There’s a great conversation going on over @ Buddhist Geeks about concentration, it’s centrality and importance. Not just in theory, but in practice too.
While Ryan and Duff were discussing how necessary concentration is for developing insight, Daniel Ingram chimed in (a teacher that I’ve worked a lot with and who we’ve interviewed for a future podcast).
Dear All,
Vince asked me to check out this dialogue and so I will comment briefly.
As to my take on concentration: you need some degree of concentration to do basic insight practices, at least enough to consistently note or investigate your chosen object(s) of meditation consistently and precisely without significant interruptions from your “stuff” and distractions. People who don’t have enough concentration to investigate their object(s) will have a very hard time in insight practices.
On the other hand, those with very strong concentration, and there are more of those out there than some of those above might imagine, can have a hard time in insight practices if they fixate or concentrate on the positive qualities they can attain, such as peace, bliss, rapture, tranquility, spaciousness, etc. rather than turning that strong concentration to the Three Characteristics of impermanence, suffering, and the self-less nature of moment to moment sensations, which are by their nature are no fun most of the time, and thus not nearly as attractive as the positive jhanic qualities.
The strongest practitioner is the one with very powerful concentration who knows not to get lost in the samatha jhanas when doing insight practice but has access to them when they want them. However, many can make good progress in insight with little or no samatha jhana ability, myself being a case in point. I didn’t learn how to get into basic jhanas (with the notable exception of the first jhana, which is very much the same as the first insight stage Mind and Body) until I was well advanced in my practice and out of real danger, so to speak. However, I could stay with my objects and perceive them to arise and vanish, moment to moment, without getting lost in my psychological crap that often, and that was enough. I was lucky to have good maps and very good instruction, and am profoundly grateful for these.
I knew to blast anything smacking of pleasure or a jhana to pieces with strong, careful, consistent investigation, and this made the difference. However, later on, when I was an anagami, I learned how to get deeply into very clean samatha jhanas and to this day find them to be a very helpful support to keeping some balance in my stressful life. They are healing, comforting, profound in their way, and in general do the mind a lot of good, just on a different axis from the way the stages of insight do a mind good, though those axes are related, and exploring where they meet is remarkable stuff.
Everyone is different and has different strengths and weaknesses. I found insight practice hard but very workable, whereas the jhanas did not come easy to me at all. I know people who have gotten into stable jhanas without training at all and yet find doing insight practices very difficult. However, I am convinced that with good instruction and strong determination people can, in general, do all of these things in reasonable periods of time if they want them badly enough. I myself wanted them more than anything in the world.
I hope that is helpful,
Daniel
Later on in another comment:
All this theory is only really useful if one is practicing.
Can any of you get into concentration states? If so, which ones? Have any of you started to make progress on the path of insight? If so, how far? Are any of you really wrestling on the cushion with how to keep these two aspects of things in their proper place and utilize them to their proper end?
In short, are these really useful points of discussion, or the same old debate about concentration vs. insight held by armchair scholars that aren’t really dealing with these issues in their practice? If you read the commentaries and hang out in the monasteries, you will find that this topic is thousands of years old and has been rehashed nearly to death a zillion times.
Somebody tell me how all this makes some difference in their actual practice, and we’ll see if there is really any value in this tired old dogma-fest.
If you’re interested in joining in on this conversation I think it could potentially be a very useful one. Having discussed many of these issues with Daniel, I find he has a very direct (and sometimes uncompromising, but in a good way) perspective on the spiritual path.
