Understanding Buddhism:

10. Buddhist Meditation

10. Buddhist Meditation What is your aim in philosophy? -To shew the fly the way out of the fly bottle, Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations From time immemorial it has been said that Buddhism is neither a philosophy nor a religion-not, at any rate, as these terms are used in the West. "None of the Oriental languages has a word which in any way corresponds to our 'philosophy',II I liThe idea of philosophy as a way of conduct has been so predominant in Buddhism/, Guenther continues, "that even that which appears to be a merely intellectual procedure is only a means to further the paving of a way of life,112 liThe highly technical language, however, has often obscured the practical nature of Buddhism and has led scholars and philosophers to believe that Buddhism is as highly speculative as are the Western philosophical systems, Yet, actually theTe is nothing in the teaclling of Buddhism which OUT immediate expeTience does not contain. "3 134 • Understanding Buddhism Across the centuries, of course, in a wide variety of cultural frameworks, the concreteness of this individualized experience has been interpreted in somewhat different ways. Numerous "schools" have emerged from different linguistic and social circumstances, over twenty divisions being mentioned in Hinayana alone. Time has operated as a filter, reducing the diversity to the few most often mentioned in our time: Theravada, Vajrayana, Mahayana, Zen and Hua-yen. Buddhism qualifies as philosophy in the Western sense if Whitehead's suggestion is accepted that it is primarily lithe critic of abstractions" and lithe search for the unexpressed presuppositions which underlie the beliefs of every finite human intellect."4 With one reservation, this definition of philosophy could have been written by anyone of the major Buddhist philosphers for the past two thousand years. The one reservation is this: its aim must be to alleviate the suffering, not to interpret the world. Buddhism takes its stand with the Socratic injunction, "Know thyself!" without the Platonic persuasion that only ideas are real and without the overlay of Plato's abstract archetypes and forms. Buddhism has always been in rebellion against the abstract obtuseness of language as compared with the concrete richness of our nonverbalized experience of life. Buddhism, indeed, is the deepest and most persistent reflection upon the nature of our concrete individualized experience ever to make its appearance anywhere on earth. Buddhism is not a body of attested truths to be accepted on the authority of the past, nor is it chiefly focused upon a systematic view of the world, although certain world views are excluded by the Buddhist way. Guenther mentions one: "In Buddhist thought, reality is not something intangible and unattainablet lying forever unknown and unperceived behind an impenetrable wall, but is sometbing that can be realized through and in us.'tS The point of departure in Buddhism from both the historical and personal point of view is meditation. This is the vital center that has given Buddhism its identity for over twenty-five centuries. Through persistent meditation any individual any- Buddhist Meditation· 135 where in the world can discover that there is something more fundamental in experience than the fixed universal cognitive forms which Immanuel Kant took as his epistemological ground. Meditation, indeed, loosens the grip of what Kant taught us to think of in the West as lithe forms of the understanding." Individuals freed in this way acquire the feeling of being in iIl1lTlediate original spontaneous contact with life. Buddhism has provided millions of people of different races, ethnic backgrounds, and nations with ntethods of meditation which stop the internal dialogue with the abstract facsimiles of a world that is always dominating our thoughts. In meditation we discover that what we formulate and control with the theoretical component in our experience tends to diminish our responsiveness to life, and that the n'1ost penetrating insights into what is fundamental and real, the greatest suffering, the gratitude that opens the springs of compassion-all are trivialized by conceptual form. The aim of meditation can be indicated by the work of three major philosophers of our time, two from the West, one from Japan. In a recent study of Wittgenstein, Jeffrey Thomas Price makes a surprisingly Buddhist statement: "One can almost imagine the world/' he writes, lias pure, undifferentiated movement and words as instances of absolute separation or distinctiveness."6 The spontaneity and concreteness of our most extraordinary moments of awareness, according to...