Asian Traditions of Meditation by Halvor Eifring

Author:Halvor Eifring
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780824855680
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Published: 2016-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

Individual Paths

Through such tales most Southern Buddhists, monks, and laity have historically been taught about meditation, its objects, and its practice: children hear Dhammapada stories as their first contact with Buddhist teaching.2 So it is a good starting point for this chapter, as it epitomizes a creative and adaptable attitude to meditation objects that is found in the canon and commentarial stories as well as in the varieties of technique in modern Southern Buddhism.3 As so often in early Buddhist discourse, the detail of sustained narrative communicates much that theory cannot. Specificity of object to individual, appropriateness of different objects at various stages of development, and variety of method in a graduated path are all characteristic of the texts and of much Southern Buddhist meditation teaching today. The meditator has been given an object that does not suit; he is given another, dovetailing with his predisposition and past experience. When he has achieved results in calm, he is asked to observe it differently: he sees the defects of his object, in a way that produces insight, rather than frustration, and, through a mixture of his own creative observation, of the bank of dead and live flowers, and the surprise of an odd and apposite step by his teacher inspiring a moment of faith (saddhā), achieves awakening. Modern interpretations might vary on features such as “magical” flowers, visits from a teacher who projects himself to the meditator to give guidance, or the occurrence of “past lives” that have active influence on present disposition. But whether these features are taken as metaphors, imaginative ways of describing idiosyncracies of temperament, or literal “truths” (and the story is rich on all of these levels), the incidents stress, as many texts do, that the individual is in part the product of past experience, that this affects what will work, that there is a right time to offer advice and intervene, that some objects are suitable at different times, and that the practice of meditation, as it is described in Buddhism, requires some spontaneous creativity on the part of the practitioner. In Dhammapada stories meditation objects are sometimes carefully chosen and prescribed, and sometimes, where there is also a graduated path that might be different for different people, they arise fortuitously. The underlying assumption is that it is up to the meditator to use advice skillfully and to exercise intuition in observing events in the world that can help his or her practice.

The interplay of character, environments, and distinct, precisely delineated individual paths, in this and other Pāli collections, indicate that in Buddhist practice and theory, no technique stands alone. The young monk would also be living his daily life, with recommendations for bodily mindfulness and attentiveness to others, and often discussing and hearing talks to loosen views that, according to the Buddhist Abhidhamma, are associated with rigidity and lack of healthiness in body and mind.4 These would all be considered important to support the body and mind for meditation, ensuring the practitioner’s well-being for the return to “normal” life.

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