(Reprinted from the Buddhist Review, No. 6, pp. 133­146)

THE teaching of the higher evolution set forth by the Buddha has as its chief characteristic the pursuance of what is termed in Buddhist phraseology the Middle Way, or, as we might otherwise express it, the golden mean between all extremest views. The Middle Way itself is indeed concerned only with fixing the standard of life for the follower of the Buddha­it consists in the avoidance, on the one hand, of the extreme of self-torture, of unnecessarily ascetic practices; and on the other of the life of the worldly man, altogether given over to self-indulgence and the seeking after pleasures of the senses. But all through that teaching we find everywhere the same principle of the Middle Way; and nowhere is this more marked than in the Buddhist attitude in the question of predestination or free will.

Teaching as it does that the character and destiny of any being are, with one exception, absolutely determined for any given moment, and are the necessary resultants of the long line of mental doings which constitute his whole past, Buddhism appears at first sight to teach fatalism, determinism, pure and simple. But it is an equally prominent part of Buddhist doctrine that, however determinate, for the present moment, is the Kamma, the character and destiny of a given being, yet that being may, if he has but wisdom and knows how to utilise it, alter his whole future in whatever direction pleases him. In other words an intelligent being, such as man, is, for the immediate moment, ruled by his destiny­he is bound by all the forces of his past to react in a definite fashion to any given set of circumstances that may arise. But over the future he is himself ruler­within very wide limits indeed; he can, if he have knowledge, so profoundly alter, by dint of culture, his own character, as to produce results obviously manifest even in the short span of this life. This circumstance is, of course, at the root of all education; and the life of a George Stephenson is a living example of the profound effect on character and destiny which a man can bring about by dint of mental culture.

Thus we may put the Buddhist position as to the free will or predestination discussion by saying that a man is determined for the immediate present, but that he has choice as to his way in life as regards the future.

Now all Buddhism is simply a system of culture, directed to the one end of lessening the suffering of life. According to this religion, all evil, all suffering, all that opposes our free progress towards the Peace Beyond all Life­lies only in Avijja, in Nescience; or, to put it in terms of the human life, the true source of evil lies in Ignorance­in not knowing, not understanding, the nature or the meaning of life. In us this Nescience is said to have three great manifestations­Craving, Hatred, and the Self-delusion; of these we may regard the latter as the most fundamental, the others being merely necessary outcomes of it. It is because we look not on life, as in fact it is, as one great unit), but as divided into Self and the Not-Self, that we entertain thoughts of Craving and of Hate. So Buddhism, going to the root of the matter, directs our attention to the undermining of this fundamental delusion of the permanent Selfhood, and all its long course of self-discipline is simply directed to this one end.

That course of discipline is conveniently divided into three sequent steps: the Discipline in Sila or Conduct; in Samadhi, or Mental Attainment; and in Panna, the Higher Wisdom. The first of these, Sila, includes both the active and the negative sides of moral culture; the negative being the five prohibitions­not to kill, steal, commit impurity, lie, or use intoxicants; the positive being Charity or universal love. This Sila, simple though it may sound in words, and well though we all know the nature of its injunctions, is the essential preliminary; there is no Samadhi, no mental Oneness to be obtained without it, and for one who is weak in it to undertake the practices of mental culture leading to Samadhi would, in case of most of them, involve a serious risk of grave mental alienation. Similarly, it is only by Samadhi­rightly directed and used­that Panna, the Higher Wisdom, Insight, may be gained.

I propose to set before you a rough outline of certain of the practices whereby this Samadhi is to be won, and must therefore first endeavour to make clear the meaning of the word. There is, unfortunately, no one word in English which conveys the meaning, the fact being that in Western countries the practices which create the link whereby its attainment is registered in the mind are but little known. The word has been variously translated Mental Concentration, Meditation, Ecstasy, and so forth; the last, Ecstasy, being perhaps the most nearly accurate rendering of the meaning. But, whilst the conscious recollection of the attainment of Samadhi is rare in the West, we are of course not to understand that the attainment itself is lacking. In one direction many varieties of what is called "Religious Experience"­the attainment of a more or less high Samadhi­is not only relatively common, but also leaves behind it a more or less distorted memory of some great happening; whilst what we call the inspiration of genius is in very many cases the direct outcome in thought of an attainment of Samadhi itself forgotten. Even in the more active functioning of the mind in this our waking state Samadhi in a sense may be said to exist, but, in this case, its continuance is for exceedingly short periods of time only.

Perhaps the best way of explaining what Samadhi is will be to use the familiar Buddhist simile of the lamp flame. The mind or thought is said in Buddhist phrase to be Pabhassara­having the nature of light, or, as we should put it, it is a radiant form of energy. Likening, then, the mind of man as a source of this radiant thought to the flame of a lamp, we are taught by Buddhist psychology that, in the ordinary man, the flame is not steadily burning­not even for the duration of a single second of our time. The emission of the thought-energy is said to alternate between the full flaming of the lamp and well-nigh complete extinction, as though the lamp were flickering; and this flickering is said to occur at a very great rate indeed­the time-terms are unfortunately very vaguely expressed, but the rate must be of the order of millions per second­so that what we call a single thought in reality consists of an exceedingly large effort of consciousness, each alternated with a lapse into almost complete unconsciousness. Apart from the rapid flickering of the flame, the flame may be regarded­still in the ordinary man­as being constantly blown about as a whole; every incoming sense-impression, each wave of sense or of emotion or interest that passes through us, is like a wind which blows about the flame of our mind.

Now it is just­to continue our simile­by this light of the mind that we live and know; and it naturally follows that, the more our flame is blown about by the winds of sense and passion and interest, and the more profound is the plunge into unconsciousness between each flicker of the lamp, the less accurate will be the view which we shall obtain of the world revealed to us by this so intermittent light. Before we can truly judge the nature of the world, the light, the mind's light by which we see that world, must. be brought to burn steadily; else we must always continue to see distorted shadows cast by the flickering flame and wind-blown light, and never catch a glimpse of the reality about us.

And this Samadhi­this steady burning of the flame of life­and all the practices that lead thereto are designed to the sheltering, even though it be but momentary, of the flickering flame; it is only in its steady-burning ardour that the higher wisdom, the true understanding of the Oneness of Life that makes for Peace, can be won. And, just as we may use an earthly light to aid us in the doing of good deeds, the acquirement of high and holy knowledge; or, on the other hand, employ it for the commission of crime or the perversion of our minds by studying foolish literature­so can the light of Samadhi itself be employed either for good or for evil; it is just here that the danger lies for one who gains Samadhi without first submitting himself to a long and careful moral and mental training.

There are two chief methods by which Samadhi may be won: these are Samatha and Vipassana, what we may term quietism, and Insight, Penetration. In the first, the attention is aroused to the utmost stretch of tension possible, but it is directed, not towards the outer world, but inwards on the mind itself. The idea is to keep intensely watchful, and to beat down, as it begins to arise, every incoming message of sense, every wave of recollection or emotion; just to watch and wait, permitting yourself to entertain no thought but watchfulness. If Samatha happens to be the best method for you, then one day, when you are doing this practice, you will suddenly, as it were, wake up­wake to a mental state indefinitely more intense and active than that in which we normally function. That is obtaining Samadhi by means of quietude.

The other method, Vipassana, Insight or Penetration, is exactly the opposite. Here, instead of keeping the mind fixed in attention only, and suppressing every thought of the outer, the objective world, you fix your attention upon some thought itself, and keep it so fixed as long as possible, bringing it back, every time it breaks away, to the particular subject you have chosen as your mind's dwelling-place. Of the two methods this latter is much the easier for the Occidental mind ; for the simple reason that all our mental training is on lines pertaining to Vipassana, that complete mental quietude of the other method is exceedingly difficult for us Westerns to attain. The fruits also are in a sense different: in Quietude, what we are doing is, as it were, just sheltering our lamp, and accordingly when it burns steady its light will be of one or other nature, accordingly as the fuel fed to it in our past lives has been of one sort or another ; in Insight the Samadhi attained will be the complete and clear understanding of the underlying law, the inherent nature of the particular object of our meditation. A Newton, watching the fall of his apple, gets Samadhi on the fact of its falling; he himself, very likely, has no clear recollection, on his return to normal consciousness, of having attained to any beyond the normal mental state; that is for lack of a bridge, of a path between the two realms of consciousness, the waking mind is simply unable to remember anything of that experience itself, just as a man, newly fallen asleep, cannot in his dream remember the more vivid consciousness of the waking state. But what he does carry over from that state is the resultant in the mind­and so we have the discovery of gravitation. For that is the nature of Samadhi when directed to any fact­that the mind attaining it perceives ultimately, not the fact, but the law, the truth underlying that fact; it is as though by Samadhi on a thing you could become that thing itself, and hence see clearly the interior nature of it.

Now it is only, as has been implied, the right use of this power of Samadhi that can lead to the goal of the Buddhist life. If we can attain Samadhi in respect of either the transitoriness, the suffering, or the absence of reality in all that we know as life, the fruits of that sort of Samadhi are Right Ecstasy­the Higher Wisdom which leads to Peace. As we have seen, it is in the end to the delusion of separateness­the belief in an immortal individual self within us, apart from other life­that Buddhism attributes all the evil in the world. But it unfortunately happens that it is just this sort of Samadhi which is the most difficult to obtain, for the simple reason that most of our mental elements have, in arising, been contaminated by one or other of the Three Forms of Nescience-Craving, Hatred, Self-delusion. If, for example, a man unprepared by long training stumbles, as it were, into Samadhi, so vast is the mental universe in which he finds himself, so intense and clear, in comparison to what we know of thought, is his mental functioning, that he is liable to become altogether unbalanced to imagine that he is God, or to become in some direction or other intensely vain and self-laudatory. And so attaining, so doing Samadhi on his own greatness, eternity, or what not, is indefinitely worse for that being than never attaining Samadhi at all. For Kamma, the reproductive force which exists in thought, whereby our minds and worlds are builded, is the more intense, the more active (that is, the nearer to Samadhi), the mind is which sets it in motion. As it is the I-making faculty in thought which is the principal element in earth-binding Kamma, it is better, from the point of view of the Buddhist, who seeks liberation from this Kamma, to never attain Samadhi at all than to attain it in respect of the Selfhood; as the rebirth causing Kamma produced by even a moment of Samadhi is as potent as that which, in our vastly less active normal waking state, could be made by the selfish thought of whole years of life. As the bulk of our mental elements from past lives are so largely component of selfhood, it becomes of prime importance that before starting on the practices leading to Samadhi that we should undertake some form of mental culture which leads to the subversion of the I-making elements. To this end the Buddhist, before attempting to attain Samadhi itself, enters on a preliminary training known as Right Recollectedness (Sammasati). The object of this practice is twofold­firstly, to suppress the existent self-forming elements in the mind; and, secondly, to link up in a more or less continuous stream the diverse items of his mental life. This practice is protective, it can be done at all times, and in fact greatly enhances one's powers of memory and observation, and it is therefore perfectly safe and most advantageous for anyone to do. It consists of sitting, as it were, alert and watchful at the mind-door, watching every sensation, perception, memory, or thought as it arises, and inhibiting the Self-idea from seizing on that particular thought. You watch, and you record on your mind; and you do not permit the ideas of craving, hatred, selfhood to come in. Suppose, for example, you are walking; you think; there is a lifting of the right foot, a leaning forward of the body, the foot is set to the ground­and so on: letting only quite impersonal thoughts arise, but carefully watching and making a mental record of what you are doing. To put it in other words, you concentrate your whole attention on whatever it is, bodily or mental, that you happen to be engaged in, but as though the being's actions you are considering were no more yourself than are those of any other man. Each time you make a slip­and that, at first, is very frequently­you pull up; recall the thought about which you thought "I," or "mine," and think of the associated action or thing:­This is not I, this is not Mine, there is no self herein. Thus you produce, in respect of that particular thought, very powerful associated thoughts which tend to neutralise it.

Very much of the Buddhist mental training depends on the power we have of altering certain classes of thoughts by producing in respect of them powerful associated tendencies in a new direction. Suppose, for example, a man is irritable­easily vexed over trifling matters. That is the form of Ignorance called Hatred; it is a great obstacle to all high attainment. The man so troubled, if he be a Buddhist, sets out to overcome that failing by producing, in respect of the objects which commonly arouse his irritability, powerful associated thoughts of love­the mental opposite. Say certain persons commonly irritate him; it will generally be found that their mental images are associated in the mind with some careless or foolish action towards him on the part of those persons. As there exists this powerful tendency of thought to make links, to form large groups in which all the associations are connected on to the central image, whenever the mere image, whether physical or mental, of those persons rises in the mind, there rise also those ideas of irritation; of all the causes for irritation that person has given him. Taking, then, the image of those self-same persons who annoy him, the irritable man, when each day he commences his day's mental practice, directs, with the whole intensity of intention at his disposal, thoughts of love towards that image. Thus he makes a very powerful set of mental elements of Tendencies, full of thoughts of well-wishing and love, associated with the image of those persons. Then, next time that image arises, there rise, as before, the associated thought-elements of hatred into consciousness; but there also arise those powerful tendencies of love which the meditation built up; one cannot entertain simultaneously thoughts both of hatred and of love towards the same image; so, before long, the practitioner masters his irritability by love.

The method of Sati­of watching and recording­may also be applied to the same problem. For, think why it is that we entertain thoughts of hatred, of annoyance, of dislike. It is really only because we imagine that the object of our dislike is a being essentially other and apart from and opposed to ourselves. Suppose, for instance, you are in a boat on a river, and you see another boat coming down the stream and threatening to collide with you and upset you. If you see another man in that boat you at once get very angry with him; not improbably you waste precious time and energy in stating your opinion of him; you abuse him for his carelessness in thus risking both your lives. But if there is no person there; if the boat is empty? Then you do not get angry at all; it is only children and the mentally unsound who get angry with things. You realise that it is the force, the flow of the river, that causes the threatened collision; that it depends on your efforts, and yours alone, to get out of danger; and the energy you might have wasted in being angry and saying things if there were a person in the other boat you now spend on securing your safety.

Now, once you arrive at the mental position aimed at by the Right Recollectedness practice, it is just like the latter case that you look on all the world. In the light of the higher wisdom there is no such thing as a true persona at all­the boats of life are empty, every one.

Each is but a given set of mental tendencies, urged by a given portion of the life-stream through a myriad lives. When, then, a person falls athwart of your life, threatening danger, you do not get angry with him; you recognise there is really no "him" to get angry with; but that the forces that built up your respective lives are now in train for a disaster; you keep your temper, and so have the more strength to avoid the threatened collision.

On similar lines, just another such application of Right Recollectedness, runs the method prescribed by the Master to a certain monk that was angered with another, and came to him to complain of that intractable one's abuse. "With what, Brother, art thou angered ?" asks the Buddha. "Is it the hair of that one's head,"­and so through the thirty-two component structures of the Form-group­" or with his sensations, his perception, memories, thoughts? "So soon as you begin to apply the Sati-analysis, you find there is nowhere anything to get angry with.

When a man has for some time practised this Right Recollectedness, he finds he has acquired a state of mental poise, of firmness of balance, that is not to be obtained in any other way. Then, and not till then, is it safe for him to go on to those other practices which lead to Samadhi in the various wider realms of thought to which reference has been made. But there is one practice of meditation given in the Buddhist books, which has the great advantage that it is quite safe to do it without a very long preliminary practice of Right Recollectedness. This practice is a further development of the linking-up of the events in consciousness which I have referred to as the second item in the Sati practice, and it has for its immediate object the recovery of the memory of one's bygone lives. Buddhism, as of course you will know, teaches that each being has lived lives unnumbered in the past; or, to put it more correctly from the Buddhist point of view, each being now existent is the present outcome of a complex set of forces, part due to the initial velocity of past lives, part to environment, heredity and so forth. As we, to-day, are the inheritors of our Kamma, our Character and Destiny combined­in fact are our Kamma­we are able, Buddhism teaches, to pick up the memories of those bygone lives just as we can pick up those of the present life. Our minds are like a palimpsest, a record written over and over again on the self-same sheet of paper. The crude, strong writing of the present life indeed, for most of us, hides and conceals the underwritten scripts; but, if the Buddhist teaching be true, they all are there; records, lying dormant in our minds, yet daily acting on our characters and lives, of every action, every thought of all that forgotten life. To recover them you have only suitably to train your mind to perform the mental function I have referred to as "making linkages." This is done as follows: Choosing, as is necessary for all these meditation practices save Sati, a time and place where you will be free from interruption, you practise, every day, on the following lines. You go into your room and sit down, keeping your mind, as in Sati, fixed on your every smallest action. Then you begin to rehearse those operations in your memory. You think of walking to the chair, of opening the door, and so on, all backwards, trying to follow up your thoughts during the whole of the past day. When you begin, you will find that you cannot flow back from thought to thought, beyond a quite trifling time, perhaps ten minutes. Before that you will find there is a little blank in your memory, some trivial little link you cannot recall. You skip that blank, and at first you will find there are so many of these, even in the past day's proceedings, that your progress backward through the day will be done in jerks; it will be, not evenly swimming up the stream of your day's life, but jumping from stepping-stone to stepping-stone of the more important events. When, in course of your meditation you come to the hours of sleep, you find that, before waking, there may perhaps have been a few incidents in the dream-state of consciousness; beyond that is a blank ; the thought was then in Bhavanga, in that state of sub-consciousness into which we have seen it is always, even during waking life, lapsing with the flickering of the mind-flame. You skip that blank; come to perhaps more dreams on going to sleep; your last thoughts before you fell asleep the day before; and go back to the time when you were doing your practice on the day before.

Thus you do each day; always confining yourself to the one day's work. After a few weeks of practice you will find your ease of doing it becomes vastly greater. At first, as I have said, you do the day beyond the few minutes before starting by jumping in thought from one to another of the more important events of the day, those which stand out clear enough to be remembered. But after a little practice, you will find your capacity of swimming up the stream of thought vastly increases; in place of only a few minutes you will find yourself able to follow the stream without a break for an increasingly long period of hours, till at last you can so cover the whole day, of course with the exception of the deep-sleep period, over which one always needs to jump.

When you can flow in the stream for a whole day, you begin to enlarge your period; taking a week till you can do that, passing on to months, to years. When you find yourself sufficiently expert­and it is surprising how rapidly in this respect the mind is amenable to cultivation­you proceed to go back over successively earlier and earlier portions of your life; always starting with the principal events as stepping-stones, then enlarging from each of these your range of action, till you can more or less perfectly flow up the stream at any point you may select. Then you come to early childhood; and begin to remember things most of us have forgotten: the keen wonder, the interest of the child-mind in anything novel or not understood; the utter difference of all your ways of thought­the strangeness even of your very sensation of Self-hood then, to you, remembering it now, and comparing it with your present feeling. Back beyond that again you come to infancy, and then you begin to understand the meaning of the Buddhist statement "Birth is Suffering.["] You find how, on your mind thus young, the crowding images of touch and sight and sound pour with terrible intensity: giving a feeling one can only compare with the pain of going from a darkened room to blinding sunlight­only that here it is mental dazzlement that pains, ten thousand times more acutely than ever did the sense-dazzlement of sight. Back further still you come to the same sensation, yet more awful and intense at the moment of birth: the sudden clamour of the sense-life bursting in upon the unformed mind, insistent, demanding attention; you remember the pain of it, the "not-understanding" of it all. And then a blank­like that of deep sleep, yet with a wider gulf to it; a period over which the mind for long is unable to bridge. Again and again the process is repeated; using every effort of the now trained will to remember what went before; till suddenly, one time, you find yourself remembering your last death.

But it so happens that, at death, or even when very near to it, the mind automatically goes through this very process of picking up the threads of its own life backwards. Thus, once you have passed, still going backwards, over the actual moment of death, you come to see the whole presentment of all that your last life was. And here it of course depends on what sphere of life you then existed in­whether as man, or in the realms termed "heavens," or elsewhere. But in the vast majority of cases it is this life of our own with which we are then concerned; and, if so, you at once perceive, in picking up the old life's threads, a great difference from your ordinary memories. You find that you remember, for the most part, only the pain of the former life; you recall indeed the events which made its pleasure, but the savour of them, the sort of happiness you had from them, is lost beyond recall. The reason of this is that the happiness of life is dependent on the body as its basis; the body is gone, so you can see the causes of the happiness, without, as it were, being able to understand why they caused you pleasure. Thus the principal result of this practice is to prove to you beyond a doubt the truth of the Buddhist dictum of the sufferings of life; but also it shows to you the truth of the teaching about Kamma and rebirth, for, remembering thus the past, you are able to see how such-and-such tendencies in that bygone life led to such-and-such results in this.

Finally I would wish to impress upon you that you must not confuse progress into the more active states of consciousness with progress on the Path that leads to Peace. Samadhi, rightly directed to the transitoriness and so forth of life, may indeed bring us that Higher Wisdom which constitutes progress on the Path; but the direction, as it were, of that Path lies not in the plane of our life at all­it is as though at right angles to it; a new direction altogether. The true path-making consciousnesses are those that tend to the recognition of the great fact that Life is One; that there is no separation between us and our fellows save what our own ignorance makes. We may indeed, through Samadhi, win, even in this life, to wider and more glorious realms of being, levels of consciousness, than here we know; but, if such attainment should result in the exaltation of our selfhood, the magnification of our "I," then we have done harm far greater than many lives of worldly ignorance could result in. And, on the other hand, every least act, here in this our world, which tends to abnegation of the Self­each deed of love and pity and helpfulness we do­is another stepping-stone we have laid in the shallows of life, over which we may presently pass to Life's Further Shore of Peace. To give up living for this false mirage of the Self; to understand our life as but a part of all life's unity; to live as far as we may, for the practical realisation of that unity­that is the real object of all Buddhist Culture, whether it fall under the head of Conduct, or Samadhi or the Higher Wisdom. To realise the Oneness of life, and live accordingly­that is the aim of every practice of the Buddhist Culture of the Mind.

ANANDA METTEYA (THERA).