The Ten Stages of Meditation: The monk is the meditator. The rope he holds represents vigilant, alert mindfulness. The goad in his other hand represents strong intention and firm resolve. The elephant represents the mind. The black color of the elephant represents the Five Hindrances and the Seven Problems they give rise to. The monkey represents scattering of attention, and the black color represents subtle and gross distraction, forgetting, and mind-wandering. The rabbit represents subtle dullness. The flames represent vigilance and effort, and when effort is no longer required, the flames disappear. The length of the road between successive Stages indicates the relative time required to progress from one Stage to the next. The Stages come closer together until Stage Seven, then they begin to stretch out again. Because the road folds back, it is possible to jump up to higher Stages or fall back to lower ones.

PUTTING THIS PRACTICE INTO CONTEXT

The meditation landscape in the West is a vibrant but confusing place. Tibetan practices emphasize elaborate visualizations or sophisticated analytical meditations, whereas Zen strips meditation down to the bare bones, giving you minimal instructions like “just sit.” Some Theravada teachers emphasize rigorously cultivating mindfulness to the exclusion of stable, focused attention, while others insist that intense concentration leading to deep meditative absorption7 is best. Rather than argue for any specific technique, this book will help you make sense of all these different approaches without having to reject any of them. But to do this, I first need to clarify an important set of terms commonly found in meditation literature, showing how they relate to each other and to the goal of Awakening8. These terms are: śamatha9 (tranquility or calm abiding), vipassanā10 (Insight), samādhi (concentration or stable attention), and sati (mindfulness).

Awakening from our habitual way of perceiving things requires a profound shift in our intuitive understanding of the nature of reality. Awakening is a cognitive event, the culminating Insight in a series of very special Insights called vipassana. This climax of the progress of Insight only occurs when the mind is in a unique mental state called śamatha.11 Śamatha and vipassana are both generated using stable attention (samādhi) and mindfulness (sati). Although it’s possible to cultivate either śamatha or vipassanā independently of one another, both are necessary for Awakening.12

Śamatha has five characteristics: effortlessly stable attention (samādhi),13 powerful mindfulness (sati), joy, tranquility, and equanimity.14 The complete state of śamatha results from working with stable attention and mindfulness until joy emerges. Joy then gradually matures into tranquility, and equanimity arises out of that tranquility. A mind in śamatha is the ideal instrument for achieving Insight.15

Vipassanā refers specifically to Insight into the true nature of reality that radically transforms our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the world. However, meditation also produces many other very useful “mundane insights,” such as a better understanding of our own personality, social interactions, human behavior in general, and how the everyday world works. It can give us flashes of creative brilliance or intellectual epiphanies that solve problems or help us make new discoveries. These useful insights are not vipassanā, however, because they neither transform us personally, nor our understanding of reality, in any profound way. The Insights called vipassanā are not intellectual. Rather, they are experientially based, deeply intuitive realizations that transcend, and ultimately shatter, our commonly held beliefs and understandings. The five most important of these are Insights into impermanence, emptiness, the nature of suffering, the causal interdependence of all phenomena, and the illusion of the separate self (i.e. “no-Self”).16

You can experience the first four of these Insights using stable attention (samadhi)17 and mindfulness (sati)18 to investigate phenomena (dhamma vicaya19) with persistence and energy (viriya20). The fifth, Insight into no-Self, is the culminating Insight that actually produces Awakening, because only by overcoming our false, self-centered worldview can we realize our true nature. But this crucial Insight requires, in addition to the first four Insights, that the mind also be in a state of śamatha, filled with deep tranquility and equanimity.21

For both śamatha and vipassana, you need stable attention (samadhi) and mindfulness (sati).22 Unfortunately, many meditation traditions split samadhi and sati, linking concentration practice exclusively to śamatha, and mindfulness practice exclusively to vipassanā.23 This creates all sorts of problems and misunderstandings, such as emphasizing mindfulness at the expense of stable attention, or vice versa. Stable, hyper-focused attention without mindfulness leads only to a state of blissful dullness: a complete dead end.24 But, just as stable attention without mindfulness is a dead end, the opposite is also true. You simply cannot develop mindfulness without stable attention. Until you have at least a moderate degree of stability, “mindfulness practice” will consist mostly of mind-wandering, physical discomfort, drowsiness, and frustration. Like two wings of a bird, both stable attention and mindfulness are needed, and when cultivated together, the destination of this flight is śamatha and vipassanā.25