Meditative Attainments Part I: The Basics

This post is the first in a series of posts about meditative attainments.

After a period of strong and consistent practice, often involving years but sometimes only months or days, some meditative practitioners experience meditative attainments that are interpreted by the traditional Buddhist teachings and teachers as being signs of enlightenment. By "attaiments" I mean meditative experiences that align with those discussed in the both the traditional Pali Canon and the Mahayana literature, that provide the practitioner with insight into wisdom and compassion, and that lead to lasting changes. There are other meditative experiences that don't have anything to do with insight, for example the experiences involved in the jhanas, or even the kinds of visions that come out of deep concentration at times, such as described in the second Flashback chapter of the book. These are not likely to lead to lasting changes and so I'm excluding them here, though I might address them in another post.


This is a somewhat broader definition than others use. Many discussions restrict the term attainments to the four stages of enlightenment discussed in the Abhidhamma and the Vishuddhimagga: stream enterer (sotapanna), once returner (sakadagami), non-returner (anagami), and arhat, or full enlightenment. For example, Daniel Ingram in his excellent book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha uses the traditional four attainment Theravadan framework, in addition to an "arising and passing away" experience which precedes the sotapanna experience, to formulate a map of meditative development, though near the end of the book he briefly discusses the possibility of other axes of meditative development.

Personally, I don't like the term "stream enterer" for the first meditative attainment. In the suttas, people who become stream enterers often do so after simply listening to a discourse by the Buddha, or one of the monks. So it seems in the time of the Buddha, stream entry had nothing to do with meditation but was rather something more like taking the precepts is or should be today, namely a change in one's philosophy of life, a reorientation away from greed, hatred and delusion and towards awakening. I prefer the term "first path" for the sotapanna attainment, and similarly, second, third, and fourth path for the others. "Path" here refers to the "path moment", a moment of consciousness in which the attainment actually occurs.

Practitioners in the various traditions are generally discouraged from talking with others about their meditative experiences, and most especially about their attainments. The Buddha discouraged monks from talking about any kind of attainments with lay people. As a practical matter, monks are supposed to be humble and boasting about attainments is certainly not a way to show one's humility. Since the majority of mediators don't ever experience an attainment, talking about attainments, even in a straightforward way without bragging, can lead to the arising of envy and other kinds of negative affective states in the listeners.

But as Ingram points out in his book, this rule doesn't apply to lay practitioners, and many people, myself included, spend years trying to figure out what exactly is going on in their meditative practice, and where they stand on the meditative map. Sometimes this happens because their teachers don't have any experience with the particular attainments the practitioners are experiencing. At other times, they may be reluctant to discuss what is coming up with their teachers, either because their specific tradition doesn't recognize the experiences as being part of the standard story of meditative development, or the experience is so out of the ordinary that the practitioner doesn't want to be classed as crazy. All of these have been true in my practice at various times.

The traditions all categorize attainments has having a mystical origin. The traditional Abhidhamma  explanation is that the mind makes contact with an object of cognition that neither exists nor does not exist, the nibbana (or nirvana) element which stands outside ordinary reality (it is sometimes called "The Deathless"). This moment of contact is the path moment spoken of above. After the path moment occurs, the mind experiences the fruit of the contact in a fruition moment, the nature of which differs depending on the Theravadan meditative tradition. In Zen, the different traditions have different stories about how enlightenment occurs but the basic underlying premises amounts to the same thing: it's a mystical experience, often hard to quantify or even speak about.  In the traditional Theravadan account of the paths, each path leads to the elimination of some basic collection of negative affective tendencies until with fourth path, the underlying roots of greed, hatred, and delusion have been thoroughly eliminated.

I've not ever experienced the basic Abhidhamma/Vishuddhimagga path/fruit moment sequence, but my sense is that what is really happening is some kind of basic rearrangement in the cognitive and possibly emotional structure of the brain. James Austin, the neurologist and Rinzai Zen practitioner, in his book Zen and the Brain makes a similar observation. One tip off in this direction is Ingram's assertion that the observable behavior of some people who experience first path and even the higher paths does not correspond to what most folks would categorize as saintly. These people experience some kind of existential change which they can describe but it doesn't manifest in their behavior, so they continue drinking, using drugs, having affairs with their students, and generally misbehaving in ways that causes suffering for those around them (if not possibly for them, presuming they're enlightened and beyond suffering). Ingram, who claims to have experienced fourth path, says that the traditional account is wishful thinking. Actually, I'm a little less negative about the elimination of negative affective states than Ingram is, and I hope to be able to get into explaining why later in the series.

Identity and Advertising

One of the requirements for getting people to notice what you write these days is that you establish an on-line identity. This is what the publishing industry calls an "author's platform". The basic idea is to have some kind of on-line social media presence that people can relate to in some way. Actually, that's partly what this blog is about. I've also obtained a Twitter handle, am in the process of setting up a Web site and of course I have an email address. I drew the line at Facebook, though. I've never been comfortable with their privacy policy, and even though they've improved it a lot, I still don't like the idea that they get to sell my personal data to advertisers without my say-so. I might join Ello instead, they have an excellent privacy policy - they promise to never sell your data - which they back up with a charter as a public benefit corporation thereby making it legally binding. I guess I don't have much of a problem with all this, I've operated on-line for most of my professional life in high tech, and am comfortable with it.

I'm having more of a problem with advertising, though. In principle, I like many other people find advertising to be an annoyance regardless of the medium in which it appears. I was pretty much OK with the discrete Google ads that showed up in search results 5 years ago, since often I was looking for something to buy and something showed up that was exactly what I was looking for. Nowadays, Google has become an something of an advertising superpower, with servers that slurp up data from everybody and sell it to the highest bidder, who then throws up ads that follow you around for the next three months. So I feel somewhat conflicted about buying advertising for the book.

But that is exactly what I've done. I bought a small ad in the Spring issue of Tricycle, and I'm planning on running a one month campaign on their Web site. It felt kind of funny creating the ad, kind of the ultimate narcissistic exercise in a way. Why did I do that? Well, I would expect people who read Tricycle would be highly interested in the book, and they might otherwise not get to know about it. So it was an extension of the whole (I cringe to call it this) marketing program for the book. The cost was reasonable, and Tricycle is a great magazine so I'm happy to support them through my advertising dollars, even though they've turned down my stuff in the past since they seem only to publish well known Dharma teachers and authors. I also contemplated taking out ads in the other two professional Dharma publications that run them but decided not to, partly because it felt weird enough running the ad campaign in one publication, and also because I figured that since Tricycle reaches the largest audience, I could probably reach enough people through that. Also, there was the additional cost.

An advertising campaign is something the publisher would run if I were to have run the book through a traditional publishing house. I tried a couple, naturally all I got was rejection letters, and I am not about to employ an agent to flog my writing to the publishers for me. So I've been going the self publishing route, and that involves the entire suite of activities including developmental edit, copy-edit, production, marketing and distribution. Some of this needs to be paid for, some of it you get for free if you epublish, which I'm doing. I decided to self-publish because I thought the message I was trying to convey with my book could not wait. Mindfulness and meditation is becoming trendy, and even though most people won't experience any problems with it, still there is the possibility that it could go wrong for some of them. Most meditation  teachers never, ever talk about this. One of the reasons I wrote the book was because I thought it was about time someone did, and I wasn't about to wait around until some publisher decided they wanted to take a risk on it. So that means I need to get the message out about it however I can.


Ultimately, Buddhism is about dis-establishing an identity, getting rid of the feeling of self-as-thing that makes so much trouble in the world. But I'm trying not to get attached to this new identity I'm creating on-line. Naturally I'm hoping the book gets lots of downloads, lots of people reading and discussing it, and that the messages I'm trying to convey gets through to lots of people because I think these messages could help people's practice enormously. The reality is though that publishing has become so easy and there are so many people writing that the sheer volume of books available is likely to overwhelm my small and relatively insignificant contribution. So I'm perfectly prepared if, a year from now, my contribution just shows up as a blip in the download stats of the ebook retailers' Web sites.

Image courtesy of SafetyWeb.com

On Vow

I've recently been thinking about this topic a lot. It came up in a response to post I made on the Dharmaoverground site about the Bodhisattva Vow. The Bodhisattva Vow normally goes something like this:

As long as samsara exists, may I continue to exist to help sentient beings achieve enlightenment.

We chant a similar wording at every Zen retreat. What the Bodhisattva Vow is saying is that the vow-er gives up the possibility to cut off rebirth through enlightenment, to continue being reborn in a way that helps sentient beings, essentially endlessly, until the end of time.

Now, on the face of it, that's a pretty tall order. First off, it presumes a metaphysical doctrine of rebirth. In fact, my post to the Dharamoverground site was about a quote from Mahasi Saydaw's book Progress of Insight:

Some meditators are unable to go beyond the Knowledge of Equanimity about
Formations due to some powerful aspirations they have made in the past,
such as for Buddhahood, or Paccekabuddhahood, Chief Discipleship, etc.
In fact, it is at this stage that one can ascertain whether one has made
any such aspiration in the past. Sometimes when he has reached this
stage the meditator himself comes to feel that he is cherishing a
powerful aspiration. However, even for an aspirant to Buddhahood or
Paccekabuddahood, the Knowledge of Equanimity about Formations will be
an asset towards his fulfilment of the perfection of wisdom
(panna-parami). This Equanimity of Formations is of no small
significance when one takes into account the high degree of development
in knowledge at this stage

Mahasi Saydaw seems to be saying that a meditator can't go beyond the last stage in the stages of insight, Knowledge of Equanimity, if they've ever taken the Bodhisattva Vow. So the Bodhisattva Vow acts as a kind of block to achieving First Path (or as it is more commonly known, sotapanna or stream entry, more about this in a later post) because if you ever achieve First Path, you only have seven lifetimes before you will achieve full enlightenment which cuts off further rebirth.  Of course, if you don't share the canonical Theravadan metaphysical view of rebirth then the Bodhisattva Vow as a block to First Path is moot.

But this got me to thinking about vows. Vows are an unpopular topic these days, because most people, especially young people, don't like to commit themselves. Now normally, a vow is nothing if not a commitment. You state a clear intention to accomplish something, usually in public, then put the full force of body, speech, and mind behind achieving that. It's different than just wanting to do something, because you've more or less promised yourself and sometimes other people that you'll try to accomplish it. You may or may not achieve your intention. If you don't, you will most likely learn something about yourself and the world that you would not otherwise have learned. Then you can either modify your vow or abandon it or continue to try to achieve it, whatever seems most appropriate at the time.

The Bodhisattva Vow isn't like that. If you generate an intention to achieve it, then put the full force of your body, speech, and mind behind the intention, you either end up becoming very frustrated or go crazy*. So what is it?

A couple weeks ago, I was on a retreat with Zen Heart Sangha, and the theme for the retreat was vow, a surprising coincidence considering it has been a hot topic in my practice lately. The last day of the retreat, I realized what the difference was: the Bodhisattva Vow is like a koan. It isn't logically achievable like a normal vow. You express your realization by the extent you embody it.

For myself, I took vows around the 10 precepts when I was ordained as a Zen monk in 1994 and even though I am not in active training anymore, I still try to keep them. The two most difficult to keep are the vow not to kill and the vows around speech.

That the vows around speech are hard to keep might not seem surprising. Third party speech, complaining about other people's performance at work, praising our own performance, even telling a small lie now and then in order to avoid hurting other people's feelings are things that everybody does. While I try to avoid them as much as possible (especially lying) sometimes I slip up. And, like I said above, this tells me something about myself and the world that lets me recommit to my vows. What it tells me about myself is that I've got a ways to go before the sense of "me" is weak enough that I'm prepared to let some conversation go by where I might end up at a disadvantage. What it tells me about the world is that society is built in a certain way that, sometimes, you end up in a position where you think that speech in conflict with the vow is necessary to keep social harmony.

But the vow around killing: how is that hard to keep that? Well, this vow has to do with killing anything, not just people and large mammals. I don't hunt, but we do get invasions of ants in our house, and I've got no choice but to kill them. Otherwise, they end up crawling on food and on us when we are asleep. So I try to do it in a way that is as ecologically benign as possible to avoid endangering other animals: first find where they are getting into the house and block it up, second use boric acid, which is nontoxic to larger animals, where they have trails outside, and finally, by flooding their nests if I can find them. And while I fortunately haven't really had to do it yet, I'm also prepared to kill rats if they persist in using our garden as a buffet.

Again, what I learn about the world from the ants is that if you introduce an invasive species into an ecosystem, sometimes it will get out of control. The ants we have problems with were introduced from Argentina many decades ago. In their home country, they are much more genetically diverse, so their numbers are kept in check by wars between colonies and their queens. In California, the genetic diversity is so low that some nests have multiple queens. So they reproduce to enormous numbers, especially in late summer. In most urban areas, the Argentine ants have wiped out the native Californian species. They are not enough of an economic problem to have attracted the attention of the agricultural departments at UC, otherwise there might have been an effort to find an ecological control.

Rats are more complicated. Unfortunately, our neighbors house and yard is overrun with them, and since our neighbors are both elderly, they don't seem to notice or care. We had rats under our house for many years and after much difficulty managed to get rid of them. I really don't want them back, because they make noise at night and their urine and feces smell, to say nothing of the occasional dead rat that ends up decaying. As with the ants, I try to encourage them not to come into our yard, with an ultrasonic device that is unpleasant for them to hear, but sometimes the prospect of a freshly fallen peach is worth the unpleasantness.

So what to do? Admit that I need to violate my vow and, sadly, that the world is unfortunately the way it is, but take no delight or exhibit aggressiveness at having to arrange for the demise of a fellow sentient being. Sometimes, say an "om mani padme hum!" to wish them well on their next round of samsara.** Then recommit to not killing. And, if they ever come up with a way to get rid of rats or ants that doesn't involve killing them, deploy it in our yard as soon as possible.



* Actually, this is part of what happened when I was on retreat and went crazy in 2011. I literally generated an intention to save all sentient beings then tried to carry it out in the only way I knew how at the time. See the "Flashback 2011" chapter in the book for more.

** Even though the scientific evidence indicates that rebirth is physically impossible.

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