Asian Traditions of Meditation

by Halvor Eifring

  The commentaries and some modern monasteries advise the practitioner to construct a kasiṇa as part of the preparation. Buddhaghosa gives careful instructions: for a kasiṇa, a disc or a larger area of the color is made, or a means of containing the elements of earth, water, air, fire, or space. In Southern Buddhist countries, where many follow commentarial guidelines, discs for the colors are already constructed, and hang in monasteries. Buddhaghosa also discusses naturally occurring fields of objects, though cautiously. That they were used at the time of the Buddha, however, is suggested in very early texts: the canonical list of the spheres of transcendence (abhibhāyatana) compares the “external object” to the flowers of blue flax, the yellow kaṇṇikāra flower, the red bandhujīvaka flower, and the white morning star, as well as fine muslin of these colors (Majjhimanikāya II 12–15).8 The taking of a field of earth is described in the Culasuññata-Sutta as “just as a bull’s hide becomes free from folds when fully stretched with a hundred pegs” (Majjhimanikāya III 105).9 In the Dhammapada story told at the beginning, as well as in others, a meditator spontaneously finds a natural occurrence of an external object.

  In the commentaries, the practitioner is asked to allow the eyes to rest on the external visual object, placed at a set distance away, so that it occupies his whole attention: the word kasiṇa is derived from the Sanskrit word meaning “entire” or “whole.”10 The eyes should not be so open as to cause strain, or half-closed, inducing drowsiness: it should be like seeing one’s face in a mirror (Visuddhimagga IV 28). The meditator then shuts the eyes, with the same rested attention as if they were open (Visuddhimagga IV 30), until a counterpart image (uggaha-nimitta) of the object appears spontaneously in the mind’s eye. He repeats this a “hundred, a thousand times.” This is a delicate process and may take time and require guidance: too much strain and the mind becomes tense or tired. The boy in the story is described as following such guidelines, as given by Buddhaghosa and Upatissa (Ehara, Path of Freedom, 76). From the outset, as the boy settles his attention and examines the flower, he would bring to mind the descriptive denoter “red, red,” an aid to sustaining alertness. Although Buddhaghosa does not specify this, it involves an “internal,” perhaps auditory factor.11 For each object a comparable descriptive formula is taught, though no significance or mantric power is associated with this. As indicated earlier, meditation objects are chosen to suit specific temperamental needs: the canonical Mahāniddesa says that the “beautiful” object, the kasiṇas of earth, water, fire, air, blue-black, yellow, red, white, space, consciousness, and, in some lists, light, are regarded as an antidote to dispositions inclined to ill will.12

  In time, when jhāna factors start to develop, an image arises spontaneously in the practitioner’s own mind (patibhaga-nimitta), when the eyes are shut. Now it is not necessary to return to the external object; the image is made stable, and the factors of jhāna begin to strengthen and support one another. Advice from the meditation teacher and care in behavior are recommended at this sensitive stage of practice (Ehara, Path of Freedom, 76–79). Two qualities come to balance: the application of the mind to the object (vitakka) and examination (vicāra), usually associated with speech and internal dialogue, become cooperative in wholehearted engagement and examination of the object. When this occurs, joy, happiness and one-pointedness (ekaggatā, literally “gone-to-oneness”) are said to arise, as the interest the mind takes in outside distractions and internal hindrances, such as hatred, resentment, or restlessness, falls away. In time vitakka and vicāra drop away, then joy and happiness, while other qualities, such as mindfulness and equanimity, intensify and grow. This is what the boy in the story would have been practicing, in a process preparing him for insight, after establishing calm first.13

  Throughout early stories, such objects are used as means of producing unification of mind. The size of the object is carefully considered: both Upatissa and Buddhaghosa recommend a specific size.14 The great variety of the methods described in the Dhammapada commentary, however, supports the possibility that more fluid forms were employed in early times. The Dhammasaṅgani associates skill in the limited (paritta) and the immeasurable (appamāṇa) with the kasiṇa, and describes making forms large and small, perhaps an indication that techniques, in extending an object to make it wide or diminishing it to make it tiny, contribute to mastery in these meditations (Dhammasaṅgani 160–247).15 These features of early and later texts suggest the use of varied naturally occurring objects. Certainly some meditation teachers in Thailand today also teach samatha meditation using simple objects, principally naturally found features, such as a candle flame, the space between trees, and running water. The object is used to arouse a nimitta, an image, that can then be applied, changed, extended, and moved around in the mind’s eye.16 Alongside this, five masteries—adverting, entering, sustaining, emerging, and recollecting—are also enjoined for flexibility and nonattachment. These ensure that the object for calm is easily entered into but also left behind at the end of meditation practice. Meditators in texts always “emerge” (vuṭṭhati) from meditation. This practice is usually conducted as a sitting, or occasionally a standing, practice, in seclusion. It is not usually undertaken in what we call “daily life,” though Buddhaghosa notes the mastery of arahats who could enter and emerge from such states for a moment. Variations involving skill and mastery over the object and its appearance are taught at Wat Dhammakaya, Bangkok, with the internally visualized “crystal ball” techniques, as well as by some other meditation teachers in Thailand.

  Beautiful visual objects are the classic means of arousing calm in secluded jhāna practice in early Buddhism, but they are also considered restorative outside sitting meditation and likely to elicit a response in the human mind that resonates with their auspiciousness. They are thought to produce a corresponding health and well-being in the mind for daily life as well as for meditation, provided there is mindfulness. It is usual for meditation centers, if they are particularly associated with samatha practice, to be set in natural surroundings. The risk of attachment is recognized in canon and commentary: Buddhaghosa, for instance, suggests one given to desire should not be placed in surroundings that are too well regulated, decorated, or beautiful (Visuddhimagga III 97). The underlying assumption, however, is that where mindfulness is practiced, kusala-citta, wholesome mind, is thought likely to be aroused by continued observation of the movement of sensory experience in response to the natural world, and the consequent alertness to the “beautiful” resultant (vipāka) objects received at the physical sense-doors. The practitioner is considered able to find the mind’s innate health or balance through such mindfulness of external objects, where attention is appropriately and alertly applied (yonisomanasikāra).17

  In addition, “beautiful” features—both internal, in the nimitta, and in the external world—can also be viewed for insight, too, the other side of meditative practice. The meditator is encouraged in the canon to see defects after the meditation in the external form of the object, to discourage attachment. In Dhammapada stories and other stories of the monks and nuns who attain arahatship, all kinds of natural objects elicit the attainment of arahatship. In one such story, an unsuccessful meditator, given a meditation object that does not work, goes in search of his teacher to receive a better one, but he sees a great forest fire on his way, so he climbs up a mountain and says to himself, “Even as this fire advances, consuming all obstacles both great and small, so also ought I to advance, consuming all obstacles both great and small by the fire of knowledge of the noble path” (Buddhist Legends 1 ii 8). The Buddha, seeing this man’s insight, sends a luminous image of himself, and reassures him: “The monk who delights in heedfulness and views heedlessness with fear / Advances like a fire, consuming attachments both small and great” (Dhammapada 31). The monk, now suddenly awakened, soars through the air to thank the Buddha in person. In yet another story, a whole group of monks see a mirage and realize the truth of impermanence of events; then, seeing the bub
bles forming in the cascades of a tumbling waterfall, they all become awakened. In another story a nun, Kisā Gotamī, who has lost her child and joined the order, lights a lamp and sees the flickering of its flame, and notices that that some lamps flare, while others flicker out. She takes this for her subject of meditation and meditates as follows: “Even as it is with these flames, so also is it with living beings here in the world: some flare up, while others flicker out; they only that have reached nibbāna are no more seen” (Buddhist Legends 2 viii 13). The Buddha appears magically to her and confirms her own formulation of her spiritual path, at which she becomes an arahat.

  So, do we say that such incidents are the product of samatha or vipassanā? What sort of object is a bubble dissolving in water, a flickering flame, a mirage, or an uncontained fire? These are “beautiful objects”—but also triggers to awakening that defy conventional classification. Perhaps they are intended to. These meditators seem to find insight through a fusion of samatha and vipassanā, which they see and articulate for themselves, and that is then supported and confirmed by the teacher. The Dhammapada-attakaṭṭhā has many stories of people, after meditative work, intuitively formulating for themselves the very insight, made on the basis of the externally observed object, that brings their meditations to fruition. In some cases the meditators have been pursuing unspecified meditations; their apprehension is so sharpened, however, that they attain enlightenment through some external natural object, undergoing natural processes of change. So the bereaved nun sees water trickling, and compares it to life ebbing away, or a group of monks see jasmine flowers bloom and die in one day (e.g., Buddhist Legends 2 viii 12 and 3 xxv 7).

  One important additional property of “beautiful” objects is that they are often invoked after awakening, in delighted observation of the natural environment, a feature of Southern Buddhism that is sometimes less appreciated. In such verses, the speaker finds in the landscape the objects that can describe or mirror his enlightened state: the world is described as observed, without desire or craving, and auditory, visual, and tactile elements in the natural surroundings are evoked. The monk Ramāṇeyyaka speaks this verse on attaining enlightenment: “Amidst the sound of chirping and the cries of birds, this mind of mine does not waver, for devotion to solitude is mine” (Theragathā 49). The monk Vimala speaks this verse: “The earth is sprinkled, the wind blows, lightning flashes in the sky. My thoughts are quietened, my mind is well-concentrated” (Theragathā 50).

  In conclusion, the “beautiful” visual object, the kasiṇa, is regarded as the paradigm of the meditation object for secluded jhāna practice. On a general level, as an object of mindfulness rather than of concentration, in manifold forms, it is also, along with other objects of the physical senses, implicitly considered to offer a restorative influence in daily life. Joy and happiness arising from observing beauty seem key: beauty in the natural world provides a counterpart to an auspiciousness considered latent within the skillful human mind (kusala-citta). As these stories indicate, the meditation object can, when linked to a sense of impermanence and to unsatisfactoriness, awaken insight. In its varied and complex manifestations, the natural world then contributes to a rich field of observation for awakened beings.

  The Formless Spheres

  After the attainment of the fourth jhāna, the mind is described as purified, malleable, and ready for work. The boy in the story that the Buddha taught proceeded to further investigation of the object, insight, and arahatship. Four other meditations can be pursued, however, exercising the flexibility and mastery of the mind in different ways. They are described here, as they are classically considered dependent on kasiṇa practice, though in the list of forty they are numbers 35 through 38, and can follow a number of jhānic meditations described in this chapter, such as the brahmavihāras.18

  That these meditations are a natural progression from the simplicity of the beautiful object is implied by a canonical list, the “deliverances” (vimokkha; see, for instance, Majjhimanikāya, II 12–15). Found frequently in the canon, this series of eight means by which the mind is “delivered” describes the meditator first seeing forms within his own body, then seeing them externally, and then, in the third “deliverance,” of “releasing the mind onto the beautiful,” which is said by the commentaries to be the beauty of the kasiṇa object, after which he enters into formless meditation.19

  All formless meditations are described in the Abhidhamma as involving the same mental factors as the fourth jhāna, which appears to act as a crossroad for meditators described in the canon and the commentaries, before the final stages of insight, the development of psychic powers, or the attainment of formlessness (Dhammasaṅgani 265–268). In the first formless meditation, the sphere of infinite space (ākāsānañcāyatana), objectness itself is examined through an infinite and undifferentiated ground within which objects usually occur. In the second, the sphere of infinite consciousness (viññāṇañcāyatana), subjectness, or nāma, is explored to an infinite extent, through examining the infinite ground of the very means by which objectness is usually apprehended. A modern teacher, Ajahn Lee Dhammadharo, describes this as “being absorbed in boundless consciousness as one’s preoccupation, with no form or figure acting as the sign or focal point of one’s concentration.”20 In the third formless meditation, the sphere of nothingness (ākinñcaññāyatana), denoters or categories of “subject,” “object,” or “thingness” cease to apply. Dhammadharo describes this as “focusing exclusively on a fainter or more subtle sense of cognizance that has no limit and in which nothing appears or disappears, to the point where one almost understands it to be nibbāna” (Basic Themes). The fourth formless meditation examines the nature of consciousness itself, before the application of differentiation or categories of “space,” “consciousness,” “thingness,” and “nothingness.” Dhammadharo says, “There is awareness, but with no thinking, no focusing of awareness on what it knows” (Basic Themes).

  In these spheres, the nature of mind and its relationship to object are successively refined and explored, until, it appears, their emergence and differentiation are themselves observed. Descriptions of their attainment are sparse in the canon, though extensively delineated by Buddhaghosa (Visuddhimagga X). Dhammadharo says they are merely resting places for the mind, because they are states that the mind enters, stays in, and leaves.

  A wide range of objects lead to the first four jhānas; indeed, the first may be accessed by twenty-five of the forty objects.21 Each formless sphere, however, defines through a single term its object, in the ground of awareness in which it is derived, the state with which it is associated, and the sphere in which the mind of the practitioner enters and “surmounts” the jhāna that it supersedes. Each sphere can be found only through the very characteristics that allow it to be experienced by the meditator: these are the only “objects” in which object, state, and meditational technique are not differentiated.

  So in the formless spheres, the mind and its field are examined, with a loosening of fixed views or attachments to any objects—images (nimittas) that arise in the “form” sphere, externally derived meditation objects, or any other objects of the senses in daily experience. The spheres (āyatanas), although subsequently termed jhānas by the Abhidhamma traditions, seem, however, to act as fields outside the parameters of “constructings” or “forms” defining any given meditation, state, meditative procedure, or object. They do not lead to awakening but seem to be “resting places,” and perhaps these are essential features of their identity. Awakening requires some “grit” or interplay of object and subject in the world of flux: the apprehension of differentiation, and a clear distinction between name (nāma) and form (rūpa). These realms, however, which are described in the texts as a kind of specialism, enact a freedom from the very nature of “subject” and “object,” “name” and “form,” as skills taught for their own sake. The last deliverance, from cessation, is reserved for those who have attained this path.

  These
meditations are not discussed much in modern contexts, though they are taught to advanced practitioners. In the canon and the commentaries, a number of people in the texts practice them, particularly those cultivating masteries in samatha practice; they are treated in the canon perhaps as a kind of spiritual aerobics for the experienced meditator, loosening attachments to forms and appearances. Moggallāna, the Buddha’s great disciple who stands to his left (while his partner, Sāriputta, stands to the right), is considered the great exponent of calm meditation, and practices each one of these formless realms in turn on his route to awakening (Saṃyuttanikāya IV 263 / Connected Discourses of the Buddha II 1302–1308). His experiences act as an encouragement to anyone awed by such rarefied objects: he has a tendency to sleepiness, at each stage, but after some dozy detours, attains arahatship and becomes a master of the psychic powers.22

  The importance of these meditations is much debated, and they are not considered “necessary” to the path; that they are there, though, refreshes the sense of what it is that constitutes an object, a meditation state, and the means of attaining it. These factors are themselves perhaps indicative of some function they serve within Southern Buddhist practice.

  The Foul: Asubha 11–20

  For the beautiful object, various practices involving mastery over the appearance of the external or internal manifestation, and the counterpart image that arises on the basis of that, are designed to improve skill in entering and leaving meditation. They also prevent attachment, or views that, for instance, any experience associated with that object constitutes a noetic or ontological insight.23 Beautiful objects, though understandably treated with caution for their capacity to entice and arouse desire, are considered particularly suitable, through their simplicity, for arousing all four jhānas and thence the formless spheres. But an apparently diametrically opposed object, the visually foul (asubha), as in the various stages of decomposition of a corpse, also characterizes Buddhist meditation. Perhaps for its disturbing and unsettling attributes, or, as the commentators indicate, more particularly for its inherent complicatedness and scattered nature, the “foul” object is described in the commentaries as being unable to provide sufficient simplicity to act as a support for all jhānas.24 It just seems too complicated. The “foul” is recommended for those with excessive attachment. Because of the obvious risk arising from its scary, disgusting nature, careful warnings from Buddhaghosa, Upatissa, and modern teachers stress its practice only under close supervision, alongside other balancing meditations (Visuddhimagga VI). It is taught in Bangkok now by visits to morgues for monks, as a collective exercise, unlike the practice conducted alone in the open charnel grounds of ancient times. For a meditator one feature, such as color, within the corpse, or one element, is required to attain to higher jhānas. From the point of view of this chapter, it seems that the simplicity of the kasiṇa is more suited to allowing calm meditation, through the abstract possibilities of a “beautiful” form, to develop and grow; the “foul,” necessarily involving complication, is less suited, except inasmuch as it arouses disenchantment (nibbidā), or turning away from the senses. But just as decay and ugliness are manifest potentially in the beautiful object, as the boy’s experience with the flower demonstrates, “beauty” too may be found by attention to one detail, such as color, in “foul” meditation.25 The category “foul” usually denotes a corpse in the manuals, but the canon and the commentary often describe it applying to living beings, and as an object producing insight as well as calm.