Meditative Attainments Part III: Four Views of Nivrana

 

The great Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai authored a series of thirty-six landscape prints known as Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku Sanjurokekki in Japanese).  The prints show views of Mount Fuji from various viewpoints around the mountain, some located in urban areas and some in rural areas. The most famous print in the series is the first one, entitled The Great Wave Off Kamakura, shown above. The print shows a huge wave overshadowing the small boats and even smaller men. The foam boiling off the top of the wave looks like a flock of birds. In the background, Mount Fuji floats, a serene white presence insulated from the chaos in front.  Most Buddhist traditions talk about nirvana like that, a serene refuge from the chaos of samsara. But there are quite different views of nirvana in the different traditions.

In Part II, I talked about a naturalistic view of meditative attainments, how one could get a base-line shift in a person's long term mental state away from suffering and towards wisdom and compassion without having to invoke any transcendental cause. As I've mentioned, the traditions which view meditative attainments as crucial (and they don't all have this view) maintain that this kind of fundamental shift, basically awakening or enlightenment as a consequence of a meditative attainment, comes from experiencing nirvana during meditation.  In this post, I'd like to talk about different views of nirvana in the different traditions, at least as I understand them.

Guy Armstrong has an excellent talk at the Dharma Seed library with a high level summary of the four views held by various traditions on what nirvana is. These are:

1.  The Madyamika tradition in Tibet, which is the tradition to which the Dali Lama belongs, maintains that nirvana has no ontological reality. Nirvana is the complete and total absence of greed, hatred, and delusion, not an object. It can only be experienced moment to moment, as a moment completely free of greed, hatred and delusion, not as an object in meditation. This view was developed by the famous 3rd century AD Buddhist philosopher Nagarajuna, the founder of the Madyamika tradition, and is in contrast to the view of the Abhidhamma.
2. The Burmese and Sri Lankan Theravada meditation schools have a view developed out of the Abhidhamma and Visuddhimagga which I talked about briefly in Part I. Nirvana is a mental dhamma, or object, that neither exists nor does not exist. It is described as supramundane, the Unborn, the Uncreated, the Deathless. When the mind makes contact with the nirvana object in meditation, the mental aggregates of feeling, perception, formations (sankaras or drives), and consciousness all cease. The mental aggregates reboot when the mind turns away from the nirvana object, and if this is the first such contact at a particular level, certain negative tendencies of the mind are dissolved. Rinzai Zen has a similar view that the moment of satori  involves the falling away of the metal aggregates, as described by James Austin in Zen and the Brain, though it is not as specific about the dissolution of those negative mind tendencies which lead to suffering.
3. The Thai Forest tradition view is that contact with nirvana causes feeling,  perception, and formations to cease but not consciousness. Normally, according to the Buddha's teaching, consciousness can't exist without an object. During the meditative attainment leading to enlightenment, the object of consciousness becomes consciousness itself, and a knowing of the Unconditioned arises. If you're a programmer, you recognize this pattern: its a setup for an infinite recursion. Consciousness takes itself as an object which, being consciousness takes itself as an object, which.... That infinite recursion causes consciousness to somehow become unbound from the need to exist in conjunction with an object. Than Geoff describes this view in his short book The Mind Like Fire Unbound. There's some evidence that the Korean Zen tradition has a similar view. Chinul (1158–1210) the founder of Korean Seon or Zen describes this as "tracing back the radiance" of consciousness to its source which is the Unconditioned. Robert Buswell describes Chinul's teaching in a book by the same name. There's some thread of this in Soto too, as can be seen by some of the essays in Jikyo Cheryl Wolfer's recent book Seeds of Virtue, Seeds of Change, particularly in the essay by Myoan Grace Schireson.
4. The final view is that nirvana is the unchanging nature of Mind, the Big Mind or True Self that doesn't die and wasn't born, Buddha-nature, or the Tathagatagabra, and that we always have it. This view is held by Tibetan rigpa teachings. The goal of rigpa is to experience empty knowing as you go about your daily life. This view is also close to the Dogen Zenji Soto tradition in which Suzuki Roshi taught in, which I practiced for many years and where I still practice with friends occasionally.

 On the surface, these four views seem to have very few points in common. 2. and 3. involve a special experience developed during meditation, but the experience is quite different, and leads to some very different conclusions. 1. and 4. involve no special experience in meditation, but 4. doesn't talk about reduction in negative mind tendencies, just empty knowing, which presumably results in the negative mind tendencies being suppressed or eliminated, whereas 1. specifically defines the experience of nongreed, nonhatred, and nondelusion as nirvana. So comparing the traditions, one can become quite confused about what an experience of nirvana is. If the traditions don't agree on how to achieve the key goal of practice, how can anybody be expected to know when they've achieve it?

The answer to that in the traditions is that a teacher usually certifies, upon a report of an experience, that one has attained enlightenment. The problem with this is: what happens if you have an experience that is outside what the tradition considers the canonical experience of enlightenment, but falls within that of another tradition? Realistically, teachers can only certify an experience if they are familiar with it themselves. But what if all the views are right? What if there are multiple, equally valid paths to enlightenment, to the long term reduction of greed, hatred, and delusion, and the arising of happiness, equanimity, and understanding?