'When one's mind is thus concentrated, pure and bright, unblemished, free from defects, malleable, wieldy, steady and attained to imperturbability, one directs and inclines it to knowledge and vision.'
-Buddha, DN2. |
What is insight practice?
According to the Pali canon, the Buddha-to-be, Siddhartha Gautama, experimented with a wide variety of practices before finding liberation from suffering. Amongst other things, he tried austerities (eating very little, holding his breath for long periods and so on) and deep concentration practice, but found that these did not ultimately lead to a lasting freedom. What did lead to freedom, however, was a deep exploration of the nature of his subjective experience - what we now call insight practice.
Many of the insights that the Buddha discovered have become key points of Buddhist doctrine, such as the Three Characteristics and the Twelve-fold Chain of Dependent Origination. However, as the Buddha stresses again and again in the early discourses, the point of these teachings is not that we blindly 'believe' them, but that we investigate them for ourselves. It is only through direct knowing-and-seeing that we can liberate ourselves.
The Three Characteristics
Central to early Buddhism is the idea of the 'Three Characteristics':
From these three, we can see the Buddha painting a picture of a deeply contingent, uncertain world - one in which there are no guarantees. But although this may sound disturbing or even frightening, it turns out that if we can truly embrace the 'groundlessness' of the world, we actually become free - free from our need to have things be just the way we want them to be, free from our desperate struggle against the uncompromising universe.
Dependent Origination
Dependent origination is, at its root, a study of conditionality: a deep understanding of cause and effect. By studying our experience, we learn to see the initial arising of reactivity, and the inevitable unfolding of suffering that will occur if we continue to cling to that reactive pattern. We come to understand ourselves and our lives much more deeply, and in a much more powerful way, so that we can make wiser choices in the future.
Three insight practices
In a sense, any time you examine your experience closely, you're doing insight practice. This type of self-guided practice can be very effective - you'll typically be much more motivated to investigate something which is meaningful to you in that moment than to do 'someone else's' meditation practice just because they're telling you to.
However, there are quite a few time-tested insight practices which are also very powerful. I'll present three that have been helpful to me.
1. The body scan
The body scan is a popular meditation practice which traces its roots back to the Satipatthana Sutta (the discourse on the establishment of mindfulness) of early Buddhism. These days it can be found in mindfulness courses and yoga classes, as well as in traditional Buddhist settings.
In this practice, you bring your attention to the sensations of the body, one body part at a time. (You can find two guided body scans, one 10 minutes long, one 25 minutes long, on the Audio page.) Over the course of the meditation, you move over the whole body, leaving no part unexamined.
This can be a powerful practice for exploring anicca, impermanence. Our body sensations come and go, moment to moment. Even persistent aches and pains break up into constellations of changing sensations on close inspection. In fact, all of our experience is like this - a continual flux of sensory impulses arising and vanishing, moment to moment, onto which our minds impose the structure that we experience as our 'solid' body. By paying close attention to each sensation in the body, we can see this for ourselves.
The body scan is also a powerful way to explore anatta, non-self. Who are we, really? If I take a moment to feel the sensations in 'my hand', who is the 'me' that this hand belongs to? Is the hand not me? And if the same is true for every other sensation in the body, and every thought in my mind, then where can this 'me' be found?
2. Noting
Another popular insight technique can arguably be traced back to the Anupada Sutta (sometimes called 'One by one as they occurred' due to the repeating refrain throughout the text), but in modern times is largely the work of the Burmese meditation master Mahasi Sayadaw and his hugely influential book Practical Insight Meditation.
In this practice, you simply notice whatever you are experiencing right now, and give it a simple label, e.g. 'music', 'pain', 'hot', 'tired', 'thinking', 'bored', 'thinking', 'frustration', 'peace'... A simpler variant on this technique is suggested by the teacher Shinzen Young, who recommends simply categorising your experience into what you see, what you hear and what you feel. Thoughts can be split into mental images ('See') and mental sounds/talk ('Hear'), while emotions are categorised as inner feelings ('Feel'). (Another simple set of labels is the Four Elements.) Alternatively, if the labels are too cumbersome, you can instead simply notice your experience - just recognise, moment to moment, where your attention is going.
Labelling or noticing your experience in this way helps us to develop greater clarity about what we're actually experiencing from one moment to the next. We also learn to let our experience come and go without resistance - there's no time to hold on to what's coming up because of the constant moment of labelling or noticing the next sensation and the next and the next - thus developing equanimity. And, of course, noticing the momentary fluctuations of experience in this way is a quick way in to the exploration of impermanence.
3. Contemplation
Whereas the body scan and noting are focused primarily on sensory experience, in contemplation we actually engage our thinking minds as well. We bring up some topic of interest and explore it, both intellectually (by thinking about it) and intuitively (by feeling our way through it).
A popular contemplation technique from early Buddhism is the Five Daily Reflections, a set of five maxims that the Buddha encouraged us to contemplate regularly in Anguttara Nikaya 5.57. Each is challenging in its own way, and the deep exploration of these topics can change us profoundly.
One way to work with the Five Daily Reflections is to read each one aloud and then sit with it for a moment, to see what comes up in response. Then, whichever one produced the strongest reaction becomes your topic of contemplation for the remainder of your meditation time.
Here are the five:
(There's an extended version of this contemplation at the end of this article on my website, along with some more discussion of contemplation in general. The practice I offer in that article is based on the version developed by my teacher Leigh Brasington and Mary Aubry, which you can find on Leigh's website)
Practices from the Satipatthana Sutta (the Discourse on Attending with Mindfulness)
The Satipatthana Sutta offers a wide range of insight practices, organised in a systematic way which begins with the body and then proceeds to progressively subtler aspects of the mind. I've written a series of articles on this discourse which unpack the various practices in a variety of ways. For a deeper exploration of this discourse, Bhikkhu Analayo's book Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization is excellent.
Practices from the Anapanasati Sutta (the Discourse on Mindfulness of In-breath and Out-breath)
The Anapanasati Sutta offers a 16-step practice which integrates both samadhi and insight. As with the Satipatthana Sutta, I've written a series of articles on this discourse which unpack the sixteen steps, including the insight aspects. For a deeper exploration of this discourse, Bhikkhu Analayo once again has an excellent book on the subject, Mindfulness of Breathing: A Practice Guide and Translations.
Strictly speaking, the first 12 steps are more concerned with samadhi than insight, but I'll include links to all articles here for completeness.
According to the Pali canon, the Buddha-to-be, Siddhartha Gautama, experimented with a wide variety of practices before finding liberation from suffering. Amongst other things, he tried austerities (eating very little, holding his breath for long periods and so on) and deep concentration practice, but found that these did not ultimately lead to a lasting freedom. What did lead to freedom, however, was a deep exploration of the nature of his subjective experience - what we now call insight practice.
Many of the insights that the Buddha discovered have become key points of Buddhist doctrine, such as the Three Characteristics and the Twelve-fold Chain of Dependent Origination. However, as the Buddha stresses again and again in the early discourses, the point of these teachings is not that we blindly 'believe' them, but that we investigate them for ourselves. It is only through direct knowing-and-seeing that we can liberate ourselves.
The Three Characteristics
Central to early Buddhism is the idea of the 'Three Characteristics':
- Anicca: Impermanence or inconstancy. Everything changes; nothing lasts forever.
- Dukkha: Unsatisfactoriness or unreliability. Nothing is ultimately a source of permanent, lasting happiness.
- Anatta: 'Non-self'. The idea that nothing has a fixed identity or essence, but is simply a temporary coming-together of conditions.
From these three, we can see the Buddha painting a picture of a deeply contingent, uncertain world - one in which there are no guarantees. But although this may sound disturbing or even frightening, it turns out that if we can truly embrace the 'groundlessness' of the world, we actually become free - free from our need to have things be just the way we want them to be, free from our desperate struggle against the uncompromising universe.
Dependent Origination
Dependent origination is, at its root, a study of conditionality: a deep understanding of cause and effect. By studying our experience, we learn to see the initial arising of reactivity, and the inevitable unfolding of suffering that will occur if we continue to cling to that reactive pattern. We come to understand ourselves and our lives much more deeply, and in a much more powerful way, so that we can make wiser choices in the future.
Three insight practices
In a sense, any time you examine your experience closely, you're doing insight practice. This type of self-guided practice can be very effective - you'll typically be much more motivated to investigate something which is meaningful to you in that moment than to do 'someone else's' meditation practice just because they're telling you to.
However, there are quite a few time-tested insight practices which are also very powerful. I'll present three that have been helpful to me.
1. The body scan
The body scan is a popular meditation practice which traces its roots back to the Satipatthana Sutta (the discourse on the establishment of mindfulness) of early Buddhism. These days it can be found in mindfulness courses and yoga classes, as well as in traditional Buddhist settings.
In this practice, you bring your attention to the sensations of the body, one body part at a time. (You can find two guided body scans, one 10 minutes long, one 25 minutes long, on the Audio page.) Over the course of the meditation, you move over the whole body, leaving no part unexamined.
This can be a powerful practice for exploring anicca, impermanence. Our body sensations come and go, moment to moment. Even persistent aches and pains break up into constellations of changing sensations on close inspection. In fact, all of our experience is like this - a continual flux of sensory impulses arising and vanishing, moment to moment, onto which our minds impose the structure that we experience as our 'solid' body. By paying close attention to each sensation in the body, we can see this for ourselves.
The body scan is also a powerful way to explore anatta, non-self. Who are we, really? If I take a moment to feel the sensations in 'my hand', who is the 'me' that this hand belongs to? Is the hand not me? And if the same is true for every other sensation in the body, and every thought in my mind, then where can this 'me' be found?
2. Noting
Another popular insight technique can arguably be traced back to the Anupada Sutta (sometimes called 'One by one as they occurred' due to the repeating refrain throughout the text), but in modern times is largely the work of the Burmese meditation master Mahasi Sayadaw and his hugely influential book Practical Insight Meditation.
In this practice, you simply notice whatever you are experiencing right now, and give it a simple label, e.g. 'music', 'pain', 'hot', 'tired', 'thinking', 'bored', 'thinking', 'frustration', 'peace'... A simpler variant on this technique is suggested by the teacher Shinzen Young, who recommends simply categorising your experience into what you see, what you hear and what you feel. Thoughts can be split into mental images ('See') and mental sounds/talk ('Hear'), while emotions are categorised as inner feelings ('Feel'). (Another simple set of labels is the Four Elements.) Alternatively, if the labels are too cumbersome, you can instead simply notice your experience - just recognise, moment to moment, where your attention is going.
Labelling or noticing your experience in this way helps us to develop greater clarity about what we're actually experiencing from one moment to the next. We also learn to let our experience come and go without resistance - there's no time to hold on to what's coming up because of the constant moment of labelling or noticing the next sensation and the next and the next - thus developing equanimity. And, of course, noticing the momentary fluctuations of experience in this way is a quick way in to the exploration of impermanence.
3. Contemplation
Whereas the body scan and noting are focused primarily on sensory experience, in contemplation we actually engage our thinking minds as well. We bring up some topic of interest and explore it, both intellectually (by thinking about it) and intuitively (by feeling our way through it).
A popular contemplation technique from early Buddhism is the Five Daily Reflections, a set of five maxims that the Buddha encouraged us to contemplate regularly in Anguttara Nikaya 5.57. Each is challenging in its own way, and the deep exploration of these topics can change us profoundly.
One way to work with the Five Daily Reflections is to read each one aloud and then sit with it for a moment, to see what comes up in response. Then, whichever one produced the strongest reaction becomes your topic of contemplation for the remainder of your meditation time.
Here are the five:
- I am liable to grow old. I am not exempt from old age.
- I am liable to get sick. I am not exempt from sickness.
- I am liable to die. I am not exempt from death.
- I must be parted and separated from all I hold dear and beloved.
- I am the owner of my deeds and the heir of my deeds. I shall be the heir of whatever deeds I do, good or bad.
(There's an extended version of this contemplation at the end of this article on my website, along with some more discussion of contemplation in general. The practice I offer in that article is based on the version developed by my teacher Leigh Brasington and Mary Aubry, which you can find on Leigh's website)
Practices from the Satipatthana Sutta (the Discourse on Attending with Mindfulness)
The Satipatthana Sutta offers a wide range of insight practices, organised in a systematic way which begins with the body and then proceeds to progressively subtler aspects of the mind. I've written a series of articles on this discourse which unpack the various practices in a variety of ways. For a deeper exploration of this discourse, Bhikkhu Analayo's book Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization is excellent.
- Mindfulness of breathing, postures, and activities
- Viewing the body in terms of its parts (contemplating the body, the body scan)
- Viewing the body in terms of its aspects (the Four Elements)
- The charnel ground contemplations, and mindfulness of vedana (the feeling of pleasant/unpleasant/neutral in relation to sensory experience)
- Mindfulness of mind states, exploring the cause and effect of unwholesome mind states, and contemplating the nature of self in terms of the Five Aggregates
- Exploring the senses, exploring the cause and effect of wholesome mind states, and contemplating the Four Noble Truths
Practices from the Anapanasati Sutta (the Discourse on Mindfulness of In-breath and Out-breath)
The Anapanasati Sutta offers a 16-step practice which integrates both samadhi and insight. As with the Satipatthana Sutta, I've written a series of articles on this discourse which unpack the sixteen steps, including the insight aspects. For a deeper exploration of this discourse, Bhikkhu Analayo once again has an excellent book on the subject, Mindfulness of Breathing: A Practice Guide and Translations.
Strictly speaking, the first 12 steps are more concerned with samadhi than insight, but I'll include links to all articles here for completeness.