Chapter 3
To the awakening
When the Buddha left home he walked south towards the centres of population strung out along the central Ganges basin, and until his death he continued to wander throughout an area roughly 250 miles long and 150 miles wide, from Kosambi in the west to Campā in the east. There does exist a late and unreliable chronology of much of this period, but more to the point is the pattern of the Buddha’s wandering life. He evidently spent time in the depths of the forest, and even sheltered in a cowshed. He had contact with both kings and prostitutes, merchants and Brahmans. His role as a peripatetic mendicant allowed him a freedom to see every way of life and every corner of his civilization. He enjoyed a licence allowed to those, the religious beggars, who belonged to no particular part of society, free to move everywhere because in principle they threatened no one. Perhaps only a merchant or a pedlar – those other figures so characteristic of the Buddha’s civilization – would have seen so much of that world, would have had such a cosmopolitan experience.
But though the Buddha witnessed his world comprehensively, he was not of it. He was set apart by the high-minded personal morality of the renouncers: ‘as a lotus flower is born in water, grows in water, and rises out of water to stand above it unsoiled, so I, born in the world raised in the world, having overcome the world, live unsoiled by the world’ (A II 38–9). He sometimes shared a roof with other wanderers, and stayed frequently for long periods of time in forested parks near the great cities – Rajagaha, Savatthi, Benares, Vesali, Kosambi – which were reserved for wanderers or, later, for the growing Buddhist order.
What we know of this formative period of the Buddha’s life, of his encounters with the other wanderers, is contained in a brief, bare account which, shorn of its repetitions and untrustworthy detail, would occupy but a page or two in translation: no very promising source for biography. However, this narrative is cast in terms which themselves can be glossed in considerable detail from other, doctrinal discourses of the Buddha, and once the narrative is unpacked in this way it becomes a more fruitful source than it first appears. To the keen sceptical scholarly eye there is no single detail of the narrative that could pass unquestioned; but the story as a whole is so well connected with the rest of the Buddha’s teaching that it must bear a substantial burden of truth.
In that narrative (M I 163–6) the Buddha’s first contacts among the renouncers are represented as having been with two teachers of yogic meditation, Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta. The Buddha went first to Āḷāra Kālāma, and ‘in no long time’ mastered his teaching ‘as far as lip reciting and repetition went’. Realizing that this doctrine – itself significantly left undescribed in the narrative – was founded in the teacher’s meditative experience, the Buddha asked him, ‘To what extent do you declare you have attained this doctrine, witnessing it directly through meditative knowledge?’ Āḷāra Kālāma replied that he had attained it as far as the Meditative Plane of nothingness. The Buddha then achieved this meditative state, and when he returned to describe his accomplishment to Āḷāra Kālāma, the latter was so pleased that he invited the Buddha to become his fellow teacher and leader. But the Buddha reflected that ‘this teaching does not lead to dispassion, to the fading of desire, to cessation, to peace, to direct knowledge in meditation, to awakening, to release; it leads only to the Meditative Plane of nothingness’. He therefore left Āḷāra Kālāma and went to Uddaka Rāmaputta, where the same course of events took place, the only difference being that Uddaka Rāmaputta’s teaching was found to lead not to awakening, but only to the Meditative Plane of neither perception nor non-perception, so the Buddha left him as well.
1. A Thai monk meditating in the posture conducive to concentration and mental alertness as taught by the Buddha from his own experience.
This was in some ways the most important chapter of the Buddha’s search, and clearly any understanding of its significance must turn on the Meditative Planes. What were they? And why did the Buddha reject them?
Meditation
The fundamental practice used to attain such states is roughly similar in all Indian meditative systems, whether the Buddhist or the yogic/Upanishadic. One begins by sitting cross-legged with a straight back in some quiet place. The straightness of the back and the folded legs foster a degree of wakefulness which could not be obtained in a more comfortable position, such as lying down. One then concentrates on some object, in some versions at first a physical object but eventually in almost every case a mental image, a single sensation, or perhaps a silently repeated sound. In an Upanishadic version one might perhaps have concentrated on the Self dwelling in the heart, ‘smaller than a mustard seed and golden’ (C III 14). Or in a Buddhist version one might concentrate upon a colour such as blue; or in both a Buddhist and a yogic meditation on one’s own breath. The counterpart to this concentration on one object is the strenuous exclusion from the attention of other sensations and indeed of merely adventitious thoughts. One is thereby absorbed in the object of meditation – and indeed some measure of this absorption is experienced by anyone who concentrates on some task.
But because the object is held unchanging before the mind’s eye for long periods of time, quite extraordinary effects are achieved. Psychologists who have investigated such effects confirm not only that measurable physical changes accompany such meditation, but also that – quite apart from beliefs about what should happen – there are psychological changes such as a heightened awareness of the object of meditation, feelings of comfort and pleasure, and detachment from the surroundings and from one’s own preoccupations. (These states are now much better known in the West than they were a generation ago.)
On the scale of meditative accomplishments these are relatively modest effects. There are others as well, such as the appearance of peculiar sensations or a light; and even entire complex visions may be witnessed. These further effects may, in some systems, become objects of meditation themselves and may represent the whole purpose of the discipline.
Since all meditative experiences are so radically subjective it seems difficult to find a language in which to couch an objective or value-free account of them. But there are nevertheless circumstantial accounts of a series of meditative states found in Buddhist texts, states which correspond roughly to those described in some yogic texts; and this Buddhist scheme has the advantage from our point of view of offering relatively unadorned descriptions of attitudes and experiences in meditation, descriptions which could as easily describe meditation in one system as in another. Indeed this Buddhist scheme is so untainted by dogma that it has been adopted by Western psychologists attempting to describe the phenomenon of meditation in general.
This scheme is that of the four Absorptions (jhāna), a graduated series of increasingly deep meditative states. In the first Absorption the meditator becomes oblivious to everything around him, though still capable of both casual and concerted thought, and his attention dwells unbrokenly on the object of meditation. In this state he enjoys both bodily comfort and the more refined mental pleasure attendant on such relaxed concentration. The meditator in this frame of mind is untroubled by unachieved desires, or by anger, or by torpor, or by doubt and restlessness.
In the second and third Absorptions the meditator gradually leaves off thinking entirely, becoming more and more absorbed in the object of meditation alone, and with this increased concentration and simplification he also transcends his feelings of comfort and intellectual pleasure. He is bent upon the object of meditation alone. And finally, in the fourth Absorption, the meditator is aware only of the object, and of an abiding sense of firm equanimity, beyond feelings of pain or pleasure. Indeed from his point of view he might be said to have increasingly become the object of meditation, in that he is aware of little else save the bare fact of his firm concentration or ‘one-pointedness’. These four Absorptions were eventually to play a special part in the system of training elaborated by the Buddha, representing specific usef
ul skills in the manipulation of one’s own experience.
Beyond the Absorptions, however, there were further meditative accomplishments, the Meditative Planes (āyatana). These are described in the Buddhist literature in a relatively abstract and colourless way, but it is very likely that in the yogic systems where they originated they were actually held to be, in some sense, places or spheres, locations in the unseen spiritual cosmos. To reach them was perhaps even conceived as a sort of astral travel. There are hints of such regions in the spiritual cosmography of the Upanishads and yogic texts, and the Buddhist descriptions of other yogic systems suggest this as well. Indeed in later Buddhist cosmography these were spiritual planes inhabited by gods. Even the abstract early Buddhist account of them cannot disguise that they are not, like the Absorptions, a general description of meditation appropriate to any number of specific meditation theories, objectives, and techniques. They are rather bound to some specific view of the topography of the unseen world. And this is not surprising, for once having resolutely set aside the world of everyday experience such a meditator was likely to supply himself with a map of the territory he had now entered.
In the Buddhist scheme of the Meditative Planes these states are achieved by leaving off ‘perceptions of variety’, a phrase which, though not entirely clear, seems to mean that the particular qualities perceived in the object of meditation are transcended, so that the meditator remains conscious though no longer with a detailed and defined object of consciousness. And we can see this in the first such state, the ‘Meditative Plane of undelimited space’. Here the meditator is conscious of extension, though with no perception of a limitation or a quality in that extension. It is in effect infinite. In the second Meditative Plane, that of ‘undelimited consciousness’, the meditator is aware of consciousness alone, though with no awareness of a delimiting object of consciousness. In the third Meditative Plane the meditator is barely aware that ‘there is nothing’ – an awareness, according to more detailed later Buddhist texts, rather like that of coming into a room and finding no one there: it is not an awareness of who is not there, but just an awareness of absence. This is the Meditative Plane of nothingness. It can only be transcended in the Meditative Plane of neither perception nor non-perception, in which consciousness is so refined, or suppressed, that the meditator can only just retrieve from such a state an awareness of its existence.
I suspect that such deep trances may account for some of the more spectacular feats of yogic athleticism attested in India today. Breathing is almost wholly suppressed, the heart rate markedly slowed, and other physiological signs yet further altered. Of course this modern Western physiological description was not how the yogis viewed the matter, nor can they have seen it with quite the colourless abstraction of the Buddhist description. In their eyes such experience, being after all the consummation of their efforts, was located in some more highly coloured spiritual landscape. It may have been something like that found in the Upanishads, where there is considerable concern with the Self as found in deep sleep, which might have been thought to be equivalent to such profound meditation. Or it may have been like the ‘meditation without qualities’ found in some early yogic texts of the Indian epic, the Mahabharata. But in any case the achievement of such states must be regarded as a testimony to human self-discipline and self-transcendence.
The Buddha’s rejection of meditation
Yet the Buddha rejected such states; or, to be more accurate, he rejected the yogic teachers’ assertions that they represented the culmination of the spiritual life. Why? A first approximation to an answer can be found in the Sallekha Sutta (M I 40–6), the Discourse on Complete Expunging. There the Buddha outlines the meditative states, both the Absorptions and the Meditative Planes, and he refers to all these as ‘tranquil abidings’ and as ‘comfortable abidings in the here and now’. But these are distinguished from ‘complete expunging’, i.e. total release from the sufferings of birth and death, which is achieved by following the elaborated path that the Buddha promulgated after his awakening. From this point of view the meditative states are finally inadequate for two reasons. First, they are merely temporary states, only abidings in the here and now. This criticism is echoed more clearly elsewhere (M III 243–5), where the Buddha notes that, though the skilled meditator can remain for a very long period of time in a meditative state, that state is nevertheless impermanent, liable eventually to dissolve. And again (M III 236–7), a meditator who believes himself to have achieved final and decisive relief through such states is in fact doing something quite different: he is in fact scurrying back and forth pointlessly between ‘distress’ (ordinary consciousness) and ‘the physical comfort of solitude’, or at best between ‘the fleshless pleasure [of meditation]’ and ‘the [mere] feeling of neither pleasure nor pain’. So in other words, though these meditative accomplishments offer temporary, even quite long-standing, release, they do not offer a decisive and permanent end to suffering. One must finally emerge only to find that one is still unchanged.
Second, as is implicit in the Discourse on Complete Expunging, such meditative skills are, when compared to the rounded fullness of the Buddha’s post-awakening system of training, one-dimensional and narrow, leaving untouched both intellectual and moral development. We can see how this might be so from an analogy with mountain climbing: though the abilities and mental traits developed in such an enterprise might be conducive to some wider development of character in the climber, they do not necessarily do so. Courage and endurance can be used to quite immoral and destructive ends. So though the Buddha had mastered the meditative skills, they did not in themselves release him from ordinary waking life.
It is important, however, to gain a balanced view of what the Buddha was rejecting. On the one hand, he rejected the yogic teachers’ claims that their particular accomplishments led to final release. But on the other hand, he implicitly accepted that meditation is, in some ways, the spiritual tool par excellence. The Absorptions in particular appear throughout his discourses as accomplishments of great usefulness. A meditator thus skilled would have great powers of concentration; for him there would ‘remain an equanimity, cleansed and purified, soft, malleable, and resplendent’ (M III 243), like the gold melted and purified by a goldsmith before it is fashioned into an ornament. This concentrated equanimity – of course by no means the sole property of Buddhist meditators – could then be used to attain the final goal of specifically Buddhist awakening and release.
His final view of the Meditative Planes is more difficult to pin down. On the one hand they are sometimes mentioned, in passages sprinkled through the canon, as achievements very near to final release. One could indeed take them a step further to ‘complete cessation of what is perceived or felt’ by a little more of the same kind of effort. But broadly speaking the canon makes it clear that this ‘complete cessation’ is not yet final liberation, for beyond that is still required an intellectual and emotional change, the acquisition of a Buddhist wisdom The Buddha was evidently willing to accept many paths to release, even ones very near those of his yogic teachers; but the final goal still had to be achieved by a quite different step, a change in quality of thought and feeling, not in quantity of meditative effort.
The value of direct experience
The usefulness of the narrative of the Buddha’s encounter with the yogis does not end there, however, for it also points to the positive and creative direction the Buddha was to take. This is implicit in the terms in which the yogis are criticized: for it is not their theories which the Buddha here finds wanting – though theories such as they must have held are attacked in many places in his discourses – but their practice. They fall short because, whatever view of the spiritual cosmos clothed their meditative techniques, it was the techniques themselves which were inadequate. On the one hand this signals that the Buddha was to move towards creating his own special forms of meditation, forms beside which methods such as the Absorptions were to take a subsidiary place. On the ot
her hand it betokens the formation of an abiding attitude which must have marked the man as it deeply marked his teaching, an attitude which might be called a stubbornly disciplined pragmatism. Whatever teachings or practices the well-stocked marketplace of ancient Indian thought offered him, they had to be shown to be useful in his own experience for him to accept them.
We can understand the significance of this attitude by looking at the Buddha’s milieu. Centuries later, India recognized certain authorities or criteria of valid knowledge, by which spiritual truth could be tested, and these criteria were already implicitly present at the Buddha’s time. One such criterion was simply whether a teaching appeared in the Brahmanical scriptures, including the Upanishads; and we can see that the Buddha was not inclined to accept this, in his view, pretentious and foreign tradition. A second authority the Buddha showed no sign of accepting was the testimony of august inspired teachers of the past on the basis of their supernormal experience. For the Buddha was self-confident, even rebellious, sure that if the problem of suffering were to be solved it had to be of such a nature that he could solve it; and in any case these teachers were not separated from him by centuries in which their knowledge could have gained an unassailable superhuman authority, but were present to him in the flesh and insistent that he could himself experience their knowledge and the liberating fruit of that knowledge. A third authority, that of sheer reasoning or inference, was hardly amenable to him, perhaps because of his already formed commitment to meditation. So he depended wholly upon a fourth criterion, that of direct personal knowledge, direct personal experience, ‘direct witnessing in the here and now’. As the Buddha expresses it this criterion seems such ordinary common sense that we can hardly say he invented it, but he was unique and original in insisting on its rigorous and exclusive application.
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