Is it possible to achieve a state of complete spiritual liberation? What does it mean to combine focus with insight in meditation?
Insight meditation, a practice innovated by the Buddha, combines focused attention with open awareness. In Altered Traits, Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson explain that this approach aims to cultivate a state of mindfulness, allowing practitioners to observe their thoughts and experiences without judgment.
Continue reading to learn how insight and focus meditation evolved and found their way into modern Western culture.
Focus & Insight Meditation
Modern mindfulness reached the West through the Burmese Theravadan tradition that the authors studied in India. But, what is it in practice, and how does it fit into the tapestry of traditional Buddhist practices? Historically, modern mindfulness draws on insight meditation, which the Buddha innovated to improve an earlier focus meditation method.
| Buddhist Concepts & the Limits of Translation When we translate ancient Buddhist concepts such as “insight meditation” and “focus meditation” into modern English, we risk stripping away crucial nuances that exist in the source languages of Pali and Sanskrit. Not only that, many Buddhist terms refer to non-conceptual experiences that can’t be fully understood just by thinking about them. Buddhists often describe the phenomenology of meditative states and practices, or the subjective experiences that can arise during meditation. Phenomenological descriptions are notoriously difficult to pin down unless you have some frame of reference that relates to the description. For instance, a description of the color blue (cool, watery, deep) does little to convey the actual experience of that color unless you’ve seen it before. In a similar way, descriptions of Buddhist enlightenment (rapture, bliss, cessation of all suffering) can remain slippery and abstract unless you’ve had some glimpse of that experience. |
Insight Meditation
The Buddha is said to have practiced focus meditation. However, he also realized that one-pointed focus needs the complement of insight.
With a strong basis in focus meditation, which trains you to access deep concentration at will, you can also remain mindful—or open, nonreactive, and nonjudgmental—to whatever arises in your mind. In other words, you first focus, and then you learn to relax into a state of calm, open awareness by quietly observing the cacophony of transient thoughts, feelings, and sensations that you experience.
This way of being aware is called sati, which we translate as mindfulness. In the modern West, practitioners often apply sati through vipassana, the simplified mindfulness meditation method devised by Burmese Theravadans and taught to the authors (and other Westerners) in the 1970s. Most often, you start a vipassana practice by developing mindful awareness of your breath. In time, you gradually expand that basic awareness to observe and become mindful of the rest of your subjective experience.
According to the authors, when the Buddha combined focus with insight, he innovated a new path to nirvana, or enlightenment: a state of complete spiritual liberation characterized by tranquility, clarity of mind, bliss, and unshakably mindful awareness. For the authors, the question remained: Is enlightenment real? Do lifelong meditators and yogis really experience these states of profound concentration, bliss, clarity, and liberation?
| Mainstream Meditation for the Secular West The authors inherited a fairly new form of vipassana meditation, based on sati, that had been revived in Southeast Asia during the 18th and 19th centuries. Prior to this, vipassana meditation had all but disappeared. When the authors and others—including teachers Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzberg—brought Theravada-style methods back from India in the 1970s, they carried these simplified and reinvented techniques into the mainstream. Since the above three leaders founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts in 1976, mindfulness has spread throughout the Western world and taken hold in contexts including education, healthcare, business, and secular personal growth programs. Many of these teachers downplayed several elements of traditional Buddhist practice, including chanting, ceremony, and belief in gods and demons. A similar process occurred when Jon Kabat-Zinn, who trained with Zen Buddhist teachers and learned from the world-renowned Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, also stripped away traditional cultural trappings to make mindfulness accessible in hospitals and to patients. For instance, one formerly important practice, samatha, has been largely ignored in favor of vipassana—even though they traditionally went together in Buddhist methodology. There are pros and cons to these kinds of changes. On the one hand, the secularization and simplification of meditation has made it accessible to more people in a wider variety of circumstances. On the other hand, it has also reshaped Buddhism into something more palatable to Western tastes in a way that risks leaving behind key elements of its original methods and theories. |
Focus Meditation
According to the authors, early Indian meditation practice centered on jhana, a state of intense bliss that arises from focusing on a single object like a candle or your breath. By repeatedly drawing your attention back to that focal point, you develop a quiet, absorbed state of concentration that, over time, becomes undisturbed by ordinary mental chatter.
The Visudhimmagga describes eight stages of jhana, beginning with absorption in one-pointed focus. Ultimately, the practice of jhana culminates in a final state of complete absorption in focus and accompanying sensations of blissful tranquility.
| Elusive Terms: Jhana and Samadhi In describing focus meditation, the authors refer to the ideas of jhana and samadhi, saying they’re more or less equivalent. These two terms are related, but it’s easy to get confused about whether jhana leads to samadhi or if it’s the other way around. Jhana refers to a progression of increasingly absorbed concentrative states. Some sources describe four jhanas, while the authors refer to eight. Jhana practice is a primary way to develop “Right Concentration,” which the Buddha taught was one milestone along the path to enlightenment. The word “jhana” was originally used in some Hindu yoga traditions to literally mean “meditation.” There are traditionally four levels of rupa jhana (material absorptions) and four levels of arupa jhana (immaterial absorptions).Samadhi refers to a unified state of mind achieved through the jhanas. Samadhi is the goal, and the jhanas are transient states that arise along the way. Note, however, that these are conceptual descriptions of words that ultimately refer to experiences, rather than ideas. If you truly want to grasp jhana and samadhi, your best bet is to practice! |
