. Ardency means basically continuing with those activities in all situations. In this way, the practice of right mindfulness becomes an insight technique.

As for the practice of jhāna, the commentaries interpret that as something totally separate. They describe the jhānas in terms of much stronger trance states than you would find in the Canon. For them, the trance in jhāna is so strong that you can’t do any thinking at all. Unlike the Canon, where it’s said that you can develop insight while in many of the levels of jhāna, in jhāna as described by the commentaries, no insight can happen. You have to leave jhāna in order to develop insight.

In the course of Buddhist history, the commentaries have had a large influence in Burma and Sri Lanka, which is why, when you see the vipassanā techniques coming from Burma, they make a clear distinction between samatha and vipassanā. Vipassanā in their explanation basically means seeing things as they happen, accepting them as they happen, being able to label them in line with how they are classified in Buddhist psychology. From their point of view, you have to leave jhāna before you can develop insight.

In Thailand, the commentaries have not had that much of an influence, which is why the teachings of the forest tradition are much closer to the Canon. That’s why, when you ask a monk from the Thai tradition, “Okay, I’ve been doing samatha. When do I stop that and start doing vipassanā?” he will basically say, “Well, you do both. It’s basically a matter of emphasis.” As I said, you need some insight in order to develop tranquility, and some tranquility to develop insight.

Basically, the instructions will be: Do what you can to get the mind to settle down and try to get it really solid. There’s no great hurry to have to start doing insight. Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about how he was basically doing concentration practice for eight years before Ajaan Mun started pushing him to develop insight. However, you can’t help but develop some insight in the course of doing concentration.

Ideally, you want to have the foundation of your concentration strong enough before you start doing some of the questioning that goes into fabrications and insight. The problem is that we don’t live in an ideal world. When an issue comes up, even though your concentration may not be very strong, if the issue is pressing enough, you have to start developing insight around it. So, you have a choice: If an issue is not pressing, you just put it aside for the time being to create space to work on your concentration. But if it really is urgent and pressing, then you use whatever discernment you can muster, either on your own, or from what lessons other people have taught you. It’s by exercising your discernment in this way that it becomes stronger.

It’s like going into a kitchen and finding that the ingredients in the kitchen are not especially good, but you’re hungry. You don’t wait to get the ideal ingredients. You get in touch with your inner chef and do your best.