Is Buddhism Just Navel Gazing?

IT IS SOMETIMES ASSUMED THAT BUDDHISM is an introspective path, best suited to dreamy, inward looking, introverts. After all we spend a lot of time on omphaloskepsis, or navel gazing, don't we? And the ideal Buddhist is often portrayed as a solitary, reclusive meditator. Buddhism can easily be seen in terms of personal psychology or self development. I would like to challenge this notion by looking at Buddhist meditation.

Buddhism broadly speaking offers two kinds of meditation: samatha and vipassanā (Sanskrit śamatha, vipaśyanā). Samatha comes from the root √śam 'to be calm, quiet, to rest'. In samatha meditation we are trying most of all to calm down, and to steady our mind. This in no way involves rumination or dwelling on one's inner world. The archetypal practice is one which involves 'watching' the sensations of breathing, allowing the sensations to fill one's awareness (hence to be mind-full). Note that I do not say "the breath". It is helpful to get away from "the breath" as an entity (what is that in any case?) and to orientate oneself towards the experience of breathing as a dynamic procession of sensations presenting themselves to our conscious awareness. The sensations of breathing offer a good meditation subject because they give feedback on one's state of calm, they change at a pace which does not excite, and they are primarily proprioceptive - i.e. felt as changes in muscle tension in the body - which helps to draw attention away from the primary modes of interacting with the world - sight and hearing. When we allow our minds to be full of these sensations, follow them closely but in a relaxed way, we begin to experience changes in our awareness.

On a good day we find that we are no longer pulled towards other experiences, or towards our own mental chatter. We find that we naturally settle into a relaxed, but focussed state. By attending to experience wisely we can deepen this state until other sensations cease to resister in our mind, and there is only the increasingly subtle experience of breathing. This state can go very deep, and is often described as beautiful, expansive, open, and blissful. One can experience physical rapture, but also other internally generated experiences with a sensory character such as visual imagery. Although we have withdrawn our attention from the world, we find a world within which is at once gloriously alive and yet very refined and subtle. The technical term for this kind of experience is jhāna (Sanskrit dhyāna).

Sometimes Buddhists will frown on talking about meditation experience - straight-forwardly saying that one has experienced jhāna for instance can be seen as "boasting" or "making a claim". This is unfortunate because experiencing a concentrated mind is relatively ordinary, and certainly within reach of anyone who seriously practices meditation in a supportive context. I'm no great meditator and I have had these kinds of experiences. The Buddha's prohibition for the monks is against falsely claiming to be an arahant, and as far as I know there is no traditional prohibition on discussing the experience of various jhānas, nor on claiming to be an arahant if one actually is an arahant. At times a useful discussion is stifled by literalism or over-reacting. I should also say that some Buddhist traditions are distrustful of jhāna. Because it is pleasurable it can become a distraction. I know several people who can easily get into these states, and some of them do say that it can become an end in itself. However my own teachers have always emphasised that jhāna is a means to an end, not the end in itself. Concentrated meditation leaves one feeling calm, happy, and peaceful. Regular meditation encourages psychological integration. The fact of getting concentrated is not in itself very significant or spiritual advanced, but concentration and absorption are useful in preparing the mind for meditation in the second sense.

The essential counterpart to concentrated meditation is vipassanā often translated as 'insight'. The term derives from √paś 'to see' and with the prefix vi- means 'seeing through' - i.e. not insight but through-sight. Using 'insight' as a translation has the unfortunate connotation that we are seeing inside ourselves, suggesting introspection. But what we are doing is seeing through our self not seeing into it. Again this kind of meditation doesn't really involve introspection.

In this style of meditation one reflects on some aspect of experience - the tradition provides a number of templates for this. We might for instance reflect on impermanence, or on suffering. We might reflect on the way things arises in dependence on causes. Other styles of vipassanā practice include visualisations of a Buddha, koan practice, or simply sitting and watching the play of experience. Reflecting this way we aim to see the way experience unfolds, to understand why we feel and think the way we do, not by by dwelling on the content of our own thoughts, but by trying to get underneath this and see how the thoughts that we have depend not so much on the sensations we have, but on the stories we tell ourselves about them. The medium is the message.

This is not like rumination. We don't get hooked on the content of our thoughts, in fact we aim for the precise opposite - to get unhooked from the content of our thoughts. This is why jhāna practice is so useful. With a mind prepared by jhāna meditation we are in a very advantageous position to observe the workings of our mind without being caught up in the content of our thoughts and feelings. Being calm and content we can just be with what we find in our minds. We can also sustain our focus on the subject far more easily.

I don't know much about Zen meditation, or other 'just sitting' or formless practice styles, but as I understand it the formless practices combine samatha and vipassanā aspects. I won't say more, but I do think that formless practice can just about fit into the paradigm I've outlined. And of course meditation is not the only practice. There are also intellectual, ethical, and devotional aspects to Buddhism which are important.

Where a Buddhist can usefully do a little introspection is in the area of ethics. By this I do not mean thinking about morality in the abstract. We cannot really see how Buddhist ethics works by considering hypothetical cases. Buddhist ethics simply asks us to reflect on our own behaviour, and especially our relationships with other people. How do we observe that our behaviour affects those around us? How do we observe it affecting our own minds? We will particularly notice the effects on ourselves in the form of the hindrances to meditation. So if we want to spend time thinking about ethics we can reflect a little on what hindrances to concentration we are currently meeting. Unethical behaviour sets up conflicts and tensions, or scatters our energies which we experience as restlessness, torpor, craving, or aversion. There is often something we can do or cease doing that will be helpful in moving us towards a less conflicted, more alive state of mind. We need not be at the mercy of hindrances.

I hope it's clear that introspection has a role in Buddhism, but that it's role is not predominant, and that in meditation we are not being introspective per se. Of course one will need some self-knowledge, to understand one's own temperament in order to sustain an effective practice. We need to understand our own habitual tendencies in order to effectively counteract them or reinforce them as appropriate. But this knowledge comes as a by-product of attempts to engage with Buddhist practices, and as we interact with other people. The fact that being generous and regulating our behaviour towards others are firmly at the base of Buddhist practice, shows that a lot of self-centred navel gazing is out of place.

~~oOo~~

Gesundheit! Making Accommodations with Custom.

One of the main critiques of traditional Buddhism put forward by Western Buddhists is against superstition. Western Buddhists promote such ideas as: Buddhism is a rational religion; there is coherence between science and Buddhism; Buddhists are naturally atheist; and Buddhism does not require blind faith. That is we say that Buddhism doesn't have the same problems with science that Christianity does, but still offers a solution to the question of 'what is a good life?', and an alternative approach to death which is not nihilistic.

The rebranding of Buddhism in the English speaking world began in Britain in the 1830s. It was helped along by the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859. Edwin Arnold's best selling humanist retelling of the Buddha's life, The Light of Asia, was published in 1879. [1] It's no coincidence that bodhi (literally 'understanding, awakening') is translated as Enlightenment (upper-case E), since the Victorian translators of Buddhism were the intellectual descendants of the European Enlightenment and wanted to explicitly align the two movements. Of course we also have a fair number of Romantics who were appalled at the idea of explaining everything (or anything), and took flight into the realms of the sentiment and imagination where science could not, and would not, then follow. (It can now, but that is another story!)

One consequence of this has been a certain amount of confusion when confronted by traditional Buddhism which appears to be a lot more superstitious and, frankly, theistic than one has been lead to believe it ought to be. Some of us Westerners have been prompted to wonder out loud, with no apparent irony, how traditional Buddhists could be getting Buddhism so wrong. There has been a tendency to see any cultural form which is less than austerely rational as a 'corruption' of the original supremely rational Buddhism. For some reason Theravāda scholastic orthodoxy became the poster child for this rationality, despite a pre-scientific worldview, and well into the 20th century the entire edifice of Mahāyāna and Tantric Buddhism was seen as a 'later corruption'. The irony is that while we are contemptuous of Asians who have allowed Buddhism to change to meet their changing needs, we are engaged in exactly the same project.

This attitude is a complex stew including ingredients such as Imperialist and Colonialist superiority delusions (aka orientalism; or racism); generalisations from the Protestant critiques of the Roman Catholic Church (and in particular Protestant historical narratives based on the rise, corruption and fall of the Roman Empire); and the fear that with the death of God (pronounced by Nietzsche in 1882) that everything would be permitted, and morality would collapse. Most of these Victorian themes are still unresolved and active, often unconsciously, in British public discourse about religion. Again, there is also an important and influential Romantic trend in Western Buddhism which positively glories in the irrational and superstition, but I won't deal with that now.

A passage from the Vinaya (Vin ii.139) shows that this confrontation with superstition is not a new concern for Buddhists. However the Vinaya seems to have allowed quite a lot of latitude to bhikkhus when dealing with ordinary people. The passage involves "the group of six bhikkhus", a gang of miscreants whose (mis)behaviour leads to many new rules being laid down. At the time they were apparently learning and teaching metaphysics (lokāyata) and worldly knowledge (tiracchānavijjā). The PED suggests that lokāyata means: "what pertains to the ordinary view (of the world), common or popular philosophy", or as Rhys Davids puts it elsewhere: "name of a branch of Brahman learning, probably nature-lore'; later worked into a quasi system of casuistry, sophistry." [2] The word also occurs in Sanskrit and Monier-Williams defines it as 'materialism'. Tiracchānavijjā is literally 'animal knowledge', a tiracchāna is something which 'goes horizontally' i.e. an animal; but the dictionary suggests that tiracchānavijjā means "a low art, a pseudo-science". I take the general drift of the passage to be saying that the 'group of six' monks had become interested in the popular beliefs and practices of the local people, or perhaps had not abandoned their ancestral religion.

The important event in this text comes when the Buddha sneezes while delivering a discourse, and is then loudly interrupted by a number of monks calling out:

jīvatu, bhante, bhagavā; jīvatu sugato

May the Bhagavan live, Sir; may the Sugata live!

This - jīvatu: the verb √jīv 'to live' in the third person imperative - is the Pāli equivalent of saying bless you or gesundheit (= good health). The Buddha asks the bhikkhus: "When 'life' (jīva) is said to one who has sneezed, is that a this reason he might live or die?" They answer "no". He then forbids the monks from saying jīvatu. However this causes the bhikkhus problems because the householders continue saying jīvatu when the bhikkhus sneeze, and are angry when the bhikkhus do not respond in the traditional way. So the Buddha tells them:

Gihī, bhikkhave, maṅgalikā. Anujānāmi, bhikkhave, gihīnaṃ ‘jīvatha bhante’ti vuccamānena ‘ciraṃ jīvā’ti vattu’nti

Monks, householders are superstitious. When a householder says 'live Sir' (jivatha bhante) to you, I allow you to respond with 'long life' (ciraṃ jīvā). [3]

Here the Pāli word maṅgalika means 'superstitious, looking out for lucky signs', from maṅgala 'lucky, auspicious, prosperous' (c.f. the word omen). The text seems to suggest that lokāyata and tiracchānavijja are synonymous with maṅgalika. Also in this vein is a short sutta in the Aṅguttara-nikāya where the Buddha makes a distinction between householders generally, and lay disciples (upasaka/uapsikā), saying that an exemplary lay disciple "is not eager for protective charms & ceremonies". [4] We see here the concern, visible throughout the Vinaya, to keep the behaviour of the bhikkhus distinct from householders (gihī).

This superstitious attitude also seems to be addressed by the Buddha in the Mahāmaṅgala Sutta, a very well known text from the Sutta-nipāta collection. Although this sutta is spoken to a deva, it includes supporting one's parents, cherishing one's wife and children, and having a peaceful occupation as examples of mahāmaṅgalaṃ (literally 'big luck') 'the highest blessings' or perhaps 'highest performance, great happiness or blessing' (following Saddhatissa's translation notes). Clearly the concerns of the text are those of householders. In the light of Vinaya reading above, we might see the Mahāmaṅgala Sutta as saying these things are 'good luck' rather than 'highest blessing', i.e as a re-contextualisation of the idea of what constitutes luck.

I think this demonstrates one way that the Buddha, or at least the early Buddhists, handled superstition. Direct opposition was unlikely to be very effective, since it was deeply embedded in the culture. For those of us who commit ourselves to Buddhism, it is vital that we examine our beliefs; the conditioning that we have received from family, peers and society, and begin to unravel it in order to free our minds from those limitations. But there's not much mileage in demanding this from people who do not share our commitment. We could rail against superstition, and where we see it as definitely harmful we probably should speak out against it, but on the whole the main thing for Buddhists is dealing with our own belief structures. Buddhism is something we take on for ourselves - e.g. upasampadā the word often translated as 'higher ordination' really just means 'undertaken, taken on'.

Sometimes it's more important to be polite than to be right.

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. On this subject see: Almond, Philip C. (1988) The British Discovery of Buddhism. Cambridge University Press.
2. Dialogues of the Buddha, p.166f. Online: www.sacred-texts.com
   
3. Vin ii.139. ('Live long and prosper' would be ciraṃ jivatu vaḍḍhatu ca)
   
4. AN 5.175. See also Thanissaro Access to Insight.

Since writing this I discovered the following in The Making of Buddhist Modernism by David L. McMahan:

"Buddhist studies pioneer Thomas W. Rhys Davids (1834-1922) first translated bodhi as "Enlightenment" and explicitly compared the Buddha with the philosophers of the European Enlightenment" (1882. Lectures of the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by some Points in the History of Buddhism. Hibbert Lectures. New York: Putnam. p.30)