Freeing the Body, Freeing the Mind by Michael Stone

Author:Michael Stone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala

By contrast, the extreme ascetic practices of Yoga would have included (if current Yoga practices in India are any indication) staring at the sun without blinking for hours at a time, or standing on one leg for months and years, or lying down on a bed of sharp nails. In the new Middle Way of the Buddha, these dhutanga practices were to be incorporated into the life of a wandering Buddhist renunciate along with the practice of the Eightfold Path, whereas a householder could focus largely on practicing the Eightfold Path while incorporating some dhutanga practices, such as eating one meal a day, in his or her daily life whenever possible. It was clearly understood in the culture of the Middle Way that the life of the wandering ascetic was most conducive to letting go of craving and clinging, for training in concentrative meditation practices, and so on.

It must be said that even though these dhutanga practices seem extreme to us moderns, especially in the West, among the hard-core śramans of the Buddha’s time they may have seemed “soft.” It would take a much bigger tome to parse out all the variances of their differences, but it all seems to come down to the ascetic’s pursuit of magical powers that justified (to him) all the extreme austerities. For the Buddha and Buddhist monks in later generations, at least in India, the call for leaving home to enter the forest was a conscious devaluation of saṃsāra, the world of craving and clinging. The Buddhist tradition shares this common worldview with the Yoga tradition as well as an inability to understand that this devaluation may be the greatest stumbling block to a genuine understanding of what these two traditions were aspiring for.

For both traditions, a devaluation of saṃsāra is a positive hermeneutic simply because it locates itself in a directly verifiable existential system of action and consequence. If the goal of Buddhist meditation was to experience the “peace that passeth understanding,” it could be done only through going inward, through disciplining breath and refining perception and cognition, rather than engagement with external things. It is also important to remember that this devaluation was not based on any nihilistic undertone but was rather an experience-based sensibility. One’s actions derive from one’s worldview, and if one’s worldview is based on the notion that the world of craving and clinging is not satisfactory in the long run, there would be no reason to remain bound to that world. Thus, leaving home to enter the forest was not only a symbolic gesture but also a concrete choice that took one further and further away from the known world of craving and clinging.

Consider also the fact that the Buddha’s definitive manual on how to do meditation practice, the Satipaṭṭhānā Sutta (Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness) contains specific practices on the foulness of the body as well as charnel-ground meditations. Their aim always was to facilitate the letting go of craving and clinging. But it also remains

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