This week we're looking at case 45 in the Gateless Barrier. It's a simple koan that points to a truth which is both profound and extremely difficult to express in words, for reasons that will soon become apparent!

Spiritual authorities, Zen and 'self-power'

Japanese Buddhism makes a distinction between approaches to practice which depend on 'self-power' and those which depend on 'other-power'.

A tradition like Pure Land Buddhism is an example of 'other-power'. The basic idea is that if you speak the name of Amitabha Buddha (a celestial Buddha who rules over the Pure Land, a kind of heavenly realm in Buddhist cosmology), then when you die you'll be reborn in the Pure Land where it's really easy to get enlightened. It's an easy method - anyone can say 'namu amida butsu' or 'namo amituofo' - and it results in an easy road to enlightenment. The key is that someone else (Amida Buddha) is doing most of the hard work for you - hence we call this an 'other-power' approach, because you aren't doing the heavy lifting yourself.

By comparison, Zen is considered a 'self-power' approach. In Zen, nobody is going to do the heavy lifting for you. A teacher can provide you with a meditation method (like koan study or Silent Illumination), but when it comes to getting the work done, that's all on you. Yes, it helps to have a sangha to practise with, and a teacher to offer support and guidance, particularly if you're going through a tough patch, but fundamentally it's you sitting face to face with yourself, day in, day out, that gets the job done.

There's something to be said for both approaches. Awakening requires us to open up to something beyond our conventional ideas of who we are - and it may be helpful for some people to frame that as a kind of grace received from totally outside ourselves. On the other hand, many people who've grown up in a culture heavily influenced by Abrahamic religions find that that approach isn't satisfying, and that they're drawn to meditation practice precisely because it doesn't rely on an external force to intervene on our behalf - and so framing things in terms of 'self-power' might be a much better fit. And, actually, in the long run, the two approaches do kinda meet in the middle. It's said in Japanese Buddhism that even the most ardent devotee of other-power needs a bit of self-power in their practice too, and even the most determined self-power practitioner has to be open to a bit of other-power along the way too.

Nevertheless, this koan is very much aimed at encouraging the self-power approach that's characteristic of Zen, and it starts by taking aim at two possible candidates for other-power: the 'past' and 'future' Buddhas.

Two Buddhas

The 'Buddha of the past' referenced here is Shakyamuni Buddha, aka Siddhartha Gautama. This is the 'historical' Buddha, the man who lived 2,500 years ago in what is now modern-day India, the spiritual teacher who kicked off the whole tradition that subsequently became known as Buddhism. If you're looking for a Buddhist authority figure, you can't go far wrong with Sid himself. At least if we take the Pali canon literally, this is the guy who discovered the Four Noble Truths, came up with the Eightfold Path and introduced insight meditation as a path to enlightenment. The historical Buddha's teachings have been tremendously helpful to me personally, and that's why they're a big part of what I teach, despite this site being called 'Cheltenham Zen'. The ancient teachings of the Pali canon can be a great source of inspiration, not to mention a treasure trove of practical methods for developing generosity, compassion and wisdom. In a broader sense, Shakyamuni represents the tremendous body of wisdom that has been developed and handed down to us over the centuries by the many practice lineages all over the world.

The 'Buddha of the future' is Maitreya, a Buddha who currently resides in a heavenly realm, and who is prophesied to come to Earth to revive the Dharma (the true teaching of Shakyamuni Buddha) at a time when the teachings have completely decayed. Plenty of people argue that that's already happened, and several people have claimed to be Maitreya. Whether or not we believe in this kind of prophecy, the point here is that Maitreya represents the promise of future salvation - OK, things might be crappy right now, but if we can just hold on a little longer, Maitreya will come and sort it all out for us - so take a deep breath and keep going!

At the symbolic level, both of these represent 'something outside ourselves' that we might secretly hope will solve all our problems. That kind of wish can manifest in a variety of ways. Perhaps it's a subtle sense of restlessness, never settling with any one teacher because maybe the next one will say the right thing to me. The next book, the next retreat, the next empowerment, the secret scroll with the hidden teaching - these all hold the tantalising promise of being 'it', the thing that's going to turn our lives around and enable us to live trouble-free for the rest of time.

Zen master Wuzu is gently and compassionately suggesting that, if this is the approach we're taking, we might be looking in the wrong place for salvation. He suggests that both Shakyamuni and Maitreya are 'servants of another' - that's a bold claim, suggesting that even the founder of Buddhism and its promised future Messiah are just underlings in the service of someone much greater. Who could it be - and do they have any books on Amazon?!

Zen master Bankei's 'Unborn Buddha-mind'

After a period of incredibly intense practice which very nearly led to his death, Zen master Bankei had a profound realisation, which he summarised by saying 'Everything is perfectly resolved in the Unborn.'

'The Unborn' was Bankei's way of referring to what we might alternatively call 'Buddha nature', 'true nature', 'Mind with a capital M', 'awake awareness' or 'pure being'. The Unborn is not something outside of ourselves; we don't need to climb a mountain to find it. In fact, whether we look for it to the north, south, east or west, we're looking in precisely the wrong direction. In order to find it, we need to turn the light of awareness around and look inside ourselves, to find out who we really are at the deepest level.

So much for the spiritual cliches - but what does any of this actually mean?

Fully understanding Bankei's teaching is, I think, the work of a lifetime - my Zen teacher's teacher apparently once commented that 'Practice is so much deeper in one's seventies than one's sixties', and I'm not even fifty yet, so I have quite a way to go! But we can perhaps get a foot in the door, so to speak, by looking at what lies beyond our thinking minds.

Zen often comes across as being pretty anti-intellectual. There's a lot of rhetoric about how thoughts won't help you, and arguably one of the major purposes of koan practice is to frustrate the thinking mind.

But the point isn't to eradicate the thinking mind, only to break its stranglehold on our experience. The thinking mind is a wonderful thing. It can figure things out, solve problems, learn skills, allow us to analyse facts dispassionately to overcome unconscious biases - honestly, it's great. I make my living using my thinking mind to solve complex technical challenges, and so I have the thinking mind to thank for the roof over my head and the food in my belly. Thanks, thinking mind!

But the thinking mind also has its limitations. The thinking mind sees the world through two major operations: divide and compare. This is different to that, and I prefer the first one. That oh-so-simple mechanism can allow us to do all kinds of cool things - for example, we can project ourselves into an imaginary future to figure out how we want things to turn out tomorrow, allowing us to make plans to increase the chances of things going our way, while taking steps to avoid some of the obstacles that might come up and stop us from getting where we want to be. That's an immense power, and likely goes a long way to explaining the dominance of the human species on this planet.

But the world of 'divide and compare' comes with some drawbacks too. Maybe you're familiar with the phenomenon of 'overthinking'. Maybe you've caught yourself planning tomorrow's important meeting for the seventh time - even though the first six runs really did cover all the important stuff. Maybe you've felt that you could be doing better - you have a clear idea of how you should be getting on, and your actual performance falls short by comparison. Or perhaps you're really good at the 'divide' part of the equation, and every time you walk into a room you start finding reasons why you don't belong there, dividing the room into 'them' and 'us' more and more effectively, until 'us' has become 'just me, all alone, unwanted and unwelcome'.

So - and bear with me on this for a moment - what would happen if we stopped thinking, even for a moment? How would the world appear to us then, if not viewed through the lens of 'divide and compare'?

There are two tricky points here. One, it's quite literally impossible to put that experience into words. This isn't just me being spooky and enigmatic. The moment we start to use words, we have to step back into the world of thought, because that's where words come from. So as soon as we start to 'talk about it', we have to stop 'living it'. But that's not actually as bad as it sounds, because it's like anything else - we just have to experience it for ourselves, and then we know what it's like. No description of the taste of a mango will ever convey the experience of its flavour to someone who's never eaten one, but luckily it isn't that hard to get hold of a mango and try it for yourself, at least in our affluent Western society - if you're reading this article, the chances are that you have access to a mango for the purposes of a taste test.

But how the heck do we experience 'not thinking'? That's the second, and altogether trickier, point. At first, we might not even realise how much we're thinking all the time - a very common experience for beginning meditators is for people to think that the practice is actually making them think more than usual, because as soon as we get quiet and start paying attention to what's going on, the thoughts are absolutely everywhere, like an unstoppable mental fire hose thrashing around and spraying thoughts left, right and centre. If you've found this for yourself, let me assure you that the meditation didn't put the thoughts there - they were there already, you just hadn't noticed them. We tend not to notice things that are always there, like the way we rapidly stop hearing the hum of the air conditioning or central heating because it's a steady drone. In the same way, when our minds are bombarded by thoughts, we actually tend not to notice most of them - they just fade into the background of our experience.

So first things first, we need to do enough practice that we start to notice our thoughts coming and going, to identify each thought as a discrete mental event with a beginning, middle and end. We can either undertake a meditation practice specifically focused on mindfulness of thoughts, as we discussed in last week's article, or we can simply allow the awareness of thoughts to develop over time as we do another practice, such as Silent Illumination.

Once we have some level of familiarity with the contents of our minds, we can then start exploring what happens when we don't have any thought present.

If we really pay attention, we'll start to notice moments like this, particularly if we practise meditation for long enough that the mind begins to settle and the thoughts quieten down. We may begin to find that gaps open up naturally between thoughts, and in between is... something else. Perhaps it shows up first of all as a kind of silence - one student described it to me as 'a deafening, horrifying silence', because it was such an unfamiliar and unexpected experience for him. (It doesn't stay horrifying! It's actually quite nice, but it can be a bit of a surprise the first time you encounter it.)

Alternatively, if the space isn't opening up by itself, we can sometimes 'trick' our minds into falling silent for a few moments. Spend a few moments noticing your thoughts coming and going, and then ask yourself this: 'What is my next thought going to be?'

Everything is perfectly resolved in the Unborn

The first step here is to get a taste of this 'deafening silence'. Then, like so many things in meditation, the second step is to figure out how to get back there! It's not at all uncommon to 'stumble' quite easily into some kind of meditation experience the first time, and then really struggle to get back there. It isn't just a case of beginner's luck - often, the problem is that we want to get back to the prior experience so much that the mind actually tightens up and becomes less flexible, thus blocking the path leading back to the desired experience. Fortunately, this is something we can learn to overcome - we 'just' have to figure out how to incline our minds gently towards wherever we want to go, without getting so 'grabby' that we get in our own way.

Once you can get back to 'the space between thoughts', even if it's just for a few moments at a time, you can start to explore what it's like. It's a delicate business - remember, you can't use words, because as soon as you do you're back in the world of thought again. (There's nothing worse than finding yourself thinking 'Oh hey, I'm back there in the space between thoughts!', because, of course, you aren't - at least, not any more! But maybe you were, right up until the thought came along, and that's still something.)

As you start to become familiar with the space between thoughts, several things become apparent. One, you don't stop existing when you aren't thinking about something! This might sound facetious, but a genuine source of resistance to letting go of thought can be a kind of fear of annihilation. If we live entirely in our thoughts, and then we stop thinking... eek. But give it a try, and notice that it's OK - usually, quite a bit better than OK, actually, but 'OK' will do for now.

Two, if you're able to rest in that space for a reasonable length of time, you'll start to notice how simple your experience has become. Although you aren't thinking, you haven't suddenly become stupid, or incapable of functioning. If something needs to be done, it's immediately, intuitively obvious what it is - unless it's a complex problem that genuinely does need to be thought about, of course, but what you'll start to notice is how rarely that actually happens. It turns out that life isn't an endless series of challenges to be figured out - unless we make it so.

Third, as you continue to taste that direct, wordless simplicity, you'll start to notice that it feels pretty good. Not 'exciting', like cookies and ice cream, but more of a quality of deep contentment. When we aren't using our thinking minds to compare the present moment to an idealised alternative version of itself, things are just what they are - they don't need to be any different. Unexpectedly, this can be true even if what's actually here is unpleasant in some way. For example, right now I have a bit of a stomach ache, because I've drunk way too much coffee this week and my digestion is a bit upset. If I start thinking about what I should have done instead (like sticking to green tea, which doesn't affect me in the same way), I'll quickly become resistant to and resentful of the present discomfort and my role in creating it. But if I'm simply here, in the space between thoughts, then the pain in my guts is just something else in the room, along with the computer screen in front of me, the music coming out of the speakers, the sensations from other parts of my body, and so on. It's unpleasant, but it's also fine - it just is what it is, no need to make a fuss about it. No need to suffer over and above the discomfort, which is already here anyway.

I believe that some combination of the above is what master Bankei is getting at with his statement that 'everything is perfectly resolved in the Unborn'. On one hand, we're quite capable of functioning from that place - despite the lack of thought, we understand what's what and what needs to be done. And in the absence of comparison, things are just what they are and don't need to be otherwise - which is one way to define 'perfect', isn't it?

Now, Bankei was a big advocate of 'resting in the Unborn', not just as a meditation practice (although Silent Illumination is an ideal vehicle to practise this way of being), but as a way of life - sit in the Unborn, eat in the Unborn, work in the Unborn, sleep in the Unborn. To what extent that's really possible for someone in a household life, I don't know. (Maybe I'll look back in ten years' time and laugh at how shallow my practice was in my forties!) For me, there are peaks and troughs in the amount of thinking that goes on. Sometimes I'll have long stretches where my daily meditation is pretty quiet. At other times, I'll be in the early stages of a new creative or research project, and my head will be a whirlwind of thoughts (that's where I am right now, as it happens). But sometimes, things quieten down enough that I can connect with that space between thoughts - and if I can do it, you can too. And even if we only have occasional access, it's a very powerful practice to connect with it whenever we can. Whatever we're dealing with at the time, it's quite likely that the situation will seem simpler, and our immediate response more obvious, when we step out of the stream of thoughts. (I've started to think of this as 'asking my Unborn mind what needs to happen next' - perhaps there's a hint of other-power sneaking into my framing there!)

Give this one a try and see how you get on. Master Bankei would say that rediscovering your innate Unborn mind is the entire path of practice, and that each moment you spend there is a moment that you already are a fully awakened Buddha. Maybe Zen isn't so difficult after all?

May you discover your Unborn Buddha mind today.

In the meditation world, a great deal of emphasis is placed on the present moment. Eckhart Tolle's well-known book is called 'The Power of Now' - it doesn't get much more on-the-nose than that.

The present moment is certainly an important part of spiritual practice, to be sure. But there's another dimension of practice which can sometimes be overlooked if we focus too much on 'right here, right now' - and that's how the practice can help us to change over time.

Pre-enlightenment practices of the Buddha-to-be

When looking at the discourses in the Pali canon (the records of the earliest period of Buddhist teachings, and generally thought to be closest to the teachings of the historical Buddha), the Buddha doesn't talk much about his personal practice history. Instead, he mostly focuses on giving practice advice tailored to the audience he's addressing. (Notice the resonance with the role of the teacher as discussed in last week's article!)

However, in Majjhima Nikaya 19, the Buddha does talk about a practice that he undertook in the early years of his spiritual journey, before reaching awakening.

“Bhikkhus, before my enlightenment, while I was still only an unenlightened Bodhisatta, it occurred to me: 'Suppose that I divide my thoughts into two classes. Then I set on one side thoughts of sensual desire, thoughts of ill will, and thoughts of cruelty, and I set on the other side thoughts of renunciation, thoughts of non-ill will, and thoughts of non-cruelty.'

(Readers familiar with the Eightfold Path will note that the Buddha-to-be chose to divide up his thoughts based on those in line with Right Intention and those not in line with it.)

The basic premise here is that thoughts can be conceptually divided into two categories: those which support our growth in the directions we wish to move, and those which don't. This is potentially helpful in two ways. Firstly, by getting clear about the types of thoughts we have, we start to develop an awareness of how much time we spend engaging in mental activity that is beneficial and supportive of our aims in life, and how much we spend doing the exact opposite! Then, secondly, we can start to do something about it. But what should we do, and how? Well, let's see what the Buddha has to say. Continuing with MN19:

"As I abided thus, diligent, ardent, and resolute, a thought of sensual desire arose in me. I understood thus: 'This thought of sensual desire has arisen in me. This leads to my own affliction, to others' affliction, and to the affliction of both; it obstructs wisdom, causes difficulties, and leads away from Nibbāna.’"

(The discourse later goes on to describe the same process for thoughts of ill will and thoughts of cruelty, but to keep things simple we'll focus on thoughts on sensual desire here.)

What's being described here is a mindfulness practice - specifically, mindfulness of thoughts. Typically, when thoughts arise in meditation, we simply let them come and go, doing our best not to pay too much attention to them, perhaps remaining focused on an object such as the breath or the body sensations. In this case, though, the practice is actually to look at the thought carefully - but without being drawn into the story associated with the content of the thought. That's tricky! The reason that most meditation practices work with something other than thoughts is because they're so 'sticky' - a thought comes up about something disagreeable that happened to us, and before we know it we're replaying the memory and getting annoyed all over again. At this point, the meditation practice has usually been lost, swept away in the tidal wave of thoughts and emotions associated with the story.

Nevertheless, if we're able to pay attention to our thoughts without getting drawn into them (which is possible, with practice), then we start to notice some interesting things. Over time, we can observe where our thoughts lead us. In the example above, the Buddha describes noticing the arising of a thought of sensual desire. We might think 'Well, what's wrong with that? What's wrong with wanting something nice?' Maybe nothing - but you should check it out for yourself! In my case, I've noticed that thoughts of sensual desire often over-emphasise the positive aspects of the experience that I'm craving, and brush under the carpet the negative side. When I see a chocolate cookie, the pleasure I'll experience when I taste it is immediately apparent to me... and I tend not to think about the regret I'll feel when I weigh in the next morning and the scale has bad news for me. There's also a subtler detail that has taken a lot longer for me to notice - which is that, after I eat a sugary snack, my body actually feels pretty bad not long after. The taste is great at first, but it leaves a kind of slightly unpleasant residue in my mouth afterwards - which, ironically, my habits tell me can most easily be assuaged by eating another cookie. Eating too much sugar can also lead to a sugar high, in which both my mind and body become slightly agitated and uncomfortable. It's not a big deal, easily missed - usually missed, because I've gone straight from eating the cookie to focusing on something else - but it's there in the background of my experience nonetheless, making me feel 5% crappier than if I hadn't eaten the cookie in the first place.

Humans have a tremendous capacity for selective awareness. I know I do! It's easy to focus on the positive aspects of an unhealthy behaviour - the taste of the cookie, the rush of the cigarette, the thrill of doing something dangerous - and ignore the negative aspects.

But something interesting starts to happen if we're able to bring the light of awareness to the totality of a situation. Slowly but surely, we arrive at a more balanced view of what's going on - the good and the bad. This can help to take the sting out of very difficult experiences, as we notice the silver lining to the cloud, and it can also help to reveal the dark side of patterns like unhealthy pleasure-seeking.

The Buddha describes coming to this exact realisation. By examining his own thoughts of sensual desire, he discovered that, ultimately, they led to his own 'affliction' - a strong word, perhaps, but the point is that he realised that, in the long run, chasing material sensual pleasures wasn't taking him where he wanted to go - and, looking more broadly, the same pattern seemed to apply to the people around him as well.

Becoming disillusioned - which isn't as bad as it sounds!

One slightly annoying feature of insight meditation is that it's possible to see something once, twice or even a few times without it really having much impact. Perhaps we notice 'Gosh, things really are impermanent, aren't they?', and yet we're still left with a sense of 'Yeah, but so what?' In just the same way, it's quite possible to notice the negative aspects of some of our behavioural patterns, and to accept fully on the intellectual level that this is something we should probably stop doing... and yet the behaviour still doesn't change. (Unfortunately, I speak from experience!)

I once heard a teacher compare insight meditation to a process of conducting a survey. You ask a couple of people what they think about something, and you get a bit of information - but it isn't really enough to draw conclusions from. You ask a thousand people, maybe a pattern starts to emerge - you're starting to get somewhere, but there's still a way to go. By the time you've asked a million people, you've now got a pretty solid basis to draw conclusions.

In the same way, each time we observe our experience, we're gathering evidence. Maybe that first glimpse of impermanence doesn't seem like a big deal - OK, you definitely noticed something, but you've spent a lifetime building up the implicit world view of permanence and solidity, and it'll take more than a few experiences of impermanence to really make a difference. But if you keep at it, then sooner or later the sheer weight of evidence you've accumulated becomes undeniable - and that's when things flip around, and your world view changes.

And the same applies to behaviour change. The Buddha goes on:

"When I considered: 'This leads to my own affliction,' it subsided in me; when I considered: ‘This leads to others’ affliction,’ it subsided in me; when I considered: ‘This leads to the affliction of both,’ it subsided in me; when I considered: ‘This obstructs wisdom, causes difficulties, and leads away from Nibbāna,’ it subsided in me. Whenever a thought of sensual desire arose in me, I abandoned it, removed it, did away with it."

By examining his thoughts of sensual desire and noticing that they consistently led away from where he wanted to go, those thoughts began to subside. The Buddha realised that the promise of lasting happiness offered by those thoughts of sensual desire was an illusion - and so he became disillusioned.

The experience of disillusionment is generally not a happy one. I experienced a fairly significant disillusionment recently, and it sucked! But - as a friend was kind enough to point out at the time - disillusionment means letting go of an illusion - something that wasn't real in the first place. It's uncomfortable and embarrassing to realise that we've been operating under a false impression all this time, but in the long run it means we're moving into closer alignment with the truth of things - and that's ultimately what this path is all about.

And, just like a magic trick that's been seen through, when we become disillusioned with something, it loses its power over us. In the Buddha's case, when he deeply understood that his thoughts of sensual desire weren't taking him where he wanted to go, the thoughts subsided. As we can see, this wasn't an immediate process, like flicking a light switch - the thoughts continued to come up for a while, but each time they did, he reflected on negative consequences, and again those thoughts lost their power.

Reward-based learning and habit change

The understanding of psychology has undergone some pretty significant changes since the time of the Buddha 2,500 years ago, and this can sometimes lead to a bit of a language barrier when trying to map traditional teachings on to modern concepts. (For example, you might be surprised to hear that there's no Pali word for 'emotion', since the concept didn't exist back then - perhaps that's even shocking, given how central emotion is to our modern understanding of human behaviour.) Nevertheless, MN19 is describing a deep truth about human experience - and one which is now being validated and fleshed out in modern terms by scientists.

There's a biological mechanism called 'reward-based learning' (or simply 'reward learning') which is key to how living beings learn to navigate their environment. At the simplest level, 'if it feels good, I should do it again; if it feels bad, I shouldn't do it again'. It hurts to stub your toe, so you learn to try to avoid doing that - which means that, overall, you're less likely to damage yourself. It feels good to spend time with friends, so you learn to do that - which means that humans tend to build communities that support each other and help us to survive by pooling our skills and resources. And so on.

While this is probably an oversimplification (if you're more knowledgeable on the science of all this and want to fill in some of the blanks, please leave a comment below!), we can start to see both where our bad habits come from, and how bringing clear awareness to an experience (including its downstream consequences) can lead to behavioural change.

We start with that first bite of the cookie. It's sugary - and that's good, because our bodies use sugar as an energy source. Unfortunately we evolved in an environment which didn't have shops selling chocolate on every corner, and so we're biologically geared to load up on resources when they're available, since we might not get to eat tomorrow. That ingrained biological response is then exploited by junk food manufacturers, who take great care to design sweet treats that are as appealing as possible to our old-fashioned instincts. So we take that first bite - and it's good! Reeeeeally good! The behaviour of taking a bite of a cookie leads to a significant positive reward - and by the time we've eaten the whole thing, we've repeated that pattern a few times. Already, our brains are starting to learn 'eating cookie = good, more please!'

But this only works if we do what we usually do, which is focus on the pleasant aspects of the experience and distract ourselves (whether deliberately or not) from the unpleasant aspects. If we instead bring mindfulness to the whole experience, then the overall 'reward' of the activity starts to go down - because now we're noticing not just that initial high but then the low that follows it. And if we do this repeatedly (that 'gathering evidence' process I mentioned above), then we can recalibrate our brains to the new reward level. We start to realise that, although the cookie still looks good, actually there are some significant downsides to it as well. Maybe we'll just have one today, rather than the whole bag - or maybe we'll just get a cup of tea instead.

For more on reward-based learning, habit change and mindfulness, check out the work of Dr Judson Brewer, who uses mindful approaches inspired by the early Buddhist suttas to help people to quit smoking and make other positive behavioural changes.

Closing on a tangent: a few thoughts on pleasure, happiness and the spiritual life

It's pretty common for people to object to the idea that sensual desire could be viewed in a negative light. To Western audiences, it smacks of joyless puritanism, asceticism for its own sake, an anti-life philosophy. It's usually easier for people to see why thoughts of ill will and cruelty should be abandoned - but what's wrong with pleasure?

One response to this is to say that it isn't about eliminating pleasure from our lives, but about coming to a more balanced appreciation of what's going on. As I've outlined above, eating a cookie is neither 100% positive or 100% negative. It tastes great - that's a nice thing! But it also has some negative consequences - and if we're focusing only on the positive and ignoring the negative, we're deluding ourselves as to what's really going on. When we have a more balanced appreciation of the whole picture, we might still choose to eat the cookie - but we'll be making that decision with our eyes open, rather than sleepwalking into it because we're too distracted by the promise of pleasure.

A slightly more sophisticated version of this argument (which is admittedly harder to justify in the context of MN19 above) is that we aren't necessarily trying to eliminate sensual desire, but rather to be free from it. What does that mean? It means that we have a choice in the matter. I've had times in my life when I've been so hooked on caffeine that at 11am every day my legs carry me to the shop at work and my hands grab the Coke bottle out of the fridge and pay for it with my credit card without my conscious intervention - I can watch the process happening, vaguely aware on some level that I'd been planning to cut down on my caffeine intake, yet the habit is so strong that it feels like I'm watching it play out on a TV screen. When we're really hooked on some kind of sensual desire, we really don't have much say in the matter - we're at the mercy of our habits and our environment. Part of the reason for cultivating mindfulness is to bring some agency back into the picture - to open up a space in which we can see our impulses come up and decide whether to act on them.

Both of these answers lead to an approach which is eminently compatible with being fully 'in the world'. We continue to have families and friends, jobs and hobbies; and we continue to do things just because they're fun - but this is balanced by the cultivation of mindfulness and a gradually deepening awareness of the full story of how these things affect us. It becomes easier to notice when a 'harmless fun' activity is starting to get problematic - that addictive mobile phone game is starting to take up a bit too much time in the morning, and we're beginning to arrive late for work, or we no longer have enough time to make a healthy packed lunch to take with us, so instead we're going to the shops and buying junk food instead. If there's no problem, there's no problem - but when there's a problem, we're more likely to spot it, and to have sufficient presence of mind to steer ourselves back on track.

This is fine so far as it goes. But you won't have to look far to find spiritual teachers and philosophers advocating something much stronger - a deep renunciation of the world, a total cutting off of 'frivolous' activities in favour of solitude and spiritual pursuits. What's going on here?

First, I should say that I'm not a monk and have never been one, so I can't really say what the monastic life is like from personal experience. The closest I've come is doing residential meditation retreats, the longest of which have been two month-long retreats at Cloud Mountain Retreat Center in the U.S. - but I think that's long enough to give me a sense of what the more thoroughly renunciate life offers.

I've previously offered a model of 'excitation and stimulation' to describe the process of 'settling the mind' in meditation. The basic idea is that, at any given moment, we have some internal level of 'excitation' - from being utterly calm to being excited, terrified or stressed out - and that, in order to meditate effectively, we need to find a meditation technique which offers a level of 'stimulation' (how interesting/engaging/active/busy the technique is) which approximately matches our current level of excitation. If the technique isn't stimulating enough, we get bored and can't stay with it. If it's too stimulating, we actually disturb our minds rather than settling them.

Well, it turns out that when you get the mind settled enough - which typically happens for me after a few days on a residential retreat - it feels really, really good. Not 'cookies and ice cream' good, but a different kind of experience - a subtle, beautiful, deeply profound contentment. Like the taste of a mango, you have to have experienced it to know what I'm talking about. But the key point is that, when you're there, it's very obvious that it's a really, really good place to be, and that all of the usual pleasure-seeking activities of your busy life don't come close. And a very natural thought that comes up at such a time is 'Why would I ever want to go back to how things were before?' Because here's the thing - accessing that kind of peace really isn't compatible with going to the cinema at weekends and playing video games in the evenings. Those activities are so stimulating - being aimed at people who are living highly stimulating lives in our busy modern society - that they're utterly destructive to the peace of mind that comes from solitude.

Whether or not you've experienced the kind of deep peace that the renunciate sages are pointing to, it isn't so outlandish to believe that if we want to take something to its farthest, deepest extents, we're going to have to make some sacrifices along the way. Suppose you want to play the piano. If you play for ten minutes two or three times a week, the chances are you'll have some fun but you'll never play to a sold-out crowd at the Royal Albert Hall. If you want to be a professional concert pianist, you're most likely looking at practising for many hours every day - and you'll also have to give up any activities that would interfere with your piano playing (for example, anything which has a serious risk of injury to the hands). I remember one point when I was practising both Kung Fu and Tai Chi with the same teacher, and I was having some trouble taking my Tai Chi to the next level of subtlety due to habitual muscular tension in my wrists. My teacher nodded and said 'Yeah, that's a Kung Fu thing, unfortunately.' At that moment I knew I'd have to give up Kung Fu if I wanted my Tai Chi to go deeper - not because Kung Fu was bad and Tai Chi was good, but simply because they were pulling me in opposite directions. (I quit Kung Fu - and while I miss it sometimes, overall I don't regret my decision. Deepening my Tai Chi was very much the direction I wanted to go, and my practice has developed significantly in the years since then.)

Getting back to the spiritual life, in the same way as the Tai Chi-Kung Fu example, it isn't that worldly pleasures are intrinsically bad - but, past a certain point, if you want to go as deep as possible in terms of deep states of peace and tranquility, you can't have it both ways. Either you pursue the path of solitude in a very dedicated way, sacrificing a great deal of modern life in the process, or you accept that by remaining embedded in the world you're only going to touch into that place of peace deeply on long retreats. Which is it to be?

And I suspect that the way we each answer that question is what makes the difference between those who choose to pursue a truly renunciate lifestyle and those who don't. I have friends who are very strongly drawn to that way of life above and beyond everything else - but I'm not one of them. I'm drawn to the world. I enjoy learning complex technical things and solving problems. I want to play a hands-on role in helping people - and not just in the spiritual world, but in wider society as well. So I have a day job in which I try to solve technical problems in a way that benefits the wider society. I also have hobbies and interests - I really like science fiction (as you can probably tell from some of the references that make their way into these articles), I enjoy writing, making music, playing games with my friends (we just started a Cyberpunk RED campaign that I'm very excited about - note, excited, not peaceful and content!), going to the cinema and so on. I also have a dedicated daily spiritual practice - which brings me the kinds of benefits I've outlined above and more - and at least a couple of times a year I go on retreat, and reconnect with that deeper place of stillness. My personal sense - and I could be totally wrong - is that some degree of that peace and stability does work its way into daily life, maintained by my daily practice and deepened by my time on retreat. And that's enough for me. I find that it's worth the trade-off to give up the full depth of contentment that might be available if I had a more renunciate lifestyle, in order to remain more fully in the world, committed to making whatever small contribution I can to our modern society from within rather than leaving it behind - and enjoying some conventional pleasures along the way too.

But that's just me. I don't say this to criticise anyone else's lifestyle choices! Maybe meditation helps you but going on a retreat is a step too far - great, meditation helps you! Or maybe you're making that transition to the more fully renunciate way of life - good for you. Sometimes I wish I could join you!

May you find your own path to happiness - whatever that looks like.

Postscript: as synchronicity would have it, Zen teacher Domyo Burk has recently uploaded two podcasts on the subject of renunciation and the household life. Check them out: part 1 and part 2.

This week we're looking at case 44 in the Gateless Barrier, simply titled 'A Staff'. As usual, on the face of it, it doesn't seem to make much sense - but once we get into the symbolism involved, it'll hopefully become a bit clearer.

Giving you a staff: formlessness to form

Zen teachers often have a staff, which represents their role as a teacher. More generally, the staff represents a method, a form of practice.

When we are first drawn to the spiritual life, we begin in a state of 'formlessness'. Perhaps we have an aspiration - to be a better person, to achieve enlightenment, to find peace of mind - but unless we have a practice of some sort - something to do - it's difficult to make that aspiration a reality in our lives.

Traditions like Zen and early Buddhism offer us a whole variety of methods of practice. Perhaps we're drawn to exploring a spiritual question through koan study, or perhaps the holistic nature of the Eightfold Path appeals to us as a way of life. One way or another, in the early stages, we very much need some kind of 'form' - a practice or set of practices that we can undertake consistently over a period of time (weeks, months, years).

Here, a teacher is very helpful. Of course we can concoct our own spiritual path, either from a single tradition or by blending together techniques from a variety of sources (just like I tried to 'teach myself' to play the guitar when I was a teenager!). But it tends to be much easier and more effective to find a teacher that we're willing to work with - in an ideal world, a teacher has already travelled at least some of the path that interests you, and they can help to save you time by pointing out the common pitfalls and correcting mistakes that are easily seen from the 'outside' but more difficult to spot from the 'inside'.

Different teachers take different approaches to providing 'form' for the student. Some teachers develop systems and curriculums which encapsulate what that teacher understands the Dhamma to be. Other teachers prefer to guide students on a more individual basis, trying to find the forms which best suit that individual. I tend more toward the latter, although I had a bit of a stab at system-building here - in a nutshell, I generally recommend that people have a practice that combines concentration, insight, heart-opening and energetic cultivation, with a strong ethical foundation.

In any case, when it's working well, the teacher will be supporting the student to develop in a way that's working well for them. That's the first part of the koan here - 'If you have a staff, I will give you a staff.' At least the way I understand Dhamma teaching, it isn't my job to tell you how to live your life; rather, it's my job to help you work within the life you already have and do my best to support and accelerate your progress. As such, I'm not looking at you as a person with no staff who needs to be given my staff (which is, of course, the best of all staffs) - rather, I recognise that you already have a staff, and I'm just supplementing what you already have, to the best of my limited ability.

Taking your staff away: form to formlessness

In the fullness of time, practice begins to mature. In the early stages, you're learning 'how to' - you're getting the basic instructions for a practice and figuring out how to do it in the most basic sense.

As we continue to practise over the months and years, however, a transition takes place. At the beginning, we're working with a technique that someone else has given us. In the fullness of time, however, the practice becomes our own. We develop our own relationship to it, our own sense of how the practice works, and how best to engage with it in this moment, with this particular set of conditions.

This transition reflects a process of integration - a blurring of the boundaries between 'this technique' and 'me'. Gradually, the separation between the two disappears. My daily Silent Illumination practice is no longer a fancy Zen meditation performed with much ceremony and specialness; it's simply how I start each day, sitting quietly and watching my experience. At times I'll find myself sitting in the same way on train or coach journeys, simply observing. There's no real distinction between 'formal practice' and 'informal practice' - resting in awareness has simply become one expression of my life, which emerges when the conditions are right.

(Perhaps that sounds a bit grandiose! I don't mean to suggest that I'm incredibly advanced or have an amazing practice, or anything like that. I'm just trying to highlight the way in which my relationship to my practice has changed over the years.)

In some ways, this period of practice can even bring up a bit of sadness. The novelty has very much worn off! Indeed, there can be a sense that practice 'used to be more interesting' - particularly when things are first taking off, it's quite common to have lots of deep insights, and to start to feel a bit special as a result. 'Look at me!', you might think. 'All these other suckers don't understand anything, but I know what the Buddha was getting at, I understand all these Zen texts!'

The technical term for this stage of practice is 'the stink of Zen'. My teacher's teacher, Shinzan Roshi, would sometimes hold his nose and say 'stinky, stinky!' if people were getting a bit too impressed with themselves. It's an exciting period, but it's also an immature one, and a responsible teacher will typically do their best to bring the student's feet back down to the ground.

And that's what the second part of the koan indicates - 'If you have no staff, I will take your staff away'. Early on, a very intense fascination with and attraction to the forms of practice can be very helpful - but past a certain point it simply becomes another kind of attachment, another ego support to make ourselves feel special because of all of our wonderful insights. In the long run, the spiritual path is all about letting go - and that includes letting go of the story of what a great meditator we are.

And thus we return again to formlessness - letting go of our attachment to specific techniques, allowing our practice to integrate itself so completely that there's no distinction between 'practising' and 'not practising'. This is a long and difficult journey, and perhaps one that takes a whole lifetime to 'complete' - but it's also a rewarding one. Along the way, we learn the true value of these practices as they manifest in our own lives, not as they're portrayed in ancient texts from other cultures around the world. Gradually, we return to formlessness; this second formlessness is both fundamentally different to, and fundamentally the same as, the first formlessness at the beginning of our practice.

As T.S. Eliot put it:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

Or, in the words of the great Zen master Bruce Lee:

Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick.

After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick.

Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.

Where are you on this journey? Do you have a staff, and if so, do you have the support of a teacher who can ensure that your staff is in the best shape it can be? Or is it time to let go of your staff - and if so, do you have a teacher on hand to point out when you're reflexively grasping at the familiar, comfortable staff that's brought you so far, and to prise it gently out of your grasp?

This article is the final one in an eight-part series on the Eightfold Path, a core teaching from early Buddhism. I introduced the Eightfold Path in the first article in the series, so go back and check that out if you haven't heard of it before. (You can find links to all the articles in this series on the index page in the 'Buddhist theory' section.)

This week we're taking a look at the eighth factor of the path, right concentration. In the quotation above, the Buddha explains right concentration as the practice of the four jhanas - altered states of consciousness which we can train ourselves to enter through diligent practice. I've written about jhana several times before (giving detailed instructions here, setting the jhanas in the context of the wider path here, and looking at the so-called 'higher' or 'formless' jhanas here), so rather than repeat that material here, I'll instead try to give a sense of my current understanding of what the jhanas actually are, what function they serve in the context of the Eightfold Path, and then take a look at how some other traditions have arrived at different solutions to the same problems.

What actually are the jhanas anyway?

The jhanas are altered states of consciousness that can be entered through meditation. Each has a number of associated 'factors', but at a high level, the first jhana is a state of strong bodily bliss, the second jhana is a state of strong emotional joy or happiness, the third jhana is a state of quiet contentment, and the fourth jhana is a state of deep peace and equanimity. (I go into much more detail about the jhana factors here.)

The jhanas are sometimes described as 'concentration states', and they're strongly associated with samadhi practice, often called 'concentration meditation'. The basic idea with samadhi practice is to rest your attention on an object, and when you notice that your mind has wandered, let go of the distraction, relax, and come back to the object. Rinse and repeat until the mind wanders less and less - there's often a kind of tipping point when you notice that you aren't really getting distracted any more (a state which my teacher Leigh Brasington would call 'access concentration'). Following the instructions from this article, you can then enter the first jhana - at least, the way Leigh and I teach it.

It turns out that this is not the only interpretation of jhana. Some teachers require a much, much deeper level of concentration than what's described above before they're willing to call the resulting state 'jhana' - see the work of teachers like Pa Auk Sayadaw, Tina Rasmussen and Beth Upton for examples. And other teachers require less concentration, such as Bhante Vimalaramsi, because they want to use their version of the jhanas to do things that are difficult to do when the mind is more deeply concentrated. And to cap it all, every teacher worth their salt will tell you that their version of the jhanas is what the Buddha really taught, accept no imitations! What's a meditator to do?

My impression now, after ten years of jhana practice in Leigh's style and having dabbled a bit with a few other approaches (both a bit lighter and a bit deeper - I haven't gone really deep, so if you'll only accept the deepest of the deep, you can stop reading now!), is that it isn't really accurate to call the jhanas 'concentration states'. I say that because I can enter an altered state of consciousness which is recognisably one of the jhanas at will, without having first done the preparatory practice to stabilise my mind and build up concentration. The resulting state is weak, unclear and easily lost, but is still clearly whichever jhana I was aiming for - it's the same state, just with substantially less concentration. If I build up more concentration first, I go into a version of the jhana which looks exactly like what Leigh taught me. If I build up even more concentration first, the phenomenology starts to resemble some of the deeper jhanas taught by other teachers. And I presume that if I built up incredibly strong concentration, I would end up in the version of the jhanas taught by Pa Auk and friends.

So if the jhanas aren't 'concentration states', why do they come under the heading of 'right concentration', and why are they taught on 'concentration retreats'?

Well, for one, it's very helpful to have a concentrated mind to learn the jhanas in the first place. When you're first learning the practice, you're asking your mind to go somewhere unfamiliar, and that's a difficult thing to do. It's very helpful to have stabilised the mind beforehand so that it's less prone to wandering - otherwise you'll probably fall out of the state before you've had a chance to get used to it. Once you've become more familiar with the jhana, you'll probably find that you can intuitively 'incline' your mind toward it, and enter the jhana with less concentration than it took when you were first learning.

Secondly, and more relevantly for the Eightfold Path, the jhanas are also a fabulous way to deepen your concentration. Fundamentally, the jhanas are states of enhanced wellbeing - they're nice states that the mind likes to inhabit. Bliss, joy, contentment, peace - these are good places to be, so once the mind figures out how to find them, it gets easier to stay there for long periods. While you're in the jhana, you're focused on the qualities of the jhana itself, and so the mind will tend to be even less prone to distraction than it was previously, and thus become more deeply concentrated. The stillness and clarity of the mind coming out of the fourth jhana is typically much stronger than the stillness and clarity of a mind which has spent the same length of time in access concentration.

So concentration helps us to find the jhanas in the first place, and then in turn the jhanas help us to deepen our concentration further. That sounds like a solid definition of 'right concentration' to me.

Other interpretations of right concentration

As I mentioned above, some teachers have extremely high standards for jhana - high enough that most people don't have the time or even the capacity to develop concentration deep enough to meet their requirements. Perhaps as a result, you'll now find many teachers who will say that jhana isn't necessary at all, or even that it's a bad idea - just another cause for attachment. (To that I would say - can you get attached to the jhanas and start using them just to get high? Sure. Don't do that. There are lots of ways to misuse spiritual practice, but that doesn't mean you should reject the whole thing. That's like saying that because you might burn yourself on a flame, everyone should eat all their food raw all the time to avoid the terrible risk of getting burned. Raw food is fine if that's what you're into, but you could alternatively learn not to burn yourself and then enjoy cooked food. To each their own.)

At the extreme end of the spectrum, you'll find teachers offering what's usually called 'dry insight'. This approach doesn't have any 'concentration practice' per se - students will simply go directly into an ***insight practice. (See, for example, Mahasi noting.) But now these teachers have a problem, because 'right concentration' is one of the aspects of the Eightfold Path, and they've deleted the concentration practice. 

Their solution is to emphasise 'momentary concentration', or 'khanika samadhi'. This is the type of concentration needed to stay focused on a complex, moving task - such as noting the arising and/or passing away of every sensation in your sensory experience. By comparison, the type of concentration I described above - putting your attention on one object and staying with it for a prolonged period - can be called 'one-pointed samadhi'. The noting practice is not one-pointed - since you're moving your attention from one sensation to another in order to note it - but you do nevertheless stay engaged in the (moving) practice for an extended period of time, so there's a kind of 'concentration' there.

The 'momentary concentration' approach has a couple of advantages. First, it's simpler - you only have one type of practice to do (your insight practice), rather than two. Second, some people have a really hard time focusing the mind, and so find one-pointed samadhi practice to be pretty unbearable. Being given permission to 'skip' the concentration can actually be really helpful in a circumstance like that, because it allows the practitioner to focus on their strengths rather than having to suffer through their weaknesses.

Another, more middle-ground, approach to redefining 'right concentration' is to make some effort to develop one-pointed concentration, but to omit any mention of jhana. (See, for example, the concentration practice in the Goenka tradition, which builds one-pointed concentration on the breath without referencing jhana at all.) Again, this has some advantages. Most practitioners will develop more concentration this way than through the 'dry insight' route, which will in turn make their insight practice deeper and more impactful. And by omitting any mention of jhanas, there's no need to learn altered states of consciousness which - depending on whose definition you're using - may be difficult or even unattainable.

Needless to say, I'm a fan of the jhanas! They really helped me, and I've seen them help plenty of other people too. But I've also seen people do well in other styles of practice too, so - despite the quotation at the top of the article - I don't want to give the impression that I think you'll go straight to Buddhist hell if you don't learn the jhanas right away. (Even so, I'd encourage you to give them a try! Come on a retreat with Leigh or me and see what happens. I'm currently hoping to arrange some retreats in Europe over the next few years, and I'd like some people to come to them - maybe you could help me out here?)

What does Zen make of all this?

Amusingly enough, although the words 'Zen' and 'jhana' actually come from the same root (Pali 'jhana' -> Sanskrit 'dhyana' -> Chinese 'chan'na', shortened to 'chan' -> Japanese 'zen'), the Zen tradition tends not to teach the jhanas, at least not openly.

It's actually very common for meditators of all traditions to stumble into the jhanas - I recently met a guy who said he was interested in them but had no idea how to get there, and when I asked him about his practice it was clear that he'd been in at least the first jhana many times without recognising it. In the case of Zen, though, the teacher will typically show little interest in reports of altered states of consciousness, saying something like 'Oh yes, that happens from time to time, just let it come and go like everything else.' Within the Soto tradition there's a much greater emphasis on 'ordinariness' and integration into daily life, while Rinzai Zennies are usually more interested in insight, kensho and satori than altered states which are not themselves intrinsically insight-producing. (Another risk of jhana is that people might mistake them for insights, because 'look, something's happening!' - again, in my mind, that's an argument in favour of teaching the jhanas openly, so that practitioners know what's happening, rather than concealing or demonising them, but whatever.)

As far as Zen is concerned, though, it's also worth noting that there's perhaps a little less need for a jhana practice in that context than in the early Buddhist context. Many of the insight practices in early Buddhism (and the Theravada tradition that developed out of it) place great emphasis on noticing impermanence and unreliability - and it can be unsettling or even destabilising to notice these things directly. Spending time cultivating the jhanas sharpens the mind, allowing you to notice impermanence more easily, but also stabilises it, allowing you to face aspects of your experience which would be unnerving or upsetting under normal circumstances, but which are easier to bear with the equanimity cultivated through samadhi. So you end up with two practices: samadhi to stabilise the mind, then insight which unsettles it, then back to samadhi to restore the stability, then back to insight to keep digging deeper, and so on.

By comparison, Zen's two major practices are Silent Illumination and working with a koan.

Silent Illumination can actually be defined as a balance of stillness (the silence, aka samadhi) and clarity (the illumination, aka insight). We stabilise our attention on the totality of the present moment and allow it to reveal itself to us more and more deeply - we aren't particularly focusing on impermanence or unreliability, or deconstructing anything, we're not actually doing anything apart from simply remaining aware. Individual moments of insight may have a destabilising effect, but the practice itself doesn't have an intrinsically abrading effect on the mind's calmness - quite the opposite.

Working with a koan can be a bumpier process, especially at first, when asking the question is bringing up all kinds of thoughts and ideas. But the key is that we don't do anything with whatever comes up - we simply notice it, let it go, and then ask the question again. Over time this has a kind of 'winnowing' effect, ultimately allowing the mind to become focused on the questioning itself rather than whatever 'answers' might be coming up. This focus on 'wanting to know' (sometimes called Great Doubt in the Zen tradition) should be balanced with a kind of radical openness, a willingness to receive an answer in any form, from any direction, at any moment. Thus, again, we have a balance of stillness (the focus on the questioning) and clarity (the receptivity to whatever may come up) - incorporating both 'concentration' and 'insight' into one practice.

So what exactly is 'right concentration'?

Well, if you're a purist, and you want to go with what the Buddha is reported to have said in the Pali Canon, then click on the link at the top of this article and check out Samyutta Nikaya 45.8 - and you'll find right concentration defined in terms of the four jhanas. You can use the resources on this website, or buy Leigh Brasington's excellent book Right Concentration, or (best of all) come on a retreat with Leigh or me and give it a go. (In fact, you can do any of those things even if you aren't a purist!)

If you're more inclined to the Zen way of things, then the key is to ensure that your practice includes both aspects - the silence and the illumination, the questioning and the receptivity.

More generally, any amount of concentration, of any sort, is likely to strengthen your insight practice - so even if you aren't interested in jhana, it's worth taking a look at how concentration might manifest itself in your practice. It's in the Eightfold Path for a reason!


The end of the Eightfold Path?

So, this brings us to the end of this article, and this series. Like I said at the start, though, the Eightfold Path isn't really sequential - you don't start with right view or end with right concentration. All eight aspects are to be practised as part of one holistic path. Different aspects will come to the fore at different times - but they're all helpful in their own ways. It can be interesting to reflect on this from time to time - are there aspects of the path where you're stronger, aspects which don't get so much attention? What might happen if you spent some time focusing on a neglected aspect of the path? And what does each aspect mean to you - not just in terms of the 'textbook' definition, but as an actual, living practice? 

How might the Eightfold Path manifest itself in your life?

​This week we're looking at case 43 in the Gateless Barrier. Regular readers of the blog might notice a striking similarity with the key moment in case 40, and you'd be right to do so - it's very similar. Rather than repeat the points I made in my discussion of that koan, though, today we'll go in a different direction (in other words, don't feel that you have to go and read that article first!).

Koans are annoying!

Zen is famous for its use of koans - short vignettes often describing an encounter between a teacher and a student in which some pivotal question is posed, or insight is arrived at in some other way.

At first glance, koans often appear totally nonsensical, and some people will tell you that that's exactly what they are - pure nonsense, designed to confuse and frustrate your thinking mind, with no intrinsic meaning beyond that. In general, I disagree with that view - as I've attempted to show over the course of this series of articles (which is almost complete now - only five more koans to go after this one!), koans are often filled with cultural and literary references that would have been well understood by practitioners of the era but which are now totally mysterious to modern readers until they're explained to us. (Imagine a Zen teaching story made up entirely of Star Wars references, and how that would look to a 12th century Chinese Zen practitioner!)

Nevertheless, although I wouldn't say that koans are total nonsense, it absolutely is true that koans are intended to take us beyond the purview of the analytical mind. You can see this even in the basic instructions for koan practice - students are advised not to think about the koan and try to 'figure out' the answer in a logical manner. Instead, we 'throw' the koan into our minds, like a stone into a lake, and then simply observe to see what splashes up in the air in response. If we do this for long enough, we'll notice something interesting. (Extending the lake analogy, we might say that Silent Illumination practice is a different means to the same end - in Silent Illumination, we simply allow the water to become still and clear all by itself, deliberately avoiding doing anything that might stir it up, until we can finally see all the way to the bottom of the lake.)

Of course, despite the standard instructions, many people (myself included) will find themselves thinking about the koan and trying to solve it like a riddle or a logic puzzle. This is a big problem for me - I've been a problem-solver my whole life (it got me good marks at school and a decent salary in adulthood), and I'll often find myself trying to 'figure out' something that really doesn't need to be figured out at all, just because it's a familiar activity that results in a periodic burst of pleasure when whatever puzzle I'm chewing over suddenly resolves itself. (As an aside, it's interesting to note that the source of that pleasure is actually relief from the mild stress of wrestling with an unsolved problem. In other words, I'm chasing those brief hits of pleasure, but in doing so I'm actually subjecting myself to much longer stretches of discomfort. Many of our habits are like this!) So a koan like this one - in which we're offered a binary choice, and explicitly told that neither option is acceptable - is a good one for people like myself who have this tendency to overthinking; there's simply no way out using logic, so in order to progress we have to find another approach entirely.

The present koan gives us an analogy for this kind of over-reliance on the thinking mind - Shoushan compares it to 'clinging' to the bamboo stick. What happens if we try to cling to a bamboo stick in real life, holding it as tightly as we can? Sooner or later, our muscles get tired, and spontaneously relax. Working with a koan can have an equivalent effect on our thinking minds - sooner or later, they simply run out of steam, and relax all by themselves. (That's why koans are such an effective approach, particularly for people who aren't able to 'just let go' into Silent Illumination - which I wasn't when I first learnt it!)

An equal and opposite mistake

We have to be careful, though. Letting go of the thinking mind is not the same as giving up on solving the koan - but that's a tactic that people sometimes try. 'It's just semantics!', 'It's just a game', 'I don't care what the answer is any more', 'Why can't you just tell me?' (I would if I could, but it wouldn't help!)

Koan practice only works if we're able to maintain what Zen master Hakuin called Great Doubt, and what my Zen teacher Daizan prefers to call 'wanting to know' - a sense of continuing to press forward toward some kind of resolution, even when the koan has become totally meaningless and we have no idea which way is up any more.

If, instead, we give up, then it's easy to fall into the seductive trap of a stagnant kind of quietism, sometimes called 'the ghost cave on the dark side of the mountain' (eep!). We say 'Well, I can't figure it out, so there's no point. Just let it all go. Just sit quietly and don't worry about anything.' That sounds a bit like the instructions for Silent Illumination, but the attitude behind it tends to point instead to what's sometimes called 'subtle dullness' - a condition in which the mind basically shuts down and disengages from what's going on, and the practitioner just sits there with nothing much going on. It feels kinda restful, and it definitely provides an escape from the struggle of wrestling with the koan, so that must be good, right? Wrong. (Sorry.)

If over-thinking was the mistake of 'clinging', the ghost cave is the equal and opposite mistake of 'ignoring'. Training ourselves to deal with problems by turning away from them is emphatically not what Zen practice is about - it's actually a kind of 'spiritual bypassing', a way of (mis-)using practice to avoid dealing with the things we don't want to have to face. The trouble is that life is full of things that we don't want to have to deal with, but we have to deal with them nonetheless, and turning away is just putting off (and often compounding) the problem.

A more extreme version of this mistake is to give up on practice entirely, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. A version of this actually came up for me recently. For pretty much my whole life, I've admired people who are very focused on doing one thing well, whereas I've always been prone to doing too many things at once, spreading myself too thinly. On a good day, I can recognise that I love the richness of having multiple interests, but on a bad day I'm convinced that all of my problems stem from a lack of commitment. A pretty big theme over the last ten or fifteen years of my life has been gradually streamlining my commitments and trying to bring more quality time to fewer things. Then, just recently, during a particularly disastrous meditation retreat (that's a story for another time, and probably not one that I'll publish on this blog!), I realised that I've now achieved what I set out to do - I really have pretty much pared things down to the minimum set of activities needed to pursue the most important things in my life. And yet I was still surrounded by problems and sources of unsatisfactoriness, and having a generally miserable time. My grand strategy to 'sort my life out' had, basically, failed - not because it was a bad strategy, but because life isn't like that. No matter what you do, there will be sources of dissatisfaction in all directions. In short, this was a very visceral experience of the Buddha's First Noble Truth - in life, we suffer.

The next thought that occurred to me was 'So what's the point of it all? Why not just give it all up and eat cookies all day? At least I enjoy that!' In other words, I'd overshot the mark - I'd gone from clinging to an unachievable ideal about how wonderful life would be if only I could sort out x, y and z to the opposite extreme, trying to retreat into a cocoon of pleasure where I could ignore the rest of the world.

Luckily, the habit of practice is pretty ingrained at this point, so I didn't give up entirely (otherwise I'd never finish this set of articles!). And, actually, once I got past the frustration that all my efforts had not resulted in a perfect life, the arguments for keeping up with all the various facets of my work and practice became obvious. Evidently on some level I'd been holding onto the hope that all those activities would sooner or later 'fix everything' - but I also do them because I enjoy them, and I wouldn't actually want to give them all up. On the other hand, it's also now manifestly clear that, while giving up eating cookies will help my waistline, it isn't going to eliminate my existential suffering, and so it probably isn't the end of the world if I continue to eat them from time to time.

I usually don't talk about what's going on in my practice right now because it's a risky thing to do - I'm never quite sure whether there's another massive revelation just around the corner, or whether I'm even getting my point across when I'm attempting to articulate something that's very much a work in progress as opposed to something that I can look back on with plenty of perspective. But maybe there's some value in sharing something a little 'rawer' than usual - well, you can be the judge of that!

So what's the take-home message here?

The koan presents us with an impossible choice: we can't cling to our analytical minds, but we can't ignore them either. So what the heck are we supposed to do?

We can see similar 'impossible choices' in many of the great paradoxes of spirituality - the apparent contradiction between the relative and the absolute, or Shunryu Suzuki's beautiful statement regarding the simultaneous need for self-cultivation and self-acceptance: 'Each of you is perfect the way you are... and you can use a little improvement.'

The simple answer to these kinds of problems is to recognise that context matters. Sometimes, we absolutely need self-acceptance. (I'm blind in one eye - no amount of yelling at myself to 'do better' is going to give me depth perception.) Sometimes, we absolutely need self-cultivation. (I'm taking on a new project at work and I don't know anything about it yet. My colleagues will not be impressed with my Zen 'don't know mind' - I'd better do some reading!)

The drawback with that 'simple' answer is that we've just created another problem. OK, in what situations do we need self-cultivation, and in what situations do we need self-acceptance? How can we tell?

The more we dig into questions like this, the harder it gets to find a nice answer that's easily articulated. Every system, every strategy seems to have its blind spots. Every situation is different, and it's impossible to foresee all of the consequences of whatever actions we take. The worst experience of our lives may turn out to be a turning point that ultimately transforms us for the better - but there's no guarantee that this will be true, and deliberately trying to have awful things happen to us isn't a good plan either!

Fundamentally, life is mysterious. As Kierkegaard said, 'Life can only be understood by looking backward; but it must be lived looking forward.' Or as Daizan puts it, 'None of us actually know anything about anything... and yet we still live and love.' Ultimately, all we can do in any given situation is the best we can at that moment, on the basis of our experiences and skills up to that point, and the intentions that we've cultivated within ourselves to act in the world in a way that seems right to us - whatever that means in practice. And even then we won't know if we're getting it right!

Another way to put this is using an image that occurred to me one night on the difficult meditation retreat that I mentioned earlier. In the moment, I was pretty convinced that the situation was totally unworkable - I couldn't see a way to get through it, given all of the challenges that were facing me at that point. (I couldn't even get to sleep, to make the time pass quicker!) But then I realised that I was getting through it, moment by moment. OK, time felt like it was passing like treacle, but even so each moment of experience was one moment closer to the end of the ordeal. It wasn't fun, it wasn't glamorous, I wasn't feeling how I thought a big fancy experienced meditator like myself should be feeling - but, nevertheless, I was getting through it.

The image that came to mind was the difference between a maze and a labyrinth. Sometimes these terms are used interchangeably (as I was reminded when I was trying to find an image of a labyrinth and all I got was mazes!), but actually there's a difference.

A maze has wrong turnings and dead ends. You can get lost in a maze. You can wander a long time without getting any closer to your destination. The question posed in the koan at the top of this article evokes a maze - you can turn left or right, but they're both wrong!

A labyrinth, on the other hand, is actually just one long twisty path. It has one destination (usually the centre), and although the path itself twists and turns, there are no 'wrong choices' - you can't get lost in a labyrinth, and even when it looks like you're walking in exactly the wrong direction, your footsteps are actually carrying you closer to the destination with complete certainty.

This article is the seventh in an eight-part series on the Eightfold Path, a core teaching from early Buddhism. I introduced the Eightfold Path in the first article in the series, so go back and check that out if you haven't heard of it before. (You can find links to all the articles in this series on the index page in the 'Buddhist theory' section.)

This week we're taking a look at the seventh factor of the path, right mindfulness. In the quotation above, the Buddha unpacks right mindfulness into what are often called the 'four foundations of mindfulness' - the body, feelings, the mind, and phenomena. These four categories are explained in much greater detail in the Satipatthana Sutta, and I've already done a series of articles on that discourse, so for today's article we'll instead take a look at why we might want to practise mindfulness at all, particularly through such an elaborate scheme as the four foundations.

The 'four foundations' of mindfulness, or four ways of attending with mindfulness

(Skippable linguistic aside: in the early translations of the Pali canon, the word 'Satipatthana' was understood as a compound of 'sati' (mindfulness, awareness) and 'patthana' (foundation or establishment) - perhaps not unreasonably. But scholars such as Bhikkhu Analayo have argued that it should instead be 'sati' plus 'upatthana', which means something like 'placing near' - and as such 'satipatthana' should be understood as 'attending (to something) with mindfulness'. The four categories of 'right mindfulness' are thus simply four types of experiences that can be attended to with mindfulness, as opposed to four 'foundations' of mindfulness. I prefer the 'attending with mindfulness' interpretation but you'll come across 'four foundations of mindfulness' very frequently, so I thought I'd mention what's going on there!)

The core of mindfulness is to cultivate one's present-moment awareness - that is, to be here now, rather than lost in worries, memories or irrelevant thoughts. That's not to say that we should never think of the future or the past - we should, when it's useful to do so. But very often we find ourselves carried away by trains of thought without any conscious intention on our part to do so - going through our lives absent-mindedly, not really noticing what's going on. As we do so, we easily fall prey to habitual patterns of mental reactivity, allowing ourselves to be led around by the nose rather than having sufficient presence of mind to choose how we would prefer to respond to the situation at hand.

So how do we achieve this state of mindfulness? Through training - in particular, through mindfulness meditation. In meditation, we typically take some object of focus - the breath, the sensations of the body, or some other aspect of our experience - and pay close, continuous attention to it. When we notice that the mind has wandered, we disengage from whatever has caught our attention, and return to the object of mindfulness. Repeat. Simple, right? But, of course, as anyone who has tried this will know, it's easier said than done. Nevertheless, over time, the practice bears fruit. Our minds become trained, better at focusing for longer periods of time, and more sensitive to their own condition (so that, for example, we know when we're getting too tired to concentrate on something and need to take a break).

Now, even a single meditation technique, such as paying attention to the sensations of the breathing, will help us to cultivate mindfulness, and as we practise more and more, we'll start to find the benefits showing up in the course of our daily lives as well. Some of the world's great spiritual traditions take the approach of going deep with a single technique - Soto Zen, for example, relies exclusively on Silent Illumination (aka shikantaza, 'just sitting').

The historical Buddha, however, seems to have valued a wide range of techniques and approaches. He emphasised not just one but four fields of mindfulness, emphasising different aspects of our experience and giving us multiple different ways to explore each of these. In the Satipatthana Sutta, we have:

• The body, which we can explore through its postures and activities; the breathing; the different parts of the body; the composition of the body in terms of its aspects of solidity, liquidity, movement and temperature; and even contemplating what happens to the body after death
• The 'feeling tone' of experience - that is, the way in which every experience we have strikes us as pleasant, unpleasant or somewhere in between
• The mind, which can be coloured by all kinds of different mind states, both positive and negative
• Wider aspects of the Buddha's teachings, such as the cause and effect relationships of positive and negative mental states, and the many aspects of our experience which come together to create our sense of selfhood

But if we're just trying to learn to be more in the present moment, why do we need all this stuff? Some of those categories sound pretty weird and complicated - isn't the breath enough?

Three kinds of wisdom

Mindfulness is a powerful tool in its own right, but mindfulness is also the primary vehicle through which we can develop wisdom - a deeper, clearer understanding of what's actually going on in our experience. (There's more about this in the first article in the series, on right view.)

There's an especially tedious discourse in the Pali Canon, Digha Nikaya 33 in the Long Discourses, which is basically one gigantic list of lists. It starts with all the lists of one thing (of which there aren't very many), then all the lists of two things (of which there are lots and lots), then three things, and so on, all the way up to the lists of ten things. It's sort of like an index to the Pali Canon - there's no explanation, just lots of lists.

One of the lists of three things is 'three kinds of wisdom' - given in the Pali version as 'wisdom produced by thought, learning and meditation', although in the Chinese version the order is 'learning, thought and meditation', which makes more sense to me.

We can understand 'wisdom produced by learning' as the kind of wisdom we hear from other people. Someone tells us something interesting, and we store it away as an interesting little factoid. This sort of wisdom is akin to a borrowed possession - someone else came up with it, and now we've put it into our brains for safe-keeping.

At this point, however, the wisdom isn't really ours. It's second-hand - and that becomes very quickly apparent if we repeat it to someone else who doesn't agree. A fairly common occurrence for me is that I'll hear something interesting on a podcast and mention it to my partner - only to discover that she isn't as easily impressed as I am. 'But that's ridiculous,' she'll say, 'what about this, and this, and this, and this?' And I'll flounder, not having a counter to any of her points, because none of them have occurred to me - I was just uncritically repeating what I heard from someone else.

If we want to go beyond second-hand wisdom, we can spend some time thinking about it for ourselves, and arrive at 'wisdom produced by thought'. This is a largely intellectual process of thinking through various angles and ramifications, experimenting with possible criticisms, trying to find holes in what we've been told, and so on. Along the way we may discover that we have genuine objections to it - or we might find that, actually, it does appear to hold water, and now we can defend the idea against criticisms if we're challenged. The wisdom is no longer second-hand - it's become our own intellectual property, if you like.

However, it's quite common for intellectual wisdom to remain at the level of thought only, just 'an idea' that doesn't really impact the way we see the world from day to day. In the meditation world this is a real trap for clever people, since they're more than willing to do the hard work to think through something to reach the satisfying intellectual payoff, but then tend to think that that's it - they're done. They understand the thing now - what's the big deal?

It turns out that there's a third type of wisdom - 'wisdom produced by meditation'. This goes beyond just 'thinking about' the topic, and invites us to explore the reality of what's being discussed in our own subjective experience. It's the difference between seeing a picture of someone eating a melon and actually eating one ourselves - no matter how much information we get about a particular experience, it's no substitute for having that experience ourselves. When we do that, the experience becomes viscerally real for us in a way that can never be matched, or even approximated, by mere thought.

So when Buddhists talk about weird ideas like impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, emptiness, suchness, non-duality and so on, these are meant to be experienced - tasted - not just understood intellectually as a kind of complex eastern philosophy. The trouble is that it's difficult to have those experiences! Unconsciously, we cling to our current way of seeing things, which prevents us from opening up to different perspectives. So, in order to have those experiences, we'll usually need to pay very close attention to some aspect of our experience for quite a while before things open up for us - and that's where mindfulness comes in.

So we have these four categories of mindfulness because the Buddha is inviting us to look at many aspects of our experience, not just the breath. Buddhist teachings are wide-ranging, and it's often very helpful to explore a concept like 'impermanence' through multiple different lenses - noticing, for example, the impermanence of the breath, of feelings, of mind states and so on. While our exploration is only partial, our understanding may likewise remain partial - in the case of impermanence, for example, we might think 'Well, everything I've looked at so far has been impermanent, but I still know there's something permanent out there, I can feel it.' Well, go look for it! Look absolutely everywhere - leave no stone unturned. That's the kind of thoroughgoing investigation which will allow us to make that difficult transition from intellectual knowledge to experiential wisdom - and truly change our lives.

May you be mindful!

This week, we're taking a look at case 42 in the Gateless Barrier, 'A Woman Comes Out of Absorption'. It's a pretty mysterious one - despite its considerable length, at least compared to most of the other koans in the collection, it doesn't give us a lot to go on. Let's make a start by decoding the cast of characters, then see what we can make of it.

Dramatis personae: the characters of the koan

First up, we have Manjushri (sometimes written Manjusri or Manjuśri). Manjushri is one of the Bodhisattvas of Wisdom in the Mahayana tradition, and is typically depicted holding a sword which is used to cut the bonds of ignorance. (Manjushri can be contrasted with Amitabha, the Buddha of Infinite Light, who represents a gentler aspect of wisdom.) According to the legends, Manjushri is so wise that he's served as the teacher of seven previous Buddhas - that's a big deal!

The story begins with Manjushri visiting 'an assembly of Buddhas'. Usually, when we talk about Buddha, we mean the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, who lived and died 2,500 years ago in what's now modern-day India. However, Buddhist mythology features many other Buddhas - early Buddhism recognised six historical Buddhas before Gautama, and in the more elaborate Mahayana mythologies it's often said that each of the infinitely many other worlds has its own Buddha too. In any case, the general image here is of a kind of 'conference of Buddhas', where the Buddhas of many worlds have come to hang out and talk about whatever it is that Buddhas discuss at such gatherings. (Sadly, the koan doesn't tell us!)

Our next character is a nameless woman who remains after the gathering has broken up, quietly meditating near Gautama himself. She's pretty central to the koan, so let's come back to her later.

Finally, we have another Bodhisattva with the curious name of Ensnared Light. (As usual, I'm following Thomas Cleary's translation - Guo Gu has a substantially different translation which leaves this Bodhisattva's name untranslated in Sanskrit, and Katsuki Sekida gives the name in Japanese.) The koan itself doesn't say so directly, but Wumen's commentary on this koan indicates that Ensnared Light is a rather lowly Bodhisattva, only having attained to the first of ten stages of Bodhisattvahood.

So the mystery of this koan is how a comparatively lowly figure like Ensnared Light is able to persuade the nameless woman to come out of her profoundly deep samadhi, while Manjushri, with all his incredible spiritual powers, can't. What's going on?

Trying to make sense of this koan

I'll admit, this koan has always been a bit of a head-scratcher for me. In preparation for writing this article, I consulted all three of the commentaries I have on hand, Googled a couple more, and even asked the Bing AI what it thought. The commentaries all had wildly different interpretations, none of which were terribly convincing to me, and poor old Bing - which has actually done a really good job when I've asked it about some of the other koans - basically said 'Uhh... yeah, this koan has a lot of different interpretations. I dunno.'

Of course, one of the beautiful things about koans is that they don't have just a single interpretation. Their very mystery provokes our own inquiry to go deeper, resisting a simple surface understanding. It's very common for a koan to reveal new layers of depth when we return to it after some time away - which I used to believe was a property of the koan, but these days I tend to think that it says more about how own own practice has deepened in the meantime.

Still, as tempting as it is to write a clever article about the multiple meanings of koans, in my heart I know I'd be dodging the question by doing so. So I'll take a stab at giving my own interpretation, as the koan lands with me right now. (It'll probably mean something else entirely a year from now!) In order to lay the groundwork, though, let's take a sidestep into one of my favourite Zen texts, master Keizan's Zazen Yojinki ('Notes on what to be aware of in meditation').

Keizan's portrait of the Zen life

The full text of Zazen Yojinki can be found here, and at some point in the future I'm planning to do a whole series of articles on the text. For today, though, we'll jump right to the end, to my favourite passage in all of Zen literature.

Arising from stillness, carry out activities without hesitation. This moment is the koan. When practice and realization are without complexity then the koan is this present moment. That which is before any trace arises, the scenery on the other side of time's destruction, the activity of all Buddhas and Awakened Ancestors, is just this one thing.

You should just rest and cease. Be cooled, pass numberless years as this moment. Be cold ashes, a withered tree, an incense burner in an abandoned temple, a piece of unstained silk.

This is my earnest wish.

Zazen Yojinki is talking about the Silent Illumination style of practice, which involves 'just sitting' and allowing reality to reveal itself, as opposed to the more 'forceful' Zen practice method of using a koan in meditation. The core of Silent Illumination is to settle deeply enough into stillness (the 'silence' part of the equation) that the habitual activities of the mind gradually run out of steam and quieten down of their own accord, allowing a deeper clarity (the 'illumination' part) to emerge. And so we have the imagery in the second paragraph above, which strongly depicts the equanimity of the Silent Illumination practitioner - resting, ceasing all activities, becoming 'cooled', willing to sit for 'numberless years' in the timeless present moment of meditation. Going further, Keizan gives us the images of cold ashes (the fire long extinguished), a withered tree (still, quiet, having long left behind the excitement of seasonal blossoms), an incense burner in an abandoned temple (once part of daily ceremonies, now simply at rest), a piece of unstained silk (pure, simple, no colour at all). All the excitement of the world can come and go outside, while we simply remain at rest, letting it all flow by without getting involved.

And yet, though this quietude is the path of practice of Silent Illumination, it isn't the end of the story - as the preceding paragraph makes clear. We sit in silence and stillness not to give up our lives altogether, but to free ourselves from the mental habits which obstruct our clear seeing of what's going on. The more fully aware we are of what's actually going on in any given moment, the more fully and appropriately we can respond to it, if the time is right to do so. And so we have this very dynamic imagery - we arise from our stillness, and carry out our activities without hesitation - no trace of clinging to stillness or silence, no regret to be leaving our peaceful time of meditation, simply and completely absorbed in the activity in front of us. In its own way, the activities of our lives - work, relationships, leisure - become another kind of meditation, another mode of practice inviting us to be fully present for what's going on. Rather than keeping one eye on the clock, waiting for the current tedious task to be over so that we can return to our nice peaceful meditation, we step fully into the here and now, the endless present on the other side of 'time's destruction'. This moment itself becomes a 'koan', the focus of our practice right now.

Coming back to the koan

So how does all this relate to the other koan, the one from the top of this article? Here's one way to look at it.

At the start of the story, the woman is deep in a state of absorption - thoroughly rooted in her meditation. I get the feeling that she probably meditated through the entire assembly of Buddhas! She's profoundly committed to her practice, and so that's what she's doing, absolutely 100%. Who wouldn't want to get up off the cushion and check out what's going on in an assembly of Buddhas?! But she's unmoved, just sitting, deeply absorbed in her own practice.

Then along comes Manjushri. Despite being the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, he seems a little envious in this story! He wants to know her big secret - but Buddha won't tell him. Instead, Manjushri has to get the woman to come out of her practice so he can ask her himself. And so he puts on his miraculous display of spiritual powers, which we might interpret as the coming and going of all kinds of wonderful spiritual experiences, altered states of consciousness and so forth - the kinds of things that most of us would get pretty excited about! Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking those experiences - after all, I teach the jhanas and the Brahmaviharas, and those practices lead to some pretty wonderful states - but Silent Illumination is a very 'pure' kind of practice that isn't terribly interested in any of that stuff. From the standpoint of a Silent Illumination practitioner, those states may come and go, and that's fine, but they aren't really the point of the practice - so there's no need to try to hang on to them, and no need to get too excited when they come along. Thus, Manjushri's display of power doesn't sway the woman, who simply continues to meditate.

Indeed, Buddha makes clear that Manjushri has the wrong approach ('even a hundred thousand Manjushris couldn't bring this woman out of absorption' - ooh, burn!). Instead, Buddha enlists the help of Ensnared Light, who is a comparative newbie, still finding his footing on the spiritual path. (Even his name implies that he's still entangled with the world and needs a bit of help from someone wiser.) Ensnared Light approaches the woman and snaps his fingers, symbolically asking for help - and immediately, the woman responds. A suffering being is asking for help, and the movement of her compassion is immediate - she arises from the stillness of her meditation to help Ensnared Light without hesitation, fully and completely engaged in the needs of the moment.

At this point, we might wonder if it isn't a little risky to respond immediately to whatever comes along, if we're also supposed to be overcoming our mental habits. Isn't meditation practice all about giving us some space and time to choose how we want to respond, rather than simply going along with whatever habitual reaction is triggered? This is a great question - and one we'll explore at length over the next four koans in the Gateless Barrier, as we explore Hakuin's Four Ways of Knowing.

For today, though, this article is long enough already! So, in the meantime, please keep up your practice - maybe your questions will answer themselves through your practice before I even get around to writing the articles. That would be pretty wonderful, wouldn't it?

This article is the sixth in an eight-part series on the Eightfold Path, a core teaching from early Buddhism. I introduced the Eightfold Path in the first article in the series, so go back and check that out if you haven't heard of it before. (You can find links to all the articles in this series on the index page in the 'Buddhist theory' section.)

This week we're taking a look at the sixth factor of the path, right effort. This is an important dimension of the path with many subtleties, so we'll spend some time unpicking each step. First, though, I'd like to cover off another way you'll sometimes hear 'right effort' described.

Right effort as 'how much effort should you use in meditation?'

​Effort is a contentious topic in Buddhism. Some people will tell you that practice should always be effortless, and anything else is wrong. My guess is that they're people who were prone to over-efforting themselves, and so their teachers gave them the most extreme advice in the hope of getting them to relax their grip just a little - and now they've taken that as a universal truth that applies to all meditators.

I've recently written about the dangers of using too much effort in practice, so I do absolutely agree that over-efforting is a problem - but I think it's going too far to say that any effort at all is bad or wrong. The fact is that we don't always want to practise, and it takes a certain amount of effort even to get ourselves to sit down on the cushion and start to meditate. Until the mind is quite deeply concentrated, it's also prone to distraction, and it does take a bit of effort to keep re-committing to the object of meditation until the mind settles sufficiently. This is why, in the article I linked above, I talked about 'relaxed diligence' - we absolutely do want to be relaxed, but we also need to be diligent, and that implies at least a bit of effort at times.

That previous article goes into this topic in more detail, so I'll leave it here for now and move on to the description of right effort found in Samyutta Nikaya 45.8, as shown at the top of this article.

The Four Great Efforts

SN45.8 defines right effort in terms of the 'four great efforts'. The definitions of the four are compact and sound a bit repetitive, so it's worth spending some time teasing each of the four apart to see how we might apply them in practice.

1. The effort to cause the non-arising of an unarisen unwholesome state

There's a whole lot of negatives in this one. Let's start at the end and work backwards. First, we need to understand what's meant by an 'unwholesome state'. What makes a state unwholesome? From the standpoint of early Buddhism, a state is unwholesome if it's conditioned by one or more of the Three Poisons - greed, hatred and confusion/delusion. Another classical list of unwholesome states is the Five Hindrances - sense desire, aversion, sloth and torpor, restlessness and remorse, sceptical doubt.

More generally, though, there's an invitation here to observe ourselves as we go through our days, using the mindfulness that we've cultivated in our meditation practice to see what makes us tick. The first two Noble Truths relate to understanding our first-person experience of suffering and what causes it to arise. We can't do that in the abstract; all we can do is observe ourselves and see what gives rise to suffering and negative states of mind. As we come to understand those better and better, we'll begin to identify triggers, and we can then act on that knowledge and start to avoid problems before they even come up.

Here's a concrete example. Suppose I'm a busy person and I don't always have time to eat breakfast - but, after a while of doing this practice, I notice that, on the days when I've skipped breakfast, my mornings seem to be generally more difficult, particularly around about 11 o'clock, when everything starts to feel just a bit more annoying than it really needs to be. It turns out that there's a name for this unwholesome state: 'hangry' (angry because hungry). It isn't that the world is secretly conspiring against me at 11am on certain days; it's that, by skipping breakfast, my body is a little bit undernourished, and the hunger that I've been keeping swept under the carpet is actually manifesting as a more critical, negative view of the people and events around me. Fortunately, this one has a relatively easy fix - I can commit to doing my very best to have breakfast every single day, come what may, even if I have to get up a few minutes earlier on a really busy day. This will require some effort on my part, but it also means I won't get hangry at 11am, and that's good for me and the people around me.

2. The effort to abandon an arisen unwholesome state

Sometimes, though, we find ourselves already in an unwholesome state. We can't go back in time and avoid it - it's here already. So the invitation of the second Great Effort is to find a way to get ourselves out of that 'arisen unwholesome state' - to abandon it.

Whereas the first Great Effort was more about detecting patterns in our personal triggers and learning to work around them, and could thus potentially be performed with at least some degree of thought and analysis 'at a distance', the second Great Effort is a much more visceral experience. You're right there in the thick of it, caught up in anger, fear, worry, greed, whatever it might be. To make matters worse, negative states often tend to have a self-reinforcing quality - realising that we're angry can make us even angrier ('how dare he make me feel this way?'), realising that we're worried can make us even more worried ('if I keep worrying like this I won't be able to sleep, and then I'll feel even worse tomorrow...'), and so on - which can make it even trickier to extract ourselves from what's going on.

This step is where some skill in meditation is profoundly helpful - I honestly don't know of a better tool. The trick is that, in order to extract ourselves from a negative state, even if we have some kind of tool for changing our mind state (whether it's meditative, deep breathing, visualisation or something else entirely), we must first have that moment of mindfulness which says 'Oh, hey! I see what's going on. I'm in an unwholesome state, and it would be in my best interest to get out of it.' For me, at least, I've found that a regular meditation practice has greatly increased the frequency of those moments of mindfulness, and also their duration - giving me a longer window in which to do something about the negative state I've gotten myself into, before I get sucked back into it again.

Meditation is great training for the second Great Effort. A core part of the act of meditation is having those moments of mindfulness - noticing that, for the thousandth time this sitting, my attention has wandered away from the breath, body or whatever else I'm paying attention to, and that I need to make that small but significant effort to bring it back on topic again. That simple act is a kind of training is extracting myself from an unwholesome state (defined here as mind-wandering) and returning to a wholesome state (paying attention to my meditation object). We can liken this to lifting a small weight many, many times - over time, we get stronger, even if it takes a long time and we don't really notice the changes.

That moment of mindfulness is just the start, of course. We still need a way out of the unwholesome state. In some cases, that might be simple: in the hangry example, perhaps we notice that, once again, we skipped breakfast and now we're getting grumpy - but now that we're aware of the pattern, we can eat a banana or grab a handful of cashews from the secret stash under our desk at work, and that'll be enough to mollify the body until lunchtime. Some unwholesome states are likely to need individual solutions according to the specific situation. Other times, though, we may be able to bring general strategies to bear on the situation, and here again we see a benefit of a regular meditation practice, as we move on to...

3. The effort to cause the arising of an unarisen wholesome state

Many meditation techniques aim to bring about the arising of a wholesome state of some kind, thereby accomplishing the third Great Effort. Here are some examples:

• The Brahmaviharas aim to cultivate wholesome states through opening the heart to positive emotions such as loving kindness, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity.
• The Jhanas are wholesome states, characterised by qualities such as bodily bliss, emotional joy, tranquillity, contentment and equanimity.
• More generally, any samadhi practice is liable to calm and settle the mind, taking us to a more peaceful state than our typical day-to-day experience.
• Even insight practice can often take us to a place of focus and tranquillity, following the scheme laid out in the Seven Factors of Awakening.
• Although Silent Illumination is a goalless practice not aimed at bringing about any particular state, once we've developed a taste for it and can settle fully into the present moment, it's quite common for people to experience subtle bliss, profound clarity and deep inner silence, so it can also have the effect of giving rise to a wholesome state.

In general, in early Buddhism the emphasis is on finding resources inside ourselves, rather than being dependent on the external world to supply sources of pleasure to keep us feeling good. It's easy to think 'Oh, I'll just eat another chocolate, that'll make me feel better,' but while that does trigger an all-too-brief experience of pleasure and a momentary decrease in stress, it's also not as good as having an inner source of wholesome states. (For one thing, maybe you've run out of chocolate and the shop is shut.) The momentariness of the pleasure of eating chocolate is also worth considering, particularly in light of the fourth Great Effort:

4. The effort to maintain and develop an arisen wholesome state

We don't just want a flash in a pan - a moment's relief from whatever unwholesome state we've dragged ourselves out of. Ideally, we want that wholesome state to persist, and even to get stronger.

My teacher's teacher Ayya Khema said that you should always begin a meditation session with some metta (loving kindness) practice. Quite apart from the cumulative benefit of the loving kindness practice itself, it also serves to put us into a wholesome state at the beginning of our meditation session, which tends to make everything that follows go a little more easily.

Sometimes, though, I'll sit down and try to get the metta going, but what comes out is a bit of a dribble... like a tap that's rusted up and doesn't want to open up all the way. There's some metta there, but it's a bit of a struggle and it'll fizzle out if I'm not careful - like the first wisp of smoke coming from a newly lit fire, that needs to be tended with care if it's going to become a steady blaze. What's needed at this point is care and subtlety - a nurturing attitude, providing an environment in which this embryonic feeling of metta can grow and develop, gradually opening up the tap until it's flowing more strongly.

This takes skill, and that skill comes from practice and repetition. Over time, we learn how to shift into this 'nurturing' attitude in order to help our fledgling wholesome states become their fullest selves. As we do so, we also learn how to maintain wholesome states in increasingly difficult situations. It's quite common for people new to meditation to start to find some peace and happiness in their practice, only for that to be shattered by a difficult encounter at work or a challenging family situation. This type of experience can knock the confidence of a new meditator - 'Oh, what's the use, it didn't work when it really mattered!' But it's just a matter of degree. Someone going to the gym for the first time isn't likely to be able to lift the heaviest weights. At any point in our practice, we'll have situations which really don't trouble us at all, situations which we can work with if we're careful, situations right on the edge of our abilities (which is where the most potential for growth can be found), and situations which are too much for us. A good sign of progress is when a situation that used to take some conscious effort to navigate no longer bothers us in the same way - our 'easy' category has grown larger, because our skills have grown stronger. Yes, there may still be situations which can knock us off balance and cause us to lose our cool, but expecting perfection is asking too much of ourselves. The fact is that, through regular practice, we can learn to inhabit more robust wholesome states more and more of the time - and each time we move the needle, even just a little, our lives get a little bit better overall.

May you develop the skill and wisdom needed to avoid unarisen unwholesome states, abandon arisen unwholesome states, bring about unarisen wholesome states and cultivate arisen wholesome states!

This week we're looking at case 41 in the Gateless Barrier, Pacifying the Mind. Like a number of koans, it reads almost like a joke - there's a 'smart-ass' quality to the master's reply that, on first inspection, makes the whole thing seem like a bit of a game. Nevertheless, this 'so sharp you'll cut yourself' exchange actually conceals a profound truth, one that I'll attempt to point the way to as the article goes on. First, though, let's take a look at this week's cast of characters.

Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen, and Huike, his successor

Bodhidharma is generally regarded as a semi-legendary figure these days. He may or may not have existed as a real historical figure, and he probably didn't cross the Yellow River in China on a single blade of grass as the stories tell us he did, but nevertheless he represents the origin of the Zen school of Buddhism.

According to the story, Bodhidharma was an Indian (or possibly Persian) Buddhist teacher, who, already advanced in years, decided to travel to China to see how Buddhism was being practised over there. When he arrived, however, he wasn't impressed with what he found. Buddhism in China at the time was a scholarly affair, without much actual meditation practice happening. Disheartened, he retreated to a cave in the Songshan mountains, near the now-famous Shaolin Temple (yes, that one), and sat for nine years facing a wall. (Today, in the Soto style of Zen, the Silent Illumination practice is typically undertaken sitting facing a wall. The nine years of Bodhidharma's retreat have also been symbolically linked to the nine months of pregnancy, and in general there's a sense in Zen that awakening takes time to ripen and mature before it's really 'ready').

The koan begins with Bodhidharma at the end of his nine years of practice. Eventually, some of the monks at the Shaolin Temple started to take an interest in this crazy barbarian hermit living up in the cave, and eventually one named Huike approached him and asked for a teaching. At first, Bodhidharma ignored him, simply continuing to face the wall. This initial refusal to teach a new aspirant is echoed in the ritual that people wishing to become Zen monks must typically go through, where they're initially ignored and left outside the temple gates until they've proven their sincerity by waiting patiently for however long the temple deems necessary.

In Huike's case, he settled on a grand - and somewhat horrifying - gesture to show his sincerity - cutting off his own arm. Please don't try this at home! Quite a bit of self-mutilation has been practised in Chinese spiritual circles over the ages - one story about Bodhidharma says that, in order to stop himself falling asleep, he cut off his own eyelids and threw them away; where they fell to the ground, they sprouted into the first tea plants. Another story says that, as a result of his nine-year solitary retreat, he sat for so long that his legs fell off! In Japan today you'll often see 'Daruma dolls' (pictured above), Daruma being the Japanese pronunciation of Bodhidharma's name. These dolls have a round, weighted base to represent a body without legs, as a result of which they roll back upright each time they're pushed over - symbolising Daruma's indefatigable spirit, captured in the popular Japanese phrase 'seven times down, eight times up'. Getting back to Huike and the whole severed arm business, for modern readers it's probably better to interpret Huike's gesture as symbolic rather than literal - a sign of Huike's absolute dedication to take up Zen practice with Bodhidharma.

Anyway, eventually, Bodhidharma relented, and turned to face Huike, at which point the exchange described above took place. Commentators often suppose that there's a gap between Bodhidharma's request for Huike to 'bring me your mind' and the next line of dialogue, implying that Huike went away and spent some time searching for his mind, only to discover that he couldn't find it. This seems right to me - maybe I'm just a bit of a slowpoke, but it's always taken me quite a while to find genuine insights!

Whether or not this particular exchange led to an awakening for Huike is not recorded in the koan, but Huike went on to be considered Bodhidharma's foremost successor. (Bodhidharma had four students in total - not many for such a pivotal figure! - three men and one woman.)

But what does the exchange actually mean, and how can it help us in modern times?

Bringing peace to our minds

Huike comes to Bodhidharma complaining that his mind is not at peace. This is probably a state of affairs that we can all relate to. But what do we really mean when we say 'My mind is not at peace?'

One simple description of what it means to have a mind which is not at peace might be something like: I experience a string of disagreeable thoughts, emotions and other impressions, which I seem to be unable to prevent.

(If you have a different definition, let's hear it - please leave a comment down below!)

This experience of a seemingly unstoppable stream of unpleasant experiences does seem to be quite common, at least within the self-selecting population of people interested in meditation practice. Quite a few people have come to my Wednesday night class asking how they can 'stop thoughts' because those thoughts cause them so much pain.

The usual answer I give is that meditation isn't really about stopping your thoughts - it's about finding a different relationship with them so that they don't cause us to suffer so much. Actually, though, that isn't quite true. If we do a lot of meditation (we're talking many hours a day) with a strong samadhi component, we actually can sometimes enter a peaceful state, initially for short periods, then for longer and longer stretches as our mind settles more and more, until it eventually becomes continuous. This kind of peace of mind can often be glimpsed on longer retreats (a month or more). However, it isn't terribly practical for most of us, since we have jobs, families and responsibilities to fit around the eight or so hours of daily meditation required to maintain this kind of state.

So, assuming you don't have unlimited spare time to spend in meditation sufficiently quietening your mind and body in order to be permanently tranquil, what else can you do? The short answer is 'insight practice'.

Concentration practice is good at bringing about a change in 'state' - moving us from a more agitated state to a more peaceful one. Insight practice, on the other hand, brings about a change in 'trait' - when we see things deeply enough, we form a new relationship to them, and thus have a permanently different experience as a result. One of the things we can explore in our insight practice is the mind itself - and it turns out that, if we come to understand our minds well enough, then we no longer find the comings and goings within our minds so bothersome. Thoughts and emotions may still come and go, but they lose their sting, and so no longer 'trouble' our minds in the same way.

So, what does it mean to 'understand our minds well enough'? What are these insights that practice will somehow give us?

Insight practice, the importance of personal experience, and the futility of 'explanations'

I've previously written quite a number of articles where I've done my best to provide my own answer to these questions. I've talked about various insights that can come out of Zen practice - into emptiness, non-duality, the nature of mind/awareness, and so forth. But the more I do this, the more I start to question how valuable these kinds of explanations actually are.

If you've never eaten a mango, no description of mine will ever convey the experience to you. Maybe I start by saying that it's yellow, and you say 'Oh, so it's like a banana, they're yellow.' Well, no, it isn't like a banana. So maybe I say that, well, no, the texture is more like a melon. 'Ah,' you say, 'it's like a yellow melon. Got it.' Nope, that still isn't right. You can't help but map my words onto experiences that you're already familiar with, because you have no other reference point. But the only experience that's really like eating a mango is, well, eating a damn mango. There's no form of words clever enough to capture that experience for you without you doing the taste test for yourself.

My Zen teacher has often commented that Zen seems to attract people who are pretty clever, and I've certainly run into quite a number of people who have read a lot of books about philosophy and science, really thought carefully about them, and can describe a very intellectually convincing model about what's going on both in their own minds and the world around them. Such people often have some kind of objection to Zen practice because they feel that their intellectual understanding of what's going on is 'better' than Zen in some way - more modern, more sophisticated, whatever. It's very difficult to 'persuade' such a person to suspend their well-thought-out philosophy of life in favour of claims which seem to be based in intangible experiences that are not available to the person asking for proof. It's a tough sell.

And yet that's how this works. The reason that the old Zen texts (and probably most of these articles) don't make any damn sense at first is because reality isn't what we think it is. We need to engage in long hours of diligent practice to see the truth of these things for ourselves - at which point all of the cryptic writings of the ancient masters (male and female, lay and monastic) start to make sense - because, finally, we've tasted the mango for ourselves, and so we can relate what's being described to our own experience. (This is often a humbling transition. Beforehand, it's easy to think 'Oh, this is all so confusing, why can't they just say it in plain language?' Afterwards, we're forced to admit that, actually, the old masters did a pretty good job.)

So rather than attempt to describe what you might find by looking at the experience of a mind not yet at peace, I'll instead simply give you some suggestions for how to investigate it for yourself. In the long run, that's the only thing that will ever make a difference for you personally. (Notice that that's what Bodhidharma does in the koan - he doesn't attempt to explain to Huike why his seemingly troubled mind isn't really a problem, he simply asks Huike to go and find his mind so that he can pacify it. Huike then obligingly undertakes the search for himself.)

Some suggested ways to look for your mind

Here are three meditative approaches to explore the nature of the mind. Pursue whichever feels more appealing to you - but stick with it. Insights tend to take a while to show up. We can view the practice as a process of gathering evidence which challenges our current world view - we need to get a critical mass of data in order to tip the scales in favour of a new way of seeing things, and that's going to take some time.

It can also help very much to spend some time settling the mind with a samadhi practice before engaging in insight work. When the mind is more focused, there's less noise, and more of our being is paying attention to what's going on, so if insights do show up, they tend to go deeper. That's not to say that so-called 'dry insight' (pure insight practice with no samadhi component) doesn't work - but in my experience it's more efficient to spend some time on samadhi first, so that's my recommendation.

When your mind is at least a little bit settled - there's often a fairly clear transition where your mind goes from wandering very frequently to being rather more stable - then move into any of the following practices.

1. Silent Illumination

In Silent Illumination practice, we simply rest, allowing both body and mind to become still. As the stilling process deepens, the usual noise in our experience quietens down, and subtler aspects reveal themselves to us. This is, by nature, an undirected process, and it can take its sweet time to do anything, but the great benefit is that there's really nothing to remember or do. Just sit there, allowing your body to breathe, and anytime you find yourself doing anything else at all (focusing on something in particular, trying to 'direct' your practice in a certain way, thinking about the practice, etc.), stop doing that. Trust, and see what happens. (If you need instructions for Silent Illumination, you can find them here, and a guided practice on the Audio page.)

One key point to note is that the stillness of Silent Illumination will (eventually!) reveal the nature of your mind to you, but the stillness is not the mind itself. What we find in the depths of Silent Illumination practice can eventually be found in every moment of life, no matter what's going on.

2. Koan: 'What, and where, is mind?'

Usually I recommend that people interested in koan practice start with 'Who am I?' That will actually get the job done as well. But since today's koan involves Bodhidharma asking Huike to go and fetch his mind, it also works well to use 'What, and where, is mind?' What is it that we're trying to pacify, and where can it be found? As usual when working with a koan, don't try to 'direct' the investigation in any way - just keep asking the question, over and over; notice what comes up, let it go, and repeat. (If you haven't worked with a koan before, you can find instructions here, and a guided 'Who am I?' koan practice on the Audio page.)

3. Direct investigation of the qualities of the mind

This third approach is more akin to the sort of thing you might find in the Tibetan Mahamudra tradition. Mahamudra insight practice (vipashyana) commonly involves a long sequence of quite specific investigations, looking at different aspects of the 'mind' (or, synonymously, the 'awareness'). The investigations can seem weird or even silly at first, but there's real power in practising this way, and it's included in today's list because it gives you something a bit more concrete to do than either of the two Zen approaches, which may suit certain types of people better.

Some example inquiries:

• What shape is your mind? Is it a circle or a square? A sphere or a cube? The shape of a rock or a person? Does your mind have a constantly changing shape, a fixed shape, or no shape at all?
• What colour is your mind? Is it blue, green, red, black or white? Does it have multiple colours, or none?
• Where is your mind? Is it inside your brain? Does it start in your brain but then extend outwards? Is it in some other part of the body? And, referring back to the previous investigations, if it has a shape, where does that shape fit in your experience? If there's no shape, how can it be inside a part of your body, which has a definite shape?
• If your mind has no shape, colour or location, perhaps it's more like space. But your mind is capable of knowing what's going on - can space know anything?
• Your mind is not yet at peace, so your mind is disturbed by something (or many somethings). Where do the disturbances in your mind come from? Where are they when they are here? Where do they go to when they cease? What is your mind like in the absence of disturbances?

...And so on. (For a more comprehensive list of inquiries, check out the Mahamudra Meditation Center's Meditation Manual.)

One final note - keep going!

Insight meditation is a strange business. The practices often come across as weird, trivial or absurd. And yet they work - but only if we stick at it. If your practice is taking you to uncomfortable places then it's very helpful to reach out to a teacher to talk about what's going on, but by far the bigger problem is the boredom and frustration of 'nothing happening'. And yet it's only by crossing the desert that we reach the oasis. So please keep going! And then, when you truly discover your mind for yourself, you can write back to me and tell me how I should have explained it in this article...

This article is the fifth in an eight-part series on the Eightfold Path, a core teaching from early Buddhism. I introduced the Eightfold Path in the first article in the series, so go back and check that out if you haven't heard of it before. (You can find links to all the articles in this series on the index page in the 'Buddhist theory' section.)

This week we're taking a look at the fifth factor of the path, right livelihood. As you can see from the quotation above, the instruction for this one is pretty simple - just avoid wrong livelihood! But what does that actually mean, and what difference does it make anyway? Let's get into it.

What is the 'wrong livelihood' we're supposed to abandon?

As you may have noticed, the definition of right livelihood that we find in Samyutta Nikaya 45.8, the discourse that we've been using all the way through this series of articles for the definitions of each aspect of the Eightfold Path, is rather sparse - some might say useless. We're told to abandon 'wrong livelihood', but we had probably already figured that one out given that there's something called 'right livelihood' that we're supposed to be doing instead.

If we search around some more in the Pali canon (the collection of discourses from the earliest stratum of the Buddhist teachings), sooner or later we come across Anguttara Nikaya 5.177, which suggests one definition of wrong livelihood:

"Monks, a lay follower should not engage in five types of business. Which five? Business in weapons, business in human beings, business in meat, business in intoxicants, and business in poison."

This is much more concrete, and thus at first sight appears to be much more helpful. OK, so we're supposed to avoid business in 'weapons' (selling weapons, maybe making them too?), business in 'human beings' (one imagines that this includes things like slavery rather than working in Human Resources), business in 'meat' (fishing, being a butcher?), business in 'intoxicants' (being a drug dealer is off the cards), and business in 'poison' (presumably both poisoning people and selling poison to others is frowned upon).

If you've read my previous article on right action and the precepts, however, you'll probably already know that I tend to get a bit suspicious of neat little lists like this. They seem to give a very straightforward answer to our moral questions, but a lot of it comes down to interpretation. While my comment above about Human Resources in relation to 'business in human beings' may have come across as facetious, there's a valid point there. I've lived a pretty sheltered life, but even I've worked for bosses who cared about me and looked out for my interests, and I've also worked for bosses whose only interest was to exploit me for everything I was worth and then throw me aside when I was all used up. Where do we draw the line with 'business in intoxicants' - are we concerned only with certain types of alcohol, or do we include creating apps which are designed to be habit-forming for the purpose of persuading people to part with significant amounts of money through hundreds of microtransactions?

Broadening our perspective on right livelihood

Let's set the specific list to one side for the moment. What's actually going on here? Why do these categories of 'right livelihood' and 'wrong livelihood' even exist?

Right livelihood is part of the section of the Eightfold Path concerned with sīla, or ethics. Fundamentally, all of the ethical teachings demonstrate how the second factor of the path, right intention, is to be practised - in particular, the intention of harmlessness. So we have the third factor, right speech, which points out how easily and immediately we can create harm through our speech, and provides some guidelines for how we can minimise that harm. Next, we have right action, which takes a broader perspective, looking not just at our speech but at our actions more generally, highlighting how we might cause harm through taking life, taking what is not given, or engaging in sexual misconduct. Finally, we arrive at right livelihood, which takes a broader perspective still, looking at the type of life we lead.

Our livelihood matters because it shapes so much of what we do - particularly if we broaden our sense of 'livelihood' to include 'lifestyle' rather than simply 'occupation'. Our lifestyle governs to a significant degree the types of situations we end up in - and thus some lifestyles are much more conducive to right speech and right action than others. A career criminal is very likely to have to tell lies (wrong speech) and take what is not given (wrong action) as a matter of course. Even leaving aside the harm that comes from such a lifestyle, being in this kind of life situation is very unlikely to lead to a peaceful mind which is well suited to meditation practice.

So I'm going to suggest that the most useful questions to ask ourselves in relation to right livelihood are not 'Is my occupation on the naughty list?', but rather 'How do I make my way through the world? What are the positive and negative aspects of my lifestyle? What effect does my lifestyle have on my state of mind? And, once I've really spent some time with this and come to a balanced assessment, how should I move forward?'

​This kind of close examination of our lifestyle isn't necessarily a practice that needs to be undertaken every day - that could lead to endless second-guessing and self-paralysis - but it's definitely useful to go into great detail at least once, and then check in every so often (maybe every couple of years, or after a major life change) to see how things are going. Our lifestyles tend to drift rather slowly, usually too slowly to notice it happening in real time, so checking in every once in a while gives us the opportunity to notice how things might have drifted over the months and years.

Practice and life

The inclusion of right livelihood in the Eightfold Path really helps to highlight that, for the Buddha, 'practice' and 'life' were synonymous. For many of us, it's easy to relate to 'meditation' as just one of a wide range of activities in our busy lives, twenty minutes a day of self-care that we can treat a bit like going to the gym - we know we're better for doing it, but we leave the weights in the gym at the end of a session and forget about them until next time.

This is actually fine so far as it goes, and I don't mean to criticise anyone who has this kind of relationship to their meditation practice! I used to feel that way too, actually. For me, though, as my practice has gone deeper, I've started to notice more and more ways that my meditation practice and my life overlap. Insights that come up in meditation can often be applied to life situations - and conversely. (The model of 'excitation and stimulation' that I described in a recent article was something I first noticed as a result of looking at stress in my working life and experimenting with different strategies to manage it, not something that was directly related to meditation practice.)

In the Zen tradition, there's a strong sense that practice can be continuous - not limited to any particular time of day or posture, but rather an attitude of presence that is carried throughout all of the activities of the day. When we have work to do, we can apply ourselves wholeheartedly to it, focusing wholly on the task at hand. When we have a quiet moment, we can return to meditation, or simply rest in the present moment rather than letting our thoughts spin out into planning tomorrow's meeting for the seventeenth time.

As we do this, we start to feel the boundaries between 'practice' and 'life' dissolving. Meditation becomes more 'ordinary' and life becomes more 'extraordinary'. We discover that we can walk the spiritual path not in order to get to some special destination, but simply because walking the path is a good way to live.

​May your practice (and your life) go well.