One Secret to Enlightenment

Dhr. Seven, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Ashley Wells (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly

"Meditation" is bringing attention (mind, focus, directed awareness) to something. Are all things equal so that anything is just as good as anything else to bring it to? NO.

Some things are better. What things? Subtle ones.

The secret to "meditation" (jhayanti) is directing attention toward an increasingly subtle object. This is because it is subtle then subtler, so the mind has to become increasingly attentive, aware, and focused (which is purifying).

The Buddha recommended focusing on the in-and-out breath for this very reason. We carry it everywhere, and it grows calmer the calmer the mind becomes.

The Five Hindrances

Who will be the Future Buddha?

When we place the mind on the breath -- bright, happy, interested (not bored, not averse) -- it meets the Five Hindrances.

Overcoming those hindrances, the mind settles as the breath thins out and eventually disappears.

1. sensual craving (desire, greed, lust)
2. aversion (ill-will, anger, annoyance, boredom)
3. sleepiness (sloth and torpor, tired mind or body)
4. restlessness (discontent, worry, flurry)
5. skeptical doubt (lack of confidence and conviction, faithlessness, excessive questioning and investigation).

The breath brings one to the first meditation (the first jhana, the first meditative absorption). The Five Hindrances have fallen away, and the Five Factors of Absorption (jhana-anga) have arisen. One of those factors is joy.

Joy is wonderful, joy is blissful, joy is rapturous (uplifting, effervescent, a kind of elation). This is good at first, but it comes to seem gross and coarse compared to more peaceful sustained-happiness (sukha and abhirati or contentment).

By removing the coarser, the mind turns to the more subtler and thereby enters the second meditation, the second meditative absorption.

This keeps happening by emerging and reflecting on the disadvantages or defects of each of the absorptions, moving one to the next more subtle absorption. This goes from the first access to first absorption, first absorption to second and so forth. This is samma-samadhi, "right concentration" or stillness.

The mind is growing more coherent, more integrated, more whole and wholesome. This is all accompanied by wholesome states -- leaving abandoned the unwholesome, the many manifestations of greed, hatred, and delusion (lobha, dosa, moha). Cultivating those wholesome states is one way to advance the process when nothing else can speed it up.

What is more subtle than the first four form-absorptions? The four formless absorptions, so named because the take as their object increasingly subtle objects: unbounded consciousness, unbounded space, nothingness, then neither-perception-nor-non-perception. What could be more subtle than that, than a state of conscious awareness so subtle that it is not possible to call it "perception," but it is not "non-perception," not unconsciousness, not non-perceiving (non-percipience).

One thing is more subtle. And that thing is not a "thing" at all but it is certainly not nothingness. It is the greatest thing of all: nirvana. It is a mistake to think that it is nothingness on the one hand or merely the end of all suffering on the other.

American Bhikkhu Bodhi

American scholar-monk Bhikkhu Bodhi long ago showed that nirvana is unique, peaceful, not a composite like all "things" are. It alone is the deathless (amata). It alone is the unconditioned element (dhatu), the conditions being composite factors and supports of things. It stands alone and is so subtle an object that the ordinary mind cannot discern or hold it.

The mind grown pure by the increasingly subtle absorptions becomes intensified, still, and so powerful that it is able to glimpse it. And by glimpsing it, the mind (heart) is freed.

Because nirvana is real and even more subtle than "the base of neither-perception-nor-non-perception," it is possible to attain that level of samadhi, the eighth jhana, and persist in that absorption for so long that the mind will then wish for something even more subtle. And it may at that point move to nirvana by simply willing for something less coarse/more subtle.

British Buddhist teacher Beth Upton (right)

A story of this exact thing happening is told by Buddhist teacher Beth Upton who knows of someone this happened to. This would seem to suggest that all the insight-meditation that makes this attainment is systematic endeavor is not 100% necessary. Even long ago in proto-India, when hermits and recluses as well as wandering ascetics kept the teaching of samadhi alive, some found the ultimate goal, the highest bliss. The Buddha was not the only one to rediscover nirvana. Other humans known as pacceka-buddhas or "non-teaching supremely enlightened beings" existed as well.