what does Buddhism really mean?

I have been interested in Buddhism since I was a teenager, but it is only recently that I feel I understand what it is all about. Buddhism is best understood in the context of meditation. Meditation is usually understood as focusing your attention on one thing. In many forms of meditation that would be a mantra, a word that is repeated mentally. When you notice that you have become distracted, you return your attention to the mantra. It's a gentle process, it's not about effort.

This form of meditation is found in Buddhism also, although usually Buddhists meditate on the breath rather than a mantra. It is called samatha meditation in Buddhism. There is another form of meditation in Buddhism called vipassana. With vipassana, instead of meditating on one thing (a mantra or the breath), you allow yourself to be aware of anything coming into your awareness, whether it is physical sensations, emotions or thoughts. You are aware of them in a different way from what is usual, you witness them but you don't participate in them.

When we become aware of a physical sensation (for example) there is the sensation itself, and there is our response to it. The mind decides if the sensation is pleasant (in which case we want it to continue) or unpleasant (in which case we want it to stop). Or it may be neither pleasant nor unpleasant, in which case we want to ignore it.

By being aware of the sensation, we can refrain from this interpretation of sensations (or emotions or thoughts). We no longer chase after pleasant sensations or run away from unpleasant ones. We have less and less 'clinging', we experience things differently, and we don't suffer in the same way.
We can notice the 'three characteristics'. We can watch sensations etc come and go, seeing their impermanence. We can see they don't bring satisfaction. We can see that they're not really part of us and aren't contributing to our sense of self.

We have a sense of self which we need to generate continuously. When we practice vipassana we are not continuing to generate that sense of self. It's as if there's a fire and we are no longer putting more wood on it. It starts to falter. It's then that 'stream entry' might happen.

The first time this happens it is for a short time in deep meditation. You realize the truth of the Buddhist theory, that there is no self. This is accompanied by a feeling of relief and joy. It is like seeing the light at the end of a tunnel. You know for sure that you're going in the right direction.
In time this will happen again and again, until it is your permanent state. Then you are enlightened. There are four stages in this process. The first stage is stream entry. The fourth stage is enlightenment.

Samatha meditation can be used to still the mind before vipassana begins. The vipassana meditation is the more important of the two. It is vipassana which liberates, not samatha. Some Buddhists take samatha meditation very seriously though.

If you practice samatha meditation you get better at it. You might shift into an altered state of consciousness called 'first jhana'. You can learn how to stay in this altered state for longer and longer periods of time. When you have done that, you might shift into 'second jhana'. There is also third and fourth jhana, each one attainable when you have experience of the previous one. Bliss is something experienced but by the time you get to fourth jhana bliss has been replaced by tranquility.

Most Buddhists don't meditate to find bliss, but the bliss of jhana helps you to see that sensual pleasures are not so important. It is better to experience jhanas without 'clinging'. It is possible to 'investigate' most jhanas, which means that you can be aware of their true nature and the 'three characteristics'.

Some may wish to take it further, and there are four higher jhanas. When you have stabilized all eight jhanas, and you have practiced lots of vipassana, then there is a ninth jhana, called Nirodha Samapatti. If you have both enlightenment and Nirodha Samapatti then it is said you are 'doubly enlightened'.

There are some Buddhists who don't believe in the value of these attainments (eg Stephen Batchelor). They may not believe they even exists. Some practice vipassana, but aren't interested in samatha (eg Goenka). They may believe that jhanas are dangerous. Jhanas can be dangerous when not used sensibly. For them samatha meditation would be meditating on the breath in preparation for vipassana, but not the cultivation of jhana.

There are a few different methods of vipassana. It is not true that there's one technique that was handed down from teacher to pupil since the time of Buddha. It was lost, but beginning a couple of hundred years ago people in Burma and Thailand started reading the ancient texts and experimenting. From this emerged two main vipassana movements in Burma, and another one in Thailand. Neither of the Burmese movements practiced jhana.

Americans like Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldestein and Sharon Salzberg took Mahasi style vipassana (one of the two Burmese types) and combined it with cultivation of the jhanas (which seems to have come from Thailand). In Mahasi vipassana, something called 'noting' (or 'naming' or 'labeling') is important.

John Kabat-Zinn developed Mindfulness-Based Stress-Reduction (MBSR) from vipassana, and then there is 'mindfulness' which has become very popular.

Vipassana can be different things. It can be very open, where you allow yourself to be aware of anything coming into your consciousness, whether they are thoughts, emotions or physical sensations. Being in the moment. Then it can be like Krishnamurti's 'choiceless awareness' or 'passive awareness'. There is a group in Indonesia (Meditasi Mengenal Diri) who are using Krishnamurti meditation as their form of vipassana.

Vipassana can be more restricted, where you only allow yourself to be aware of physical sensations, and only then as part of a 'body scan'. This is how Goenka taught. Goenka learned from U Ba Khin, who in turn derived his method from Ledi Sayadaw. This tradition is one of the two Burmese traditions, the other one deriving from Mahasi Sayadaw.

Goenka meditation has become popular because it is free. However, the lack of individual attention that can be offered by teachers on these free courses adds to the problems of mental instability that are often encountered.

There are actually four different things that can be the subject of vipassana meditation according to tradition, but it's not clear what they all are. Sensations, emotions and thoughts seem to be three of the four. Some say that it's easier to work with physical sensations, which might be why Goenka meditation can produce such dramatic effects.

So perhaps the best thing is to practice an 'open' form of vipassana sometimes, and sometimes be more restricted to the awareness of physical sensations (called vedanupassana). Noting may be valuable. Samatha is important too, not just in the awareness of breath (anapana) but also the cultivation of jhanas. Another form of samatha, called metta or loving-kindness, is valued by many.

There is the Theravada Buddhist tradition, found in countries such as Burma, Thailand and Sri Lanka. They kept the ancient texts, the Pali Canon, including the satipatthana-sutta, the anapanasati-sutta, and the Bahiya-sutta. Added to that is the more recent tradition formed within the last two hundred years which has given us the two main forms of vipassana (the Mahasi and the U Ba Khin/Goenka methods). Added to that is an even more recent tradition formed by Americans like Jack Kornfield and developed by people like Daniel M Ingram and Culadasa.

It's a confusing picture, but I hope I have helped sort it out in people's minds. Two other groups of Buddhists practice meditation, the Zen Buddhists and some of the Tibetan Buddhists. Zen Buddhists don't talk openly about their teachings, but some of the Tibetan Buddhists seem to have something to offer (eg Dzogchen). Then there are Buddhists who don't value meditation, instead they chant to mythological beings such as Amida.

When it comes to enlightenment, some people will say there's only one kind of enlightenment. I think there is a difference between what you might call Hindu or Mystical enlightenment and Buddhist enlightenment. Tibetan Buddhist enlightenment seems to be like Hindu enlightenment, where you have Advaita Vedanta and the teachings of Ramana Maharshi (sometimes called nondualist teachings). So by 'Buddhist enlightenment' I mean Theravada Buddhist enlightenment.

Some people will say they are the same but I have come to a different conclusion. When you meditate a lot then the usual Subject/Object boundary starts to go. It can go in one of two ways. Either you start to experience everything as all Subject. You perceive everything to be part of you. When you look at a mountain you feel it is part of you, or you are part of it, or you and it are one.

From this it is easy to start believing that you have attained unity with God, or that you have merged with Brahman, or that you have always been Brahman but only now do you realize your true identity. This is an illusion though.

The other way is to experience everything as Object with no Subject. You are aware of sensations, or rather there is no you to be aware of them. It’s like they are aware of themselves. Someone called them self-knowing knowns. What’s happening is that part of your brain is processing visual information and another part of your brain is processing auditory information but they are not contributing to the creation of a Self or Subject.

This is not an illusion. However, it doesn’t free you from reincarnation because there is no life after death in any form. It doesn’t make you a better person, either more contented or compassionate. Can it free you from suffering? I don’t know about that but I do know there’s a lot of suffering along the way.

You need to know how to end the Subject/Object dichotomy in the right way. You need to know how to avoid the suffering that comes during the 'dark night'. You need to know how to stop elements of your unconcious mind from taking over your personality.

emotional distress from meditation

Can people suffer emotional distress through practicing meditation?

Meditation is supposed to make people calmer, so it is surprising that sometimes it seems to give people emotional problems. This can be problems with anxiety, anger, depression, mania or dissociation.

The first clue that I had to this is when years ago I read the book Sharing the Quest by Muz Murray. He said that he talked to people who he had known who told him they experience acute psychological pain as a result of their meditation practice. I wondered how this could be. I hoped that is was not true because I didn't want that to happen to me.

In the New Scientist magazine on 16 May 2015 was an article Ommm...aargh! The dark side of mindfulness. Meditation and mindfulness have a dark side that should not be ignored, say psychologists Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm. Research shows 7 per cent of people on meditation retreats experienced profoundly adverse effects, including depression.

On BBC Radio 4 on 16 March 2016 at 11 am a programme said much the same thing but in more detail. The presenter Jolyon Jenkins interviewed two people who have practiced meditation, Suzanne and then Patrick. She started suffering from panic attacks while he had an episode of mania.

The next person Jolyon spoke to was Daniel M Ingram. Daniel was introduced as a doctor who runs a forum about meditation. Jolyon didn't say that Daniel believes he is enlightened and has written a book about Buddhist meditation. Daniel talked about what he calls the 'Arising and Passing Away' and the 'Dark Night'. These are two stages in Theravada Buddhist meditation. It is the Dark Night stage that is the problem. During the Dark Night a few people experience "depression, micro-psychotic episodes and psychotic depression, and can make people suicidal and occasionally even kill themselves". He says that this is predictable and not just with his form of meditation.

Psychologist Tim Lomas says that a quarter of people who were taught meditation had 'substantial difficulties'. Psychologist Miguel Farias talked about research into the effects of meditation in general, as in his book 'The Buddha Pill'. He said that mindfulness isn't any better than sitting quietly. A study was mentioned that showed that people practicing mindfulness had higher levels of cortisol which would suggest that they had higher stress levels.

What are we to make of all this? First of all it seems that only a minority of people suffer these problems. Even Daniel M Ingram says that for most the effects of the Dark Night are mild. It seems that some people are more prone to it than others. Secondly it could be that some forms of meditation will produce more of it. It could also be that some forms of meditation produce a temporary negative effect which is followed by a long-lasting positive outcome.


Jolyon talked quite a bit about Transcendental Meditation. Here he was not trying to show it is dangerous, presumably because he couldn't find any evidence that it is. Instead he was trying to show that it doesn't live up to its claims. So maybe TM isn't a problem.

Jolyon didn't say what sort of meditation Suzanne and Patrick had been practicing, but it seems that in both cases it was Goenka vipassana meditation. The retreats were 10 day intensives and involved scanning the body. I have read a lot of bad things about Goenka meditation in internet forums. Goenka was an Indian man who learned his method while in Burma from the influential teacher U Ba Khin.

Goenka's form of meditation is different from others within the Theravada Buddhist tradition. He and U Ba Khin didn't teach samatha meditation, except for the preparatory meditation on the breath. He didn't teach the use of jhanas. Jhanas are states of consciousness achieved through samatha meditation. They are used in conjunction with vipassana meditation.

Meditation on the breath is the beginning of samatha meditation, but samatha goes beyond that to these altered states of consciousness called jhanas. Some meditators in the Theravada Buddhist tradition will enter the jhanas before going on to the practice of vipassana meditation. In vipassana meditation you allow yourself to be aware of different things such as physical sensations, emotions and thoughts.

However, in Goenka's form of vipassana practitioners are taught to be aware only of physical sensations (hence the 'body scanning'). This is only one of the four traditional subjects of awareness during vipassana. Awareness of emotions or thoughts is not taught. So it seems that the Goenka technique - which is similar but not identical to that pioneered by U Ba Khin - is missing most aspects of Theravada Buddhist meditation as far as we can tell from the earliest Buddhist texts. Yet their literature says their form of meditation is the same as Buddha's.

That could be the problem, as could the 'boot camp' approach on the 10 day intensive retreats. It does seem that people are taught to work through any physical or emotional pain so that they can emerge on the other side. This is probably a wrong approach. It's probably better for people to stop vipassana for a while if they feel emotional distress. Samatha meditation on the other hand could be fine, in fact it might calm and stabilize people. But of course Goenka didn't teach it.

Transcendental Meditation is from the Hindu tradition not Buddhist but could be described as a form of samatha meditation.

If we look at Daniel M Ingram's methods we see that he teaches the use of samatha meditation including the jhanas. His form of vipassana is that pioneered by an influential Burmese teacher called Mahasi. The Mahasi form of vipassana involves something called naming or noting or labeling. Physical sensations, emotions and thoughts are named. It's a way of becoming aware of thoughts etc but whether this is the same form of vipassana as that taught by the Buddha is a subject of much debate.

It could be that vipassana/mindfulness could be inherently destabilizing. If that happens then it would seem sensible to decrease the amount or stop it altogether for a while. Perhaps use your meditation time for samatha only. How do we explain this emotional distress? One possibility is that when we practice vipassana we gradually become more aware of sensations that have always been there but rarely noticed. It's not that we have more internal distress but that we become more aware of it. When we do become fully aware of it then it might go away.

Another possibility is that we get way outside of our comfort zone as our sense of reality is changed. We feel a sense of discomfort that can manifest as restlessness/agitation, anxiety or dissociation. Or it could be that emotions that we were unable to feel fully in the past are making themselves apparent. The memory of childhood traumas or at least the emotions associated with them are pushing their way into our consciousness.

You get the idea reading the book by Daniel M Ingram and some of the ones by Jack Kornfield that this often happens on retreats. Daniel is quite scornful of people who encourage this - he thinks that they are wasting their time - but Jack seems to be aware that some kind of therapy is required by many people and would be an important part of their spiritual unfoldment. You would think that vipassana/mindfulness in itself might be therapeutic, perhaps it is the way some people teach it, or perhaps we have yet to discover exactly the methods that Buddha taught.

I have heard it said that Buddhists shouldn't discuss things too much, they should start practicing meditation, then they can discuss their experience of that if they wan't to. The problem with that is that if someone wishes to try vipassana, signs up for a Goenka 10 day intensive retreat and is damaged by it, they might find out that it bears little resemblance to Buddha's methods and wonder why someone didn't tell them that to begin with.

People who have had more difficult childhoods might be the ones who encounter the most emotional distress when they practice vipassana. So much so that it might be best for them to avoid it. There is the other problem though and that is that meditation doesn't seem to work for some people. It just doesn't do anything. It doesn't go anywhere, they get bored and give up. These too are likely to be people who have had difficult childhoods, but their emotions express themselves in a different way.

the importance of emotion in spirituality

Several Buddhist authors have written that emotions are not changed by meditation. They say that emotions are biological and so cannot be eliminated. I have never thought that it is possible or desirable to eliminate emotions, but neither do I believe that they don't change. I don't believe either of these two extreme positions: that they will disappear or that they will stay the same. Instead, I feel that something between these two opposites will be true.

You can say emotions are 'biological', but that doesn't explain why some people have much more of a particular emotion than others. With some people their anger is like a raging inferno, with others it is like a spark. I would even go so far to say that I have met people who don't seem to have anger at all.

It's better to think of an emotion as like a muscle. We all have the same muscles, that's biological. But we don't have the same size muscles. How big a particular muscle is depends on choices that we have made. The more we use a muscle the bigger it grows. If we don't use a muscle it will wither away, but never disappear.

Your emotions are not your enemy. Emotions are not bad but - like thoughts - we have too much of them and there is a compulsive quality. When I am doing something I try not to plan for the future, ruminate about the past, daydream or think about issues that I might have read about in the newspaper that morning. Instead, I try to be aware of what I am doing. It's not that planning is a bad thing, we need to do that sometimes, but it's usually better to be in the moment and aware of whatever we need to be aware of.

What is true of thoughts is true of emotions too. There may be times when desire, anger, fear or sadness are appropriate. We should accept our thoughts and emotions, but when we examine them they start to change.
Our relationship to our emotions is as important as the emotions themselves. Some would say it's our reactivity to our emotions that's the important thing, not the emotions. They don't spell out quite what they mean by that. Do they mean that you can have a raging temper but as long as you don't go round thumping people that's fine? Of course, it is better not to thump people if you get angry. However, that sounds like suppressing emotion or maybe dissociation. It doesn't seem healthy to me.

It does seem true though that we can witness our emotions but not participate in them. We can refrain from chasing after pleasant emotions and avoiding unpleasant ones. We can observe that they are not permanent, they don't bring satisfaction, and they are not essential to our being or part of us. We can do this while we are meditating and when we are not. It would seem to me that someone who chases after pleasant emotions when they're not meditating could be said to be 'compartmentalizing' his or her life.

Some Buddhists, and I think especially the nondualists, will say that lust and conflict are part of life and we should accept them. They may even think that an enlightened person can behave in an uncaring and antisocial manner. I think that the nondualists and some Mahayana Buddhists have got themselves into a philosophical muddle. It would take another post to sort that out.

At one level we should accept our emotions. Acceptance doesn't mean that we think they are permanent, or that we should leave them unexamined. Or that we think that when we examine them they are not going to change. Vipassana meditation allows healing of emotional scars, it's not just about realizations of the nature of reality.

There are some people who aren't interested in sex. You can't get more 'biological' an emotion than sexual desire. I'm not just talking about some Buddhist nuns. These people say they have lost interest in it and don't miss it. Are they deluding themselves? Are they merely suppressing their emotions? I don't think so. I'm not one of them, I have many sexual thoughts and I also have many angry thoughts. It would be quite nice to be free of them though, at least for most of the time.

I don't think that someone who has practiced the best meditation methods will need to live their lives through their emotions as most people do. People stimulate their emotions because it makes them feel alive. People feel most alive when they are in love. They want that. After a couple of years that feeling fades and that's when problems in relationships and families cause so much sorrow. People want to move onto the next partner to get that feeling back.

Someone who has made progress in meditation can have that feeling of aliveness all of the time without having to do anything. Without having to make those around him or her suffer. Some meditation methods don't deal with emotion in a satisfactory way.

I have quoted below from five Buddhist authors. The first three of these quotations are examples of the way some Buddhist authors treat negative emotions as biological and unchangeable. The last two are things I agree with.

After Buddhism by Stephen Batchelor chapter 3

"Today we would understand these forces as part of the legacy of biological evolution, the embedded instincts and drives that enabled our ancestors to succeed in the competition for scarce resources and survive. They are summarized in the canon as the "three fires" of "greed, hatred and confusion" or the "effluences" (asava) of "sensual desire, being, opinion, and ignorance". 

Gotama's awakening is said to have involved the "stilling" and "fading away" of these reactive forces and drives. But if such instincts are neurobiological functions of our organism, it is difficult to understand how they can be systematically overcome - "cut off like a palm stump," as many discourses claim, "never to arise again." Although Buddhist orthodoxy insists that these forces and drives have been eliminated in arahants and buddhas, another, less prominent thread in the canon offers a more intelligible account of the ceasing of reactivity."

Why I Am a Buddhist by Stephen T Asma chapter 2

"The escape is not from our feelings, in this case, our attractions and repulsions about the beautiful and the ugly. These levers and pulleys are part of having a body, a brain, a personality. They cannot be entirely removed, only transcended - in the sense that wisdom can recognize our own womanizing or femme fatale tendencies (or our fear of intimacy), and then discipline can diminish these obsessive components from our romantic lives."

Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel M Ingram part 3

"When I think about what it would take to achieve freedom from all psychological stuff, the response that comes is this: life is about stuff. Stuff is about being alive. There is no way out of this while you are still living. There will be confusion, pain, miscommunication, misinterpretation, maladaptive patterns of behavior, unhelpful emotional reactions, weird personality traits, neurosis and possibly much worse. There will be power plays, twisted psychological games, people with major personality disorders (which may include you), and craziness. The injuries continue right along with the healing and eventually the injuries win and we die. This is a fundamental teaching of the Buddha. I wish the whole Western Buddhist world would get over this notion that these practices are all about getting to our Happy Place where nothing can ever hurt us or make us neurotic and move on to mastering real Buddhist practice rather than chasing some ideal that will never appear."

Why Can't I Meditate? by Nigel Wellings chapter 1

"Acceptance is to see things as they really are in the present. It is the opposite of denying what is, wanting things to be different or resisting things as they are. When we accept ourselves as we are in our meditation we are present with whatever our experience is - physical sensations, thoughts and emotions - without the intention to change it for something we believe will feel better. By being accepting of what is, we can see that it is always changing. 

Acceptance does not mean having to like what we experience, nor is it a passivity that means we'll never change anything. By accepting what is we place ourselves in the best position for making wise changes. Acceptance makes the space for the most appropriate actions."

Journey of Insight Meditation by Eric Lerner Chapter 13

"What I had found deep within this mind and body was a process. The process manifests itself over and over again, birth after birth in endless forms. We aren't a soul or entity that exists and jumps from body to body. We don't transmigrate. We change. We alter moment after moment. We alter, and each lifetime is just another moment of alteration in this stream of energy. The alteration is not random. Randomness is not a characteristic of the universe. The universe is really mind. Mind precedes all, the Buddha observed. The mind has purpose, will. The will comes from desire, from hatred, from anger, from delusion. Or the will comes from love, from nonattachment, from wisdom. We become what we will. We are what we have willed. The stream of energy that is endless is a wheel. That is the image of suffering. We turn the wheel with our minds, our minds steeped in delusion and attachment. We come into being, into bodies whose nature is decay and suffering because we will that. This is the law of karma. Buddha said he was here to teach the end of this suffering, the way off the wheel. Nirvana is the end of becoming. It is just being. The body ends and the life energy requires no new body. The chain of birth and death is broken because the mind has been so purified of its attachments that it takes hold of no new form. This is deathlessness."

I used to think that Eric Lerner had summed up Buddhism in the above passage but I realize now that not all Buddhists will agree with it. Daniel M Ingram doesn't believe in karma and reincarnation. He doesn't believe that the mind is purified of its attachments and no longer has desire, hatred or anger. He thinks that Theravada Buddhism got it all wrong in that. I think he has modified his opinion after writing Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha when he experimented with Actualism, which seems to have corrected some of the deficiencies in his previous meditation practice, but I don't think he has all the answers yet.

the importance of tradition in spirituality

I am no respecter of authority or tradition. I don't blindly follow any tradition, but I do look to tradition to give clues as to how we can progress towards enlightenment. There are three forms of Buddhist tradition that we can examine. I look at all three in turn below.

1. The Pali Canon. This is the collection of the oldest Buddhist texts, but half of them don't make any sense. It's difficult to work out which are the ones that we can have confidence in. Many have espoused one text from the Pali Canon called the Satipatthana Sutta but there are problems with this. The Anapanasati Sutta is also used. A much later text from Sri Lanka called the Visuddhimagga is advocated by some.

2. The monastic tradition in Theravada Buddhist countries. Some people like to believe that Buddha's teachings have been handed down through the centuries from teacher to pupil. They believe that in monasteries in Burma, Thailand and Sri Lanka the old meditation practices have been preserved. We know this is not the case though. The practice of meditation died out or nearly died out. Even monasticism itself died out in parts of the Theravada world. Monks from Burma re-established ordination in Sri Lanka in 1065 AD and Thai monks did the same in 1753. Ordination for nuns has yet to be re-established in places.

Theravada Buddhism is the nearest we have to the original Buddhism, but it is not the same as the original Buddhism.

3. Recent attempts to re-invent Buddhist meditation. In all three of the main Theravada countries there have been attempts to re-invent the original meditation practices. In Sri Lanka someone called Dharmapala (1864-1933) examined old Buddhist texts, not just as a scholarly exercise as others had done but to practice meditation. In Burma, two lineages came to be established. In Thailand another one began.

The first of the two Burmese lineages was started by U Narada (1868-1954). The most influential person in this tradition was Mahasi Sayadaw (1904-1982) who developed the method of labeling (also called noting or naming) of thoughts and feelings during meditation.

The second Burmese lineage was started by Ledi Sayadaw (1846-1923). The most influential person in this tradition was U Ba Khin (1899-1971). He developed the method of 'body scanning'. An Indian man called S N Goenka (1924-2013) spread this method widely, and his technique is probably the best known Theravada meditation practice.

Both the Mahasi Sayadaw method and the U Ba Khin method are forms of vipassana meditation (also called insight meditation). Neither of them makes use of the other traditional form of Buddhist meditation called samatha meditation (also called concentration meditation) which is meant to be used in conjunction with vipassana. So their methods seem a long way from that taught by Buddha. Also, despite the talk of 'lineages' and 'traditions' there has been much change in methods. Mahasi Sayadaw's method is not the same as U Narada's. U Ba Khin's method is not the same as Ledi Sayadaw's. So they are definitely not ancient, as some seem to believe.

A lineage in Thailand seems to go back a bit further in time. It could be said to date back to King Mongkut, who wanted to reform Thai Buddhism. Ajahn Mun Bhuridatta (1870-1949) developed a method. The most influential person in this tradition was Ajahn Chah (1918-1992). It's difficult to work out what his form of vipassana meditation is, but it is different from either of the two Burmese methods. He taught samatha meditation as well as vipassana (unlike either of the Burmese methods). This tradition is called the 'Thai forest tradition'.

Have any of these three traditions found the true vipassana meditation which can take a diligent meditator to enlightenment? Somehow I doubt it. They all seem to do something, but are they all they should be? Several Buddhist authors seem to combine Mahasi style noting vipassana with samatha meditation. Is this the way forward?

The problem with traditions is that they seem to ossify inadequate methods. Four men, all of them born within 24 years of each other in the 19th century, made their own attempts to re-create Buddha's methods (Dharmapala, U Narada, Ledi Sayadaw and Ajahn Mun). The methods that the last three developed were considerably altered by their followers (principally Mahasi Sayadaw, U Ba Khin and Ajahn Chah). However, today people seem to think we have to protect the purity of the tradition, whatever tradition they have become involved with, thinking that it has been passed down intact from the time of Buddha.

Perhaps people should learn more than one vipassana technique. It would seem sensible to also practice samatha meditation. There seems to be more agreement about what samatha is. I don't just mean meditating on the breath to calm oneself before vipassana, I mean experiencing the first four jhanas. Perhaps people should keep an open mind about what vipassana is or could be. Maybe something can be learned from Zen or Tibetan Dzogchen meditation. Many people seem to be trying Dzogchen and other forms of non-dualist practice.

Buddha said that when he was making his way towards enlightenment he felt like 'a man wandering through a forest' who comes on a forgotten 'ancient path travelled upon by people in the past'. (Nagara Sutta). I feel that we are in the same position today.

That doesn't mean we should give up. If you want to make your way across a landscape but only have a faulty map there are four options. You could decide not to make the journey. You could make the journey and trust blindly in the map. You could make the journey but leave the map behind. Or you could make the journey using the map to give you clues about which way to go. In this analogy the 'map' is the Pali Canon together with the experiences of meditators who seem to have progressed along the path.

Some Buddhists would say that we already have the method that leads to enlightenment. One or two Buddhist authors say they are enlightened (Daniel M Ingram and Kenneth Folk). Others say that the search for enlightenment should not be the priority in the life of a Buddhist. One idea is that the more you seek enlightenment the less likely you are to find it.

One Buddhist author, Jack Kornfield, says that if we choose a spiritual path it doesn't have to be Buddhist but it should be a tradition. In chapter 16 of A Path With Heart he writes "Lineage and tradition are the sacred containers for preserving practices and wisdom that have been discovered and accumulated over generations". It seems to me that a tradition can get you started, but you need to go beyond a tradition if you want to get enlightened.

There are many uncertainties, but some things are more certain than others. The idea that there are two forms of meditation that complement each other (samatha and vipassana) seems sound. What exactly vipassana is, or should be, is what we still need to search for.

For more information on the reinvention of vipassana see below
Theravada spirituality in the West
Theravada reinvents meditation