Meditation traditions: intentions and approaches

Student: Hi, I was just curious, if you could spend a moment to define the differences between the various meditation techniques you mentioned like Theravadan and Vipassana.

Ken: Why are you interested in that?

Student: Just am.

Ken: Oh, no! You’ve got to go further than that. I always want to know the question behind the question. I’m very annoying that way.

Student: I’m wondering what the values are—different techniques, so there must be different values.

Ken: Good. Okay, I’m going to change that word if I may. Different practices have different intentions. Okay. Now there are two pieces here. Different practices have different intentions and different traditions have different approaches.

Now, my own training is in the Tibetan tradition so I feel fairly confident speaking about that. Well, moderately confident, no, not even fair, and I know a number of people who practice Zen and I’ve hung out there. So, I’ll probably put my foot in my mouth. Around the Theravadan tradition, I’ll definitely put my foot in my mouth, so I’m just giving you that warning.

The richness and complexity of the Tibetan tradition

Ken: The Tibetan tradition inherited the full blown, or fully developed medieval Indian Buddhism. Buddhism didn’t come to Tibet until 800 or 900 AD, that’s the ninth or tenth centuries. I think there may have been a little bit in the eighth century, but it’s really late. So this is 1,200 years after Buddha lived and by this time there were, you know, huge monastic universities and extraordinarily deep philosophy being done in these places, and very developed systems of practice and it was rich, it was baroque. And so in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, you have a very strong academic or scholastic or intellectual component. And you have a very sophisticated range of techniques, because they’ve not only got this stuff from India, all of the academic stuff from the Indian universities, but they also got it from all the yogic traditions too.

And these were really weird guys who lived on the fringes of society and really went deeply into stuff and meditated on glaciers, just all kinds of weird stuff. And so, the Tibetan tradition is very rich this way. And as a Zen friend of mine said to me, “Gee, Ken you have an awful lot of arrows in your quiver.” And it’s true, I mean I’ve never counted but I’ve been trained in probably somewhere between 150 to 200 different meditation methods. So you have a problem, I’ve got a meditation method for that, and there’s more that I haven’t been trained in, in the Tibetan tradition. There are significant areas in the Tibetan tradition I know very little about. Now, that’s one way, and so there’s a lot to learn, and it’s very rich and you can learn a lot of stuff, and sometimes you can get lost in all of that and a lot of people do.

Soto Zen: simple, direct practice

Ken: At the other end of the spectrum, you might say, there’s Zen. Now you have to appreciate the origin of Zen, which goes back to China, the Chan school in China. The Chan tradition developed in, I think, the ninth or tenth centuries and Buddhism had been in China for like three or four hundred years already. It had carried on this Indian tradition of intellectual pursuit and philosophy, and was really heavily into the moral stuff. When you combined this with a Confucian formality, everything had really got stuck. You almost couldn’t move, because there were so many things you were meant to be doing.

And so the Chan school developed as a reaction to all of this. Now, the word Chan, which became Zen in Japan, is actually the Sanskrit word, dhyana, which means meditation or meditation state. So, when you say the Zen school, you’re really saying it’s the meditation school of Buddhism, and you go, “Well, isn’t Buddhism about meditation?” Well, by this point in China, it wasn’t about meditation, it was about study and it was about morals. It was about all this stuff and very few people were doing any meditation, and so you had this radical school, who are going to call themselves the meditation school.

And they took as their inspiration, a figure called Bodhidharma. Bodhidharma was an Indian master who came to China and presented himself to the emperors. The emperor said to this grand master, “I have funded monasteries and supported monks in many monasteries. What merit, what goodness does this give to me?”

Bodhidharma said, “None whatsoever.” Well, this didn’t go over too well, you don’t speak to emperors this way.

So the emperor looked at him and said, “What do you teach?”

“Nothing,” said Bodhidharma. This was not doing himself any favors.

So, the emperor said, “Well, who stands before me?”

Bodhidharma said, “I have no idea.”

Well, the emperor had had enough at this point, he threw him into jail. So there was Bodhidharma, sitting in jail and what do you do in jail? He sat, he practiced, and he kept falling asleep. So he actually tore off his eyelids so he couldn’t go to sleep. Yeah, people are really extreme about some of these things. And he just sat there for 12 years looking at this wall. I presume he was fed occasionally, and then the emperor relented and let him out, and he became a great teacher in China. So, you have this school of Buddhism, which sits looking at a wall; that’s Soto Zen, that’s what you do. And you learn a lot from just looking at this wall. You learn everything about yourself. It’s very similar to Ajahn Chah’s instruction, “Just sit in the center of the room and see who comes to visit.” You could look at the wall and see who comes to visit. So very simple, very direct practice.

Rinzai Zen: intricate questions

Ken: Then in the other stream of Zen, Rinzai, they found great inspiration in their early teachers. And you have this very famous question. “What was your face before you were born?” Well, when you entertain that question, what happens?

Student: You’re overwhelmed, you get overwhelmed with the possibilities of what the answer might be.

Ken: Just before you get overwhelmed, what happened? Yes. Right there, what’s that?

Student: Puzzle, I suppose.

Ken: Yeah, everything stops doesn’t it? And you don’t know how to relate to it. You with me? Yeah. Okay. That’s what the Rinzai school is about. They ask you these questions and everything stops, and you don’t know how to relate to that. And so the practice consists of learning how to relate to that.

Different approach. And so, you know, you think you’re so smart to come up with an answer to the one that the teacher just asked and you know what you get, you get another question. “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” You know there are many, there’s whole records of these. One of the most famous ones is—and you have to know a bit about Buddhism to appreciate it—but in the Chinese tradition, the notion of buddha nature, this potential to awaken, is one of the very deeply held ideas. It was considered present in every form of life, animals and people and everything like that. So this one master is asked, “Does a dog have buddha nature?” Normally this would be a no brainer. It would be, yes.

Do you know what this guy answered, “I have no idea.” He didn’t actually say all of that. That’s my take on what he said. He just said “no idea.” And that’s been the subject of meditation for people for the last thousand years. What did he mean by this? So there are all kinds of things like that. And that’s another approach where everything stops, or you find a way to make everything stop, and then you learn how to relate to that. And if you don’t like any of those questions, I’ve got a few more, I have my own too.

The flavor of the Theravadan tradition

Ken: So the Theravadan tradition is very different in flavor, because it split off from the Indian tradition long before all of this huge evolution took place and spread to Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Laos, and other countries in Southeast Asia. And the practices tend to be very, very simple. Not like the complex meditations or intricate questions you get in the Tibetan or Zen traditions, and very much concerned with learning how to live simply without struggling with experience.

And of course over time, all kinds of things developed and except for a very few people, the Sri Lanka tradition became very intellectual, very conceptual. And in the 19th Century, the Thai forest tradition developed as a reaction against things becoming stultified in Thailand. And it’s become a very rich tradition of practice. Many of the teachers, Western teachers like Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, were all trained in that tradition. They’re coming from that tradition as well Ajahn Amaro and Ajahn Pasanno, who are up in Northern California. And so it’s very vibrant, but it’s only one tradition within the Theravada and Vipassana approach. So that gives you probably more than you want to know.

Student: That’s a great deal.

Ken: Okay.