There Are Two Cautions for Meditation
There are two main things we must be careful about when practicing Buddhist meditation. The first is how to deal with the feelings, emotions, and physical and mental phenomena that arise during meditation. The second is what attitude to take toward Buddhist meditation itself. If we miss these two points, we can practice meditation while still misunderstanding what meditation is.
First, I want to make one thing clear. The Buddhist meditation I describe is not an attempt to create a special experience by assuming a special posture. Whether I read a book, draw, make music, sing, watch a film, exercise, or do anything else, if I can devote myself to it and concentrate completely, that is meditation.
First Caution: Simply Immerse Yourself
Even Drinking a Cup of Tea Can Be Meditation
Suppose I want to drink tea because I want to rest for a while without thinking about anything else. I only need to taste the tea, feel the warm cup against my hand, and fully experience the comfort and pleasure of this moment. I concentrate on the taste, the warmth, and this moment of rest, immersing myself in the act of drinking tea. Then there is no room for another thought to intrude.
If I can immerse myself in whatever I am doing, it is meditation, so strictly speaking I do not need some separate meditation. Still, I recommended breath observation as one method for a reason. Breath observation can be practiced anywhere and at any time, anyone can do it, and it consumes no special additional energy.
Once I become accustomed to observing the breath, I can quickly return even after falling into an irrelevant train of thought. I notice, “Ah, I was thinking about something else,” and return to the breath. This is the practical usefulness of breath observation.
Do Not Mystify Alertness or Unusual Sensations
The breath enters and leaves on its own. I do not have to expend the active mental or physical energy required when exercising, drawing, reading, watching a film, or playing baduk or janggi. Yet I am not asleep or dreaming. I am awake while spending little other energy, a condition we rarely experience in ordinary life. It resembles the state of non-doing, in which I am not trying to accomplish something.
When I simply watch the breath and the mind gathers in one place, a state of alertness can arise in which the mind wakes up as sharply as it does after coffee. People in different periods have interpreted that feeling in peculiar ways. Like people in ancient India, they may imagine that a chakra has opened through the brain and cosmic energy is pouring in, or they may feel as though the body is floating. They may write about various experiences as if they were mystical events.
I call such experiences delusions. If I am watching the feeling that my body is floating, am I observing my breathing at that moment, or am I observing the sensation of floating? The moment I think I feel cosmic energy, I am likewise no longer concentrating on the breath. When a new thought, sensation, or feeling arises and pulls me along, that means I am still failing to immerse myself.
Even if such a feeling arises, I should not treat it as important. I simply notice, “I have lost my immersion,” and return to observing the breath. Whether I am dragged along by a thought, a feeling, or a sensation, I have lost the breath. Do not assign it a mystical meaning. Simply concentrate on breathing.
Do Not Try to Conquer Sleep or Pain
I have not required a particular posture for breath observation. I may lie down or sit. If I become sleepy while lying down, that is natural. Especially when I meditate before bedtime, it is human to fall deeply asleep. If I concentrated for even one minute and then fell asleep, that is fine. I will be less sleepy if I practice after getting up in the morning, and if lying down always sends me to sleep, I can sit instead.
If my legs hurt while sitting, I should not insist on a half-lotus or full-lotus posture; I can sit in a chair. If my back hurts in the chair, I can stand. Do not reject or try to overcome bodily pain and natural phenomena. The body should not be made to hurt. Enduring pain must not be mistaken for immersion.
Do not attempt ascetic ordeals or acts that merely look holy. Do not regard something like ten years of never lying down as Buddhist meditation. If I can immerse myself for even a very short moment, that is Buddhist meditation. Tormenting the body in the name of heroic exertion is not the Buddhist meditation I mean.
Second Caution: Do Not Become Attached to Meditative Absorption
Why Absorption Feels Good and How Judgment Returns
Buddhist meditation can sometimes lead to meditative absorption. Buddhist circles may divide absorption into four stages, but there is no need to explain those stages here. Consider reading as a form of meditation. After becoming completely absorbed in a good novel and reading a long epic as though I were its protagonist, I feel disappointed when the book ends. The book itself was entertaining, but I also loved the time I spent absorbed in it.
The same applies to exercise and hobbies. Complete immersion in something naturally feels good because judgment is always involved when we ordinarily perceive and think about reality. Judgment needs a standard, and that standard consists of thoughts and fixed ideas I have accumulated. By that standard, I judge whether I am happy or unhappy, what I like or dislike, what is beautiful or ugly, dirty or clean, what I should or should not do, and what is right or wrong.
But that standard is merely an illusion I have accumulated. When immersion ends and I return to ordinary life, I collide again with things in the real world. Each collision produces an emotion; emotion means that judgment is present, and judgment means that fixed ideas remain. The countless concepts and fixed ideas I have built do not vanish automatically because I meditated.
Hobbies and Immersion Relieve Stress
Modern people experience stress and release it by becoming absorbed in hobbies. If I have nothing into which I can immerse myself, mental suffering continues, and that suffering affects the body. Mind and body are not two. When the mind suffers, the body may develop a stomach ulcer, cancer, a skin problem, or another illness; when the body hurts, it affects the mind in return. They cannot exist independently but stand within the relationships of not-self, impermanence, and dependent arising.
That is why I recommend making time to relieve stress by immersing oneself in something enjoyable. If I live only in worry, depression, anger, and rage, continually suffering, the body will eventually break down first. Whether through a hobby or another activity, everyone needs some way to enjoy and become absorbed in something.
Do Not Mistake a Pleasant State for Awakening
Instead of a hobby, I may experience complete immersion through breath meditation or another Buddhist meditation. Whether it is the first absorption, the second, or another particular state, once a person has experienced a samadhi-like state in which the mind gathers completely in one place, that person begins to seek it again. Some make it extremely important and want it to continue twenty-four hours a day. Then they mistake that state itself for awakening.
Buddhism describes the state of a Buddha as liberation or nirvana. People therefore create a fixed idea that the state of absorption must continue forever without changing. In their heads, they construct an image of the awakened person, Buddha, or arahant as a flawless, godlike being who has cast off every desire and all anger and can never be disturbed.
But that is not the Buddha. It is my own image of the Buddha. Because it appears in books and people hear such descriptions from the moment they begin learning Buddhism, practitioners find it extremely hard to escape this fantasy. They live with all kinds of imaginings about awakened and enlightened beings, but that fantasy is precisely what the Buddha kept at a distance. The fantasy of the awakened person must be discarded.
Becoming Ordinary Outside the Meditation Hall Is Human
While sitting in a meditation hall, a monk may enter absorption and may even carry that state for a while after going outside. But when he returns to daily life and handles real affairs, other thoughts arise and he feels as though he has become an ordinary human again. He then decides, “I am not there yet,” and goes back into the meditation hall. I say this shows that he has failed to understand Buddhist meditation, human beings, and the Buddha.
A person becomes a Buddha by understanding humanity. The human brain is a device that thinks 365 days a year whether I want it to or not, reacts to sounds when it hears them, and reacts to things when they appear before the eyes. Wishing that this device would cease to function as it naturally does is like wishing that the impermanent were not impermanent. Just as we must eat when hungry in order to live, Buddhism begins from understanding human beings and not resisting their nature.
Whether I immerse myself while drinking tea, while reading, through breath meditation, through Ganhwa Seon, or while entering absorption in a meditation hall, there is no difference in the fact of immersion. Yet people become attached to absorption, thinking, “This state must continue if I am to be a Buddha.” They are disappointed when the state comes and goes, and when sleep brings dreams and thoughts. But why should that be so important?
Even someone who has almost experienced the fourth absorption may fail to cross this stage. That person still clings to the images “A Buddha is this kind of being” and “I am not yet a Buddha.” To cross the final stage, even attachment to meditation must be abandoned.
Daily Life Itself Is Meditation
Being visited by stray thoughts is human. What matters is the observation that recognizes a stray thought as a stray thought. Human beings eat when hungry and think irrelevant thoughts when events arise. I only have to accept that this is human and stop being dragged around by it. When I recognize that the thoughts I clung to were idle thoughts, there is no longer any reason to cling to a meditative state.
Yet people who say, “I am enlightened,” “I have seen my true nature,” or “I have awakened,” sometimes return to sit in a meditation hall for two or three months. How is that different from my playing a PC game, feeling good during that time, and doing nothing but playing Civilization IV? There is no difference between a hikikomori shut inside a room doing only that and a person doing nothing but meditation in a meditation hall.
There is no difference between playing games for ten years and sitting in a meditation hall for ten years. To say that one never lay down for ten years is, in my own expression, like saying one masturbated until one’s back nearly broke for ten years.
It is a crude analogy, but my point is clear. If someone says he has awakened while continuing to remain in the pleasure of absorption, it is nothing but masturbation. The mere fact that he has meditated for a long time cannot be evidence of awakening.
Meditation Is a Tool for Awakening
Breath meditation and absorption are tools. If entering absorption and stopping thought showed me how comfortable and pleasant the mind can be, I should use that contrast to recognize how wildly my ordinary emotions and thoughts had been boiling and how many of those thoughts were idle. The purpose is to observe that fact and the fact that I had cherished a fantasy about the Buddha.
Life is impermanent, and I may die tomorrow. I must therefore stop even the desire to become a Buddha. As long as I cling to a fantasy of what a Buddha is, I cannot arrive at Buddhahood. I must understand human beings as they are and avoid attachment to meditation or states of absorption. The quest for something flawless and perfectly pure is itself foolish.
People imagine an impossible state and guess that a being who achieved it would be a Buddha. Someone’s imagination is written into a scripture, and another person inherits the same imagination. They imagine a Buddha who sees every mind and commands supernatural powers—divine eye, divine knowledge, and even, as I joke, neuralgia. If they do not stop that fantasy, they merely become people bound by it.
If You Have Awakened, Come Out into the World
One must not claim awakening and then do nothing but meditate for months. Ten years of never lying down by Seongcheol should not be a boast. If he was awakened, why sit in private pleasure for ten years as though masturbating? One must understand that this is purely self-gratification.
In the process of awakening, we practice breath observation or Ganhwa Seon to stop the stray thoughts and afflictions in our heads and see the world as it is with a clear, clean mind. But if someone claims awakening while remaining absorbed in meditative states, that person is not awakened.
If awakened, one should work hard to save sentient beings and speak and act for the world. It is fine to practice breath meditation or tea meditation briefly from time to time. But rising in the morning to sit, sitting again after eating, and sitting again in the evening while imagining that this is the behavior of a great monk is not admirable. It is time to wake up.
Release Even the Last of the Last Fantasies
Misunderstandings about awakening, awakened people, and the Buddha existed in the past, and the same is true today. Unless I escape the fixed ideas I created, I cannot become an arahant. The condition is to understand human beings fully, accept them as they are, and see them as they are.
Everything is impermanent. As long as I cling to the intention to achieve some state in a distant future rather than today, I cannot become a Buddha. I am chasing an illusion. Even if meditation seems to have brought me to the very end, I must release even the last of the last fantasies. I arrive at that very moment.
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