Dhyanaparamita; The Perfection of Meditation

The perfection of living a meditative life.

Dhyana, or meditation, is the second to last perfection, following energy and preceding wisdom.  

–      “Meditation names a set of practices and disciplines that suspend daily activity in order to cultivate the mental orientation behind all other activities.”  214. 

–      Three forms of meditative/suspending activity: presence, critical reflection, and reflexivity. Presence/mindfulness is awareness of the immediate experience of the internal and external world, environment and body.  Reflective thinking steps out of this immediate experience; what one is aware of in a present moment is extended into reflection.  Reflection is the ability and habit of understanding how things work rather than getting stuck in the delusions of habits and conventions.  Reflexivity is self-awareness; the understanding of how ones mind works.  Mindfulness alone does not lead to compassion, all three forms of meditative activity are required.

–      Traditional Buddhists understand each of the six perfections to be character traits as well as bodies of practice. To be meditative is to be calm, thoughtful, contemplative, and imaginative.

–      Bhavana, the art of cultivation or of bringing into existence.  Bhavana requires siksa, or training, “in mental experiences that differ qualitatively from ordinary forms of awareness.”   174.

–      Energy and meditation: The perfection of meditation – changing the content and patterns of ones mind - follows after energy because it requires enormous amounts of it.  Raw energy requires guidance; the fifth and sixth perfections guide this energy. 

–      Meditation counters the three poisons and five hindrances:  The Three Poisons: Greed – we pull the world towards us.  Aversion – we push it away.  Delusion – we are oblivious to our true circumstances.  The Five Hindrances: sensual desire, ill-will, laziness, elation and depression, and doubt.  Wisdom is understood to be the state of mind that is untouched by the poisons and hindrances.

–      Two basic styles of meditation: samatha, “calming,” and vipassana, “insight.”  Samatha is geared towards stillness of mind and begins with following the breath.  Vipassana focuses on visualizing wisdom, which is a state of realizing impermanence, selflessness, and suffering.

–      Meditation on immediate experience aims to enhance the quality of pre-reflective experience – to become undistracted, aware of the present moment.  Awareness of the present requires a mental balance of relaxation and alertness.   

–      Breathing and observing the minds activity cultivates awareness of the present moment.  In both, we see how much influence our body has on our mind, and our mind on our body. 

–      Immediate experience involves thought, but it does not involve reflection.  Awareness is accompanied by thoughts like, “my breathing is soft,” “I feel cold,” etc., but these do not get extended into reflection.

–      Attentiveness to the present moment, or mindfulness, is not innately ethical. Sheer power of attentiveness and awareness of the moment does not lead to compassion; reflection and reflexivity are required.   

–      Reflective thinking and phenomenology, 193.  The main purpose of reflective thinking for Buddhists has been to observe and classify mental experiences.  In philosophy, this is called phenomenology, “the effort to study the contents of consciousness systematically by analyzing their different appearances and the effects they have on our minds.” 

–      Buddhist ethics arose out of phenomenological insight and description.  Its ethics were based on how actions affected consciousness.  

–      The link between meditation and philosophy, 197: “Both ‘philosophy’ and ‘meditation’ are extraordinary cultural practices, activities that suspend the ordinary, everyday flow of life.  In both philosophy and meditation we withdraw from the surge of ordinary, worldly experience, temporarily stepping back in order to gather ourselves, and through a transformative cultivation of the mind, to prepare ourselves to reenter ordinary life with greater perspective, vision, and efficacy.  Moreover, wisdom is the primary goal of both practices.  Meditation and philosophy, conceived as two forms of a larger comprehensive sphere of mental practice, have been understood in Buddhism to work in conjunction, both active in the service of human emancipation.

“The split between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ that occasionally surface as a vexing problem in Western cultures is only occasionally visible in Buddhist contexts.  Theoretical reflection is a practice, one that is central to the maintenance of all other practices.  If you do not think about your practices and your goals in comprehensive, theoretical terms, they will remain undeveloped, unsophisticated, and, in some sense at least, ineffective.  Philosophical practice is therefor conjoined with other practices and serves them by clarifying and honing their connection to life.  Like other practices, theoretical thinking aims to transform daily life by bringing insight to bear on it.” 

–      Reflexive Meditation: This is meditation on forces that shape ones thoughts… desires, motives, and actions, but most importantly, no-self.

–      Freedom as ability to analyze our causes and conditions, 206:  In saying that our nature, like the nature of everything else, is interdependent, the doctrine of emptiness may seem to say that we are not totally free beings… that we do not shape ourselves.  But to think that we are not interdependent beings or beings determined by our world - that we have a self that is totally independent of the world and would be just as it is regardless of the forces of the world – is to live in delusion.  In one sense, to be conditioned is a restriction on freedom – we cannot chose to be anything; we are not who we are today simply because we chose to be that.  The true restriction of our freedom is to think that we are the product purely of our choices.  This restricts us from being able to analyze the true causes and conditions of our experiences.  

–      Certainty as ignorance: If we exist in certainty, we are not perceiving “the contours of our ignorance,” and are experiencing delusion.     

–      208: “The way you participate in your current given worldview shapes the extent to which you will be able to see alternatives to it and be able to reach out beyond it in freedom.” 

–      Imagination: fantasies that are detached from possibility are fun; fantasies of how to actualize an ideal have a distinct ethical character.  Imaginative meditations are based on self-knowledge.  “Imagination, in its most creative and productive forms, is a discipline.”  This imagination has the goal of transformation… “of breaking through the weaknesses of previous orders… products of the imagination are often counterintuitive… they run against the grain of our previous ways of understanding ourselves and the world… Our measure of them is the degree to which they open up new dimensions of reality to our mind.”