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SHAMATHA: THE TRAINING

The previous chapter was a prelude, a warm-up. Here I will teach about shamatha, or calm abiding, in detail. First, I want to address the issue of conceptual mind—the state of mind in which experience is divided into or held as having two parts, subject and object. This holding of duality is what fuels the whole play, the whole drama. (Conceptual mind in Tibetan is called lo; dualistic thinking mind is sem.)

The view held during shamatha practice is a conceptual view. There are a few types of shamatha. One I call “stupidity training,” a training in being dull and absentminded. It is actually not a formal meditation practice, but people do use it, so it needs to be mentioned. As a matter of fact, many people mistake their stupidity training for real shamatha. The genuine training is traditionally described as being of two types: one is supported shamatha with object, while the other is unsupported shamatha without object.

The idea of meditation started to become popular in the West in the sixties. People began to associate a certain mental state with that word. Sometimes it is used to refer to a kind of shutting off, a process of remaining uninvolved and going into your own space, an altered state where you don’t notice anything happening in the outside world. To practice in this way means to distance yourself from experiencing through the senses. You go into a state of oblivion, absentminded and totally dim, just like animals do in hibernation. This process of shutting off from anything and trying to stay like that was sometimes called deep relaxation and even meditation. Many people still do this. One can slip into this when training in shamatha, and many people are in fact fond of it. They like it because it’s peaceful, and it feels like taking a break. Someone who trains like that for years and years will become progressively duller and more stupid. His eyes will become very cloudy. This type of “progress” is dangerous. Please watch out! There’s a big risk in mistaking that state of stupidity training for the training in shamatha.

Just as an experiment, let’s rest in stupidity training for five minutes. We should be familiar with it so that we can identify what it is. Close your eyes. Do not think of anything. It’s just like when you lean back in the sauna after working out—there’s no attempt to know anything. You may even drool. You completely close down but are somewhat relaxed. Mentally there is no activity. Do you recognize this state?

First-class stupidity training for even five minutes will surely put you to sleep. There is a strong link between this state and sleep. Falling asleep is caused by dullness, and to train in shutting down like that pulls us into the absentminded state of sleep.

Shamatha is definitely unlike that. It should have a certain brightness. During shamatha, you are well aware of what is happening all around you. Your attention is focused on nowness, and yet at the same time you are able to notice what is going on around you, both right and left.

Let’s do another five minutes of stupidity training. Do not keep hold of anything; just forget all your worries. Totally shut off into a state of dullness. Don’t try to figure out anything. This is not the time for realization. We are not trying to attain anything from this. Do not maintain any particular thought activity; simply withdraw inside.

Those of you who have gone to the beach know this state. Those of you who have gone trekking in the mountains know this state. It is not something new. You go to the beach, you swim around, then you lie on your back with a towel over your face and do stupidity training. You just kind of pass out there on the beach. After about twenty minutes, you think, “How relaxing!” But that sort of training does not brighten your intelligence; it brings no insight. Without insight, there is nothing to wipe out the seeds for further samsaric existence. So, right now, close your eyes. You have to close your eyes for this practice, but still sit with a straight back.

[A few minutes of stupidity training]

Enough. This is risky. You may fall asleep. The other danger is that tomorrow you might want to repeat this practice. Stupidity training is no good. It may feel cozy, but it’s not Buddhist meditation practice. It is not shamatha and it’s surely not vipashyana. It’s in no way a noble practice.

Shamatha, calm abiding, is completely unlike stupidity training. It is found at many levels of Buddhist practice, as well as in many other spiritual traditions—for instance, the Hindu schools and probably other places as well—but its origin was in the teachings of the Buddha. The Buddha taught meditation as shamatha and vipashyana. Buddhist shamatha has two types: one with support and one without support.

The purpose of shamatha is to improve our presence of mind. We all have an innate ability to pay attention, to know. To improve upon this presence, to make it steady instead of being scattered and distracted, we try to remain attentive in a stable way.

In stupidity training, there’s no sense of nowness. The sense of nowness is allowed to fade away. Stupidity training has no sense of being present. We hold nothing in mind, but we are just about to fall asleep. We are dull, absentminded. In shamatha, we focus on nowness, on being here, right now. There is a sense of knowing, of being mindful: that I am here, that all the objects are here, that everything is taking place and I’m aware of this. There is a certain brightness in this state. The brightness is the quality of knowing what is taking place, even though it may not be a state of liberation.

You can say the brightness is liberated when there is a sense of knowing what it is in itself in the present. That happens at the time of vipashyana, or at the time of the view of the Great Perfection, of Dzogchen. Right now, during the straight and honest shamatha of dwelling in nowness, this quality of freedom is not yet there; it is missing. Nevertheless, we need to begin with the type of nowness that is mindful of the present. In order to be here now, we need a certain amount of support to not let the attention drift off or slip away to this and that.

Shamatha has three components: being mindful, alert, and settled. Imagine a shepherd at work. When the sheep are tethered, they remain settled. They have a rope tied around their necks to prevent them from walking too far away. That rope is mindfulness. But there is also the shepherd supervising the whole affair, not paying too much attention to each individual sheep, but looking to see if everything is okay, keeping an eye out in case something goes wrong. Some really stupid sheep may get tangled up in their rope, and if there’s no shepherd there to undo it immediately, they can strangle themselves. Then the shepherd walks over and undoes the rope so the sheep can again roam and graze. That is alertness.

That was the analogy; here comes the meaning. When this attention of ours, this mind, is not following the past and not planning the future but just remaining in nowness, that’s a sense of settling, of staying put. Next, something extra is needed to keep the attention on the present, to prevent the attention from going astray into thinking about the past or the future. The sheep feels a tension at its throat if it walks a little too far away, so it moves back to make the rope more slack. That is the analogy for mindfulness, the method for keeping the attention tethered to the present moment, remaining settled in the present. Third and most important is the sense of alertness, the supervising quality that stays alert to whether this attention remains present or not. Without this, how would one know whether one is being distracted? How would one know whether this mind actually remains settled in nowness? Thus, the most important quality is this sense of overall alertness, the sense of being awake to the whole situation.

This alertness sees the whole picture. In midst of the entire panorama of shamatha, there is something that knows very clearly that you remain settled. You know you are settled, while at the same time you know you are not distracted. You are there together with the sense of abiding, and this knowing also is aware. This whole atmosphere is needed in shamatha practice. Slowly and gradually, the alertness will become more alert, more alert, more alert.

The correct practice of shamatha further and further strengthens this alert quality. It transforms into an increasing sense of being awake. Meanwhile, the mindful quality becomes more and more mindful, so that it requires less and less effort. You are just naturally mindful, naturally present. And the sense of being settled, of dwelling in the nowness, becomes more and more of the same identity as the alertness, until finally the alertness pulls this state into something that is no longer just shamatha: it has become vipashyana, the state of seeing clearly.

The Mahamudra teachings say that when the division between stillness and thought occurrence falls away, this is the recognition of one-pointedness. This one-pointedness is actually shamatha. At the beginning, there was a very strong division in one’s mind between being quiet and thinking. However, when this alertness, in Tibetan called shezhin, becomes a sense of wakefulness that grows stronger and stronger, then at a certain point there is no longer any wall between stillness and thinking—the boundary falls apart. Everything is just one continuity of being alert and awake. And this alertness or awake quality is completely settled, without your having to try to settle it.

Please understand that Buddhist meditation training from A to Z, from beginning to end, has one central quality: this sense of knowing, this sense of being awake. It comes and goes again and again, but it is always identical in essence. This quality is given many names—alertness, wakefulness, shunyata, insight, omniscient wisdom—but it is the same basic quality that goes all the way through. And if, at any point during Buddhist meditation training, this quality goes missing, then that is definitely not the path to complete enlightenment. Please understand this point very clearly. Even at the very beginning, in shamatha practice, this sense of knowing is that which keeps alert to the existence of subject and object, that which stays aware, although in a dualistic sense. As it becomes the vipashyana quality, it is aware of nonduality, the absence of subject and object. The knowing quality that extends all the way through these various practices is identical in essence, though the subject of its knowing may change. There are different levels of practice, but you always need this basic knowing, this sense of awareness.

Actually, stupidity training does have some purpose. It is useful when you are very agitated, when you cannot sleep, and if you want to get a stupid rebirth. Otherwise, it’s not much use. Though one could mistake stupidity training for shamatha practice, most people don’t. Instead, they go astray when introduced to Mahamudra and Dzogchen. In Mahamudra and Dzogchen it is said, “Do not concentrate, do not fixate, do not meditate, do not hold anything in mind, don’t do anything at all.” Some people might think, “All right, I don’t need to do anything, so I’ll just relax,” and then they go into that state of stupidity. It does happen. This is why many meditators go to sleep as soon as they meditate, especially Tibetans and other Asians. Westerners are a little different.

It’s also very important to have open eyes during meditation, even though many people say it’s hard to sit with open eyes. It may be difficult at the beginning, but the real difficulty lies in the way of looking—in knowing how to place the eyes, how to gaze. We have the habit, whenever our eyes are open, of spearing one object after the other with the eye consciousness. Therefore, when we try to just leave the gaze free it feels funny; it feels like we can’t stay that way. Many people ask, “Where do I need to look? In which direction am I supposed to look?” You don’t have to focus, but that doesn’t mean looking in an unfocused way. Wherever you look, just look in that way. You do not have to look at a particular spot.

I think you know the difference between these two styles of meditation, between stupidity training and shamatha with support. One is to withdraw the knowing quality, and the other is to focus outwardly. The real meditation state is not withdrawn, nor is it focused outwardly, nor is it the maintenance of a certain state in between these two. It does not dwell on anything at all, but rather is totally free and pervasive. Do you understand this? The real meditation state is like space. Space does not dwell on anything, but at the same time it is all-pervasive. This is how shamatha without support should be.

Shamatha with support focuses the attention on an object like the breath and uses this focus as a way of abiding. Shamatha without support doesn’t focus on any particular object but simply abides in nowness. Either way, however, shamatha is still a way of confining your mind. Among the possibilities of arising, dwelling, and ceasing, shamatha is a way of ceasing, of confining yourself to nowness. Did you get that? In shamatha practice you are occupying yourself. In addition, it contains hope and fear.

Shamatha has an object held in mind, and the object is nowness. It’s a way of occupying oneself with nowness. Instead of being occupied with attachment, anger, stupidity, jealousy, and pride, one is occupied with nowness. Unfortunately, at the same time, there is also no devotion, no compassion, and no omniscient wakefulness. None of these is present, only a sense of nowness.

It’s like when you’re in the toilet on an airplane, the OCCUPIED sign is lit up. For as long as you’re occupying that space, you are unable to meet the people on the other side of the door. Even if the Buddha comes onto the plane, you won’t meet him. The Buddha comes and sees the sign: “Oh, occupied, I’m not going to enter.” So you do not have a chance to meet the Buddha. Next, an obstacle demon comes and says, “Oh, it’s occupied, I won’t go in.” Inside the cubicle, you still have hope and fear—especially when you are returning from Kathmandu to your own country, because your stomach is not feeling so good. You have the sincere hope to stay in there and rest and make sure everything is fine, but you also have fear because people are waiting outside, maybe knocking on the door. Shamatha is a little bit like that. You are occupied with the present moment, and thus unavailable to whatever may happen to pass by. Anger comes and you are occupied; a positive emotion comes and you are occupied. You are present, practicing correctly, having a nice time in the toilet. Shamatha with support is something like that.

Shamatha is indeed a skillful method. Without it, your attention is so wild, all over the place, like a whirlwind. If you submit to whatever this movement is and go wherever it takes you, there is the risk of going nuts. It’s better to shut yourself up inside the toilet for a while and take a little rest.

Next is unsupported shamatha, in which your attention makes use of no support. Unsupported shamatha keeps no real object in mind. We’re simply allowing the aware quality of mind to be as it is, without doing anything to it. It seems as if there is no support. This is true, but only relatively speaking, within the context of shamatha itself. When viewed from higher levels of practice, some support is still apparent. This support, this object that is held in mind, is the feeling of being present: “This nowness, all of this is right now, moment by moment; it is vividly present.” Nowness is the object, and the subject is the knowing of that, acknowledging the nowness. Unsupported shamatha is simply remaining undistracted from nowness. Generally speaking, for a beginner there is the danger of mistaking stupidity training for shamatha. But for a practitioner, the real danger lies in mistaking unsupported shamatha for vipashyana. Please understand this point.

To get a taste of this teaching, let’s first do a short session of shamatha with support. Right now, you should not close your eyes. Just use any support in front of you—but not the neck of the guy in front of you, because when he moves you get distracted. Just relax and remain very quietly, with your attention simply resting on something, without being distracted by anything else. At the same time, allow everything else to be present as well. Nothing is blocked out, but your attention is directed only at your support.

Don’t close your eyes, because if you close your eyes now you risk falling back into stupidity training. While it is perfectly all right to use the movement of breath as the support, in our tradition we still do not close our eyes. As a matter of fact, do not close any of your sense organs. Do not close any doors. Simply pay attention. When exhaling, notice that your breathing is moving out. When inhaling, notice that your breath is coming into you; just that, nothing else.

Or, as an alternative to using the breath as the support, pay attention to the picture of the Buddha on the wall or a flower on the shrine or the crown on the Karmapa’s statue. Pick something ten or fifteen feet in front of you. Anything will do. You can just let your breathing flow freely, without being concerned with it at all.

Together with that focused attention, there should be a certain feeling of being unblocked. You are not concentrating, not trying to grab hold of something tightly. That’s not what is meant by focused. Rather, you’re just staying with the object of your attention.

Don’t do anything weird with your eyes; just leave them as they are. Look in the same way you usually look at something. Normally, when you walk around you don’t stare; you just allow things to be seen. Some people may seem as if they are trying to twist their eyes around while meditating, so that one eye is up and the other is down. That is not necessary. Imagine that you have a basin of water and two glass spheres—you just put them into the water and leave them there. That is how you should leave your eyes.

Do not twist your eyes or move them in two different directions. If you do, your eyes will start hurting. You might as well be natural. When you listen to a sound, you do not have to sit like this either, in order to hear. [Rinpoche crooks his neck] You can just allow the sound to be heard. It’s the same with any sensory input—we can be totally natural about how that sensory input is being received. So right now, let’s be relaxed and comfortable. Happy mind. Choose your object.

[Practice session]

RINPOCHE: All right. Now, what is the difference in the feeling of this state compared to the previous one? Any difference?

STUDENT: Brighter.

RINPOCHE: How about feeling? Which one felt nicer, the first time or the second?

STUDENT: The second.

RINPOCHE: I disagree. I prefer the first one, it feels better. Now, what’s the main difference?

STUDENT: More wakeful.

STUDENT 2: There’s no sense of “I” in the first one.

RINPOCHE: During the session, there was somebody beating a drum over there. Did you all hear this?

STUDENT: Yes.

RINPOCHE: Very good. What else did you notice?

STUDENT: The light dimmed.

RINPOCHE: Wasn’t that being distracted?

STUDENT: No.

RINPOCHE: How do you know that? How do you know the difference between being distracted and noticing that the light is dimming or that someone is beating a drum? Could it be that the moment the light dims, you switch your focus from the support of your attention over to the electric light?

STUDENT: Well, no, maybe not, because being able to perceive that object depends on the light, because it could be dark. [Laughter]

RINPOCHE: Is it possible to be open and yet at the same time notice that someone is beating a drum?

STUDENT: Yes.

RINPOCHE: I said open, yes. But I did not say undistracted. Wide open. Now, what is it we call “the present”? Is it the presence of the electric light, the presence of what you were using as the support, or what? Right now, in the context of shamatha with support, you pay attention to one spot. Is it possible to pay attention to more than one thing at the same time, without being distracted from the first one and then moving over to the second?

STUDENT: I would have to be totally blocked off to not notice what took place. I acknowledged it, but quickly returned to the stillness practice.

RINPOCHE: Shamatha with support is similar to what you are saying. You pay attention to the object with 80 percent attention. Twenty percent is still allowed to register everything else. That is the best way. Otherwise, if we pay 100 percent attention to the object of focus, there is a risk of getting stuck in that and becoming absorbed. So what you said is actually very good.

Now, for the second type of shamatha, do not worry about the breathing, and don’t worry about using an object as support. Just leave the attention as it is, right now. Let whatever happens happen, but do not get caught up in it. Do not hold any special object in mind. At some point a thought will form. When that happens, do not follow it. Just remain in the present.

Do you understand what is meant by “the present”? Not following the past, not planning the future, not holding an object in mind right now. Just leave your attention totally relaxed, and remain like that. Remain in nowness. Following thoughts is not good enough. Trying to stop thinking is not good enough. Shamatha without support remains in the nowness without getting caught up in thought.

Did you understand what I said? Is it clear? What did I say?

STUDENT: Remain in the nowness without getting caught up in thought.

[Laughter]

RINPOCHE: Please explain what that means.

STUDENT: When a thought comes up, you just let it go rather than following it.

RINPOCHE: But still remaining in the present. You need to stay in the nowness. The main focus here is presence of mind, knowing whatever is. Keep to that. In this context as well, you keep your eyes open. A lot of you seem to like to close your eyes. That is not a good habit. If you close your eyes today, then tomorrow you might be closing your ears. You will bring along your earplugs. Then you will want to close your nostrils too, so you don’t have to smell anything. Let’s not get into attitudes like that. You’re allowed to notice whatever takes place. It’s okay. If you train with closed eyes, then later on when you leave here and you have to carry the practice with you in daily life, how will you be able to function walking around with closed eyes? Wouldn’t it be better to be capable, to have open eyes right from the start? The purpose of our present meditation training is to become capable of dealing with any emotional state that is triggered while we walk, talk, eat, or lie down, rather than being overwhelmed. When the emotions well up, do you always have time to sit down and close your eyes in order to deal with it?