In a discourse about the teaching of non-self, the Buddha offers the following illustration: “Bhikkhus, what do you think? If people carried off the grass, sticks, branches and leaves in this Jeta Grove, or burned them or did what they liked with them, would you think: ‘People are carrying us off or burning us or doing what they like with us?' No, venerable sir. Why not? Because that is neither our self nor what belongs to our self.” (M 22) As we hear this example today, however, we have to … [Read more...]
Buddhist Psychology: Classical Texts in Contemporary Perspective
In the first week of December last year the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies held a five-day residential course on Buddhist Psychology. The intention of the course was to introduce students to the classical models of mind and mental processing contained in the primary texts of the Pali Canon and other Buddhist texts, and then to review this material from the contemporary perspectives of modern psychology. The program was co-sponsored by the Cambridge Institute of Meditation and … [Read more...]
Upon the Tip of a Needle (Mahā Niddesa 1.42)
This remarkable and powerful poem, found buried amid the rather dry linguistic commentary of the Niddesa (a canonical commentary on the Aṭṭhakavagga of the Sutta Nipāta attributed to Sāriputta), speaks to the dual themes of impermanence and selflessness. In the later systematic psychology called Abhidhamma, these themes are developed into the doctrine of momentariness and the thorough enumeration of impersonal phenomena. All human experience is ever-changing, but is … [Read more...]
Mindfulness: Gateway into Experience
These words are excerpted from a dharma talk given at BCBS on January 18, 1997 as part of the Nalanda Program's weekend retreat. Mindfulness (sati) reveals to us the nature of reality, of our own mind and body in each moment of our experience. When we apprehend any aspect of our experience with mindfulness, we find that experience to be fleeting. Seeing the fleeting nature of all our experiences over a period of time, we become grounded in the wisdom or insight that we cannot rely on any … [Read more...]
Meditation and the Therapist
Paul Fullon Ed.D. is Director of Mental Health Programs for Tufts Health Plan, an Instructor of Psychology in the Dept, of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and is the president of the Boston-based Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy. These comments are excerpted from a talk given at the bi-annual meditation retreat for psychologists and psychotherapists at BCBS in July 2003. When we look closely at some of the empirical studies conducted on the effectiveness of psychotherapy, … [Read more...]
Whose Life Is This, Anyway?
I don’t know many people in this country who really believe in rebirth—do you? I often meet Buddhists of various sorts, and yet it seems that most, like myself, have inherited from their cultural upbringing the “one life to live” model of the human condition. It makes me wonder how much of Buddhism we are really capable of absorbing. When we see how much of who we are now is embedded in our habitual responses to specific conditions in a world we each create from our unique illusions, what … [Read more...]
Lessons from an Illness
Marilyn Judson has studied vipassanā meditation with Shinzen Young for the past nine years, and with Thich Nhat Hanh for five years before that. She has a daily sitting meditation practice, meets weekly with her sangha for dharma and discussion and sitting practice, and attends several vipassanā retreats each year. I was lying in my hospital room and starting to feel desperate and afraid. I had a suction tube down my throat, an I.V. in my arm, and I hadn’t eaten in three days. Twenty-four … [Read more...]
Meditation on the Elements (Majjhima Nikaya 62)
How Does Meditation Train Attention?
"Attention, attention, attention!" —Zen Master Ikku's answers when asked for the source of the highest wisdom It helps to conceptualize meditation as an attentive art, so let’s start with meditation’s two basic categories. The first kind employs an effortful, sustained attention. This variety of concentrative meditation is the easiest to understand. It’s what we begin with and what we return to frequently during meditation. Concentration implies that we narrow our focus voluntarily. We … [Read more...]
The Sixth Sense
We are used to thinking of ourselves as autonomous agents experiencing an objective world that is out there, separate from us in here. This is as natural to us as breathing. Unfortunately such a view of the self inevitably brings with it a great deal of suffering. The Buddha has shown us how to overcome this suffering by teaching us how to see our experience of self more clearly. Following his guidelines, we can learn to see how we construct a sense of self from the raw material of experience. … [Read more...]