Vipaśhyanā Practice — Four Kinds & Four Stages

✦ A few Insights:

When I began learning about this topic, nobody explained to me the difference between the vipaśhyanā aspect of all Buddhist meditation techniques, the formal vipaśhyanā meditation, and the resulting vipaśhyanā itself. Firstly, every meditation technique can be said to have both a śhamatha aspect and a vipaśhyanā aspect. Take the Four Immeasurables as an example: the initial contemplations on equanimity and impartiality—where we use conceptual reasoning to consider why all beings equally deserve our goodwill—are the vipaśhyanā aspect of that practice. It is only once loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, or equanimity actually arises and we rest non-conceptually in that feeling, focused on it as a meditative object, that we are practicing the Four Immeasurables as śhamatha meditation. Similarly, the breath technique has a vipaśhyanā aspect—the natural curiosity that arises in the space between awareness of one breath and another. Secondly, formal vipaśhyanā meditation, as described in this small vehicle module, involves deliberately using research questions and phenomenological categories to investigate experience. Initially the meditation involves applying these conceptual frameworks, but it actually aims to transcend them. Thirdly, the liberating insight of vipaśhyanā itself is often experienced as an indescribably profound glimpse of the extra-ordinary ordinariness of things that is always in plain sight but constantly overlooked. Many beginning meditators imagine that such a glimpse will occur during a meditation session. But often it occurs instead as an experiential aftereffect (pṛṣthalabdhajñāna) of having immersed ourselves in meditation for a period—while going about our lives.

As for the four kinds, one might wonder: if common vipaśhyanā already works—if therapy, reflection, and willpower can help us let go of grudges and manage our emotions—why bother with anything more? It may be worth noting, in fact, that all three founders of modern Western psychology were inspired by their encounter with Buddhism at the turn of the twentieth century: Sigmund Freud, who even quotes the Buddha in Civilization and its Discontents; Carl Jung, who studied Buddhism and Hinduism extensively; and William James, who professed to be a Buddhist in his postscript to The Varieties of Religious Experience. So the connection between Buddhist investigation of mind and Western psychological inquiry runs deeper than many people realize, and many contemporary forms of therapy were directly or indirectly inspired by Buddhist psychology. Contemporary psychology has of course developed many other beneficial frameworks and tools—which meditators would do well to explore. But according to the Small Vehicle, no matter how deep such forms of common vipaśhyanā go—whether ancient or modern—they are only pulling weeds without getting rid of the roots. They address the emotional disruptions that paralyze us, but the Buddhist tradition aims to uproot those emotions entirely by investigating their deepest source: our unexamined assumptions of a fixed personal identity around which our emotions are structured. On the Great Vehicle and Diamond Vehicle floors, we will see how the investigation can be extended to other territories as well.

One final note on the relationship between study and practice. The prerequisite for vipaśhyanā is a curious, inquisitive, open mind — and a willingness to look at our own experience with honesty. Studying Buddhist phenomenology naturally cultivates this: learning the categories of experience makes us more curious about what we are actually experiencing, sharper and more objective in observing it. This self-reflective curiosity can operate whether or not we are formally meditating because we can always investigate our experience through the Buddhist frameworks once we learn them. However, śhamatha helps us focus on the research questions long enough to gather enough evidence so that we arrive at genuine insight rather than just fleeting impressions. So while moving forward in the modules, it is essential to continue practicing the guided meditations — the Four Immeasurables, the mindfulness of body, feelings, and mind, and now the “thinking” meditation above. As the next modules introduce the five aggregates and the conditioning forces, the labels will become more precise, and the investigation will deepen accordingly.