May 25, 2013 full moon

Meeting your thoughts at a resting place

(Excerpted from the upcoming book, Thoughts Are Not the Enemy.)

By Jason Siff

There is a particular discourse, titled, Vitakkasanthāna Sutta, that is taught as the Buddha’s way of working with thoughts in meditation, for when I teach in a more traditional or orthodox setting, I encounter people who swear by it and take me to task on it. So, I am now going to face my biggest critic, the Buddha himself, as he is interpreted by scholars and lay meditation teachers alike. When this discourse is viewed with unprejudiced eyes regarding thinking in meditation, the Buddha may actually be saying something closer to what I have been saying all along: Get to know your thoughts in meditation, but be careful how you handle unwholesome thoughts.

To begin with, each translator of this discourse makes his bias known in how he translates the title. Soma Thera shows his antipathy toward thoughts by choosing to name it, “The Removal of Distracting Thoughts,” while Thanissaro Bhikkhu offers an unbiased literal translation of “The Relaxation of Thoughts.” Just in the title alone, if someone read Soma Thera’s translation, they would be looking for ways to remove distracting thoughts that get in the way of meditating on a particular meditation object. But even this does not lend support to the notion that all thinking should be eliminated in meditation. According to Soma Thera’s translation: “…the evil unskillful thoughts are eliminated; they disappear.” The emphasis in the discourse is thus not about eliminating all types of thinking, but only “evil unskillful thoughts” that are connected with “desire, hate, and delusion.” Unfortunately, a view that all of our thinking is connected with desire, hate, and delusion has crept in and muddied this picture for certain Buddhist meditation practitioners, so, for them, the broad stroke of eliminating all thoughts seems to be in order.

Venerable Thanissaro’s translation of the Pāli word, santhāna, as “relaxation” is much closer to one of the original meanings of the word, which refers to a “resting place, a meeting place, a public place (market).” This notion of a “resting place” as a place where one stops at the end of journey probably gave rise to a secondary, more abstract meaning of “stopping” or “ceasing” when the word santhāna is applied to thoughts. Surely in the minds of those who seek a pure mind that is absolutely free of thoughts, the Buddha could not be talking about “meeting your thoughts at a resting place.” But what if that is exactly what he meant to those who first listened to him? The Buddha speaks in this discourse about “resting with” (though people have tended to see this discourse more as “wrestling with”) all kinds of thoughts and what to do when unwholesome and unskillful ones catch hold of you.

This way of resting with thoughts is found in the first “instruction” on what to do with thinking. The Buddha is careful to say that it is not a passive affair, where one would allow unwholesome and unskillful thoughts to completely lead one astray, but, I believe, he also does not say that it is an active one either, where the meditator replaces unwholesome thoughts with more wholesome ones, such as practicing loving-kindness at the first sign of an angry thought. It is somewhere in the middle; and yet, like many things in the middle way, it is entirely different than either extreme.

I will use Venerable Thanissaro’s translation throughout this chapter, as his title, “The Relaxation of Thoughts,” best captures a middle way orientation to being with thoughts in meditation. His wording of the sutta passages is more complicated than Soma Thera’s translation (Bhikkhu Bodhi’s translation is greatly indebted to Soma Thera’s and uses the same title), and will require a bit more concentration on your part, and work on my part, to get at what is being said.

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