Today the practice of insight
meditation has gained global popularity, yet in achieving
this success it has undergone a subtle metamorphosis.
Rather than being taught as an integral part of the
Buddhist path, it is now often presented as a secular
discipline whose fruits pertain more to life within the
world than to supramundane release. Many meditators
testify to the tangible benefits they have gained from the
practice of insight meditation, benefits that range from
enhanced job performance and better relationships to
deeper calm, more compassion, and greater awareness.
However, while such benefits may certainly be worthwhile
in their own right, taken by themselves they are not the
final goal that the Buddha himself holds up as the end
point of his training. That goal, in the terminology of
the texts, is the attainment of Nibbana, the destruction
of all defilements here and now and deliverance from the
beginningless round of rebirths.
Perhaps the most powerful pressure that
has shaped the contemporary expression of insight
meditation has been the need to transplant the practice
into a largely secular environment remote from its
traditional matrix of Buddhist faith and doctrine. Given
the skeptical climate of our age, it is quite appropriate
that newcomers to Dhamma be invited to explore for
themselves the potential inherent in the practice. Perhaps
the last thing they need is to have the full agenda of
Buddhist doctrine thrust upon them from the start.
However, though we may initially take
up meditation with an open and explorative mind, at a
certain point in our practice we inevitably arrive at a
crossroads where we are faced with a choice. Either we can
continue the meditation as a purely naturalistic,
non-religious discipline, or we can transpose the practice
back into its original setting of Buddhist faith and
understanding. If we choose the first route, we might
still deepen our meditation and reap more abundantly the
same benefits we have obtained so far-deeper calm, more
equanimity, greater openness, even a kind of penetration
of the here and now. Nevertheless, as desirable as these
fruits might be in themselves, viewed against the Buddha's
word they remain incomplete. For the practice of insight
meditation to achieve the full potential ascribed to it by
the Buddha, it must be embraced by several other qualities
that rivet it to the framework of the teaching.
Foremost among such qualities is the
complementary pair of faith and right view. As a factor of
the Buddhist path, faith (saddha) does not mean
blind belief but a willingness to accept on trust certain
propositions that we cannot, at our present stage of
development, personally verify for ourselves. These
propositions concern both the nature of reality and the
higher reaches of the path. In the traditional map of the
Buddhist training, faith is placed at the beginning, as
the prerequisite for the later stages comprised in the
triad of virtue, concentration, and wisdom. The canonical
texts do not seem to envisage the possibility that a
person lacking faith in the tenets specific to the Dhamma
could take up the practice of insight meditation and reap
positive results. Yet today such a phenomenon has become
extremely widespread. It is quite common now for
meditators to make their first contact with the Dhamma
through intensive insight meditation, and then to use this
experience as a touchstone for assessing their
relationship to the teaching.
At this juncture, the choice they make
divides meditators into two broad camps. One consists of
those who focus exclusively on the tangible benefits the
practice yields here and now, suspending all concern with
what lies beyond the horizons of their own experience. The
other consists of those who recognize the practice to flow
from a fount of understanding far deeper and broader than
their own. To follow this wisdom to its source, such
meditators are prepared to subordinate their own familiar
assumptions to the disclosures of the teaching and thus
embrace the Dhamma as an integral whole.
The fact that insight meditation can be
seriously practiced even outside the domain of Buddhist
faith raises an interesting question never explicitly
posed by the canon and commentaries. If insight meditation
can be pursued solely for its immediately visible
benefits, then what role does faith play in the
development of the path? Certainly, faith as a full
acceptance of Buddhist doctrine is not a necessary
condition for Buddhist practice. As we have seen, those
who do not follow the Dhamma as a path to spiritual
deliverance might still accept the Buddhist ethical
precepts and practice meditation as a way to inner peace.
Faith must therefore play a different
role than that of a simple spur to action, but the exact
nature of this role remains problematic. Perhaps the
solution will emerge if we ask what faith actually means
in the context of Buddhist practice. It should be clear at
once that faith cannot be adequately explained simply as
reverence for the Buddha, or as some alloy of devotion,
admiration, and gratitude. For while these qualities often
exist alongside faith, they may all be present even when
faith is absent.
If we examine faith more closely, we
would see that besides its emotive ingredients, it also
involves a cognitive component. This consists in a
readiness to accept the Buddha as the unique discoverer
and proclaimer of liberating truth. Seen from this angle,
faith necessarily involves a decision. As the word
decision implies ("to decide" = to cut off), to place
faith in something is to exercise an act of
discrimination. Thus Buddhist faith entails, at least
implicitly, a rejection of the claims of other spiritual
teachers to be bearers of the liberating message on a par
with the Buddha himself. As a decision, faith also entails
acceptance. It involves a willingness to open oneself to
the principles made known by the Enlightened One and
adhere to them as trustworthy guides to knowledge and
conduct.
It is this decision that separates
those who take up the practice of insight meditation as a
purely naturalistic discipline from those who practice it
within the framework of the Buddhist faith. The former, by
suspending any judgment about the picture of the human
condition imparted by the Buddha, limit the fruit of the
practice to those that are compatible with a secular,
naturalistic worldview. The latter, by accepting the
Buddha's own disclosure of the human condition, gain
access to the goal that the Buddha himself holds up as the
final aim of the practice.
The second pillar that supports the
practice of insight meditation is the cognitive
counterpart of faith, namely, right view (samma ditthi).
Though the word "view" might suggest that the practitioner
actually sees the principles considered to be right, at
the outset of the training this is seldom the case. For
all but a few exceptionally gifted disciples, right view
initially means right belief, the acceptance of principles
and doctrines out of confidence in the Buddha's
enlightenment. Though Buddhist modernists sometimes claim
that the Buddha said that one should believe only what one
can verify for oneself, no such statement is found in the
Pali canon. What the Buddha does say is that one should
not accept his teachings blindly but should inquire into
their meaning and attempt to realize their truth for
oneself.
Contrary to Buddhist modernism, there
are many principles taught by the Buddha as essential to
right understanding that we cannot, in our present state,
see for ourselves. These are by no means negligible, for
they define the framework of the Buddha's entire program
of deliverance. Not only do they depict the deeper
dimensions of the suffering from which we need release,
but they point in the direction where true liberation lies
and prescribe the steps that lead to realization of the
goal.
These principles include the tenets of
both "mundane" and "transcendent" right view. Mundane
right view is the type of correct understanding that leads
to a fortunate destination within the round of rebirths.
It involves an acceptance of the principles of kamma and
its fruit; of the distinction between meritorious and evil
actions; and of the vast expanse and multiple domains of
samsara within which rebirth may occur. Transcendent right
view is the view leading to liberation from samsara in its
entirety. It entails understanding the Four Noble Truths
in their deeper ramifications, as offering not merely a
diagnosis of psychological distress but a description of
samsaric bondage and a program for final release. It is
the transcendent right view that comes at the head of the
Noble Eightfold Path and steers the other seven factors
toward the cessation of suffering.
While the actual techniques for
practicing insight meditation may be identical for those
who pursue it as a purely naturalistic discipline and
those who adopt it within the framework of Dhamma, the two
styles of practice will nevertheless differ profoundly
with respect to the results those techniques can yield.
When practiced against the background of a naturalistic
understanding, insight meditation can bring greater calm,
understanding, and equanimity, even experiences of
insight. It can purify the mind of the coarser defilements
and issue in a tranquil acceptance of life's vicissitudes.
For these reasons, this mode of practice should not be
disparaged. However, from a deeper point of view, this
appropriation of Buddhist meditation remains incomplete.
It is still confined to the sphere of conditioned
existence, still tied to the cycle of kamma and its fruit.
When, however, insight meditation is
sustained from below by deep faith in the Buddha as the
perfectly enlightened teacher, and illuminated from above
by the wisdom of the teaching, it acquires a new capacity
that the other approach lacks. It now functions with the
support of dispassion, moving toward ultimate deliverance.
It becomes the key to open the doors to the Deathless, the
means to gain a freedom that can never be lost. With this,
insight meditation transcends the limits of the
conditioned, transcends even itself, to arrive at its
proper goal: the eradication of all the fetters of
existence and release from the beginningless round of
birth, aging, and death.