Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College!
After discussing the varying yogas in the Bhagavad Gita, it is a perfect occasion for us to start reading Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. The Lord Krishna taught Arjuna to achieve his total inner equanimity while performing his vital duties in the battlefield, whereas, in the Yoga Sutras, what Patanjali accomplished is that after learning the contemplative Hindu practices as they were indicated by varying classical Hindu writings, for the first time of Hinduism, Patanjali furnishes a systematic elaboration about the philosophy, experience and technique of meditation per its Hindu bent. Since meditation would be such an important, generic theme of our course on Eastern Religions (I do think meditation is the most important religious practice for individuals in the traditions of the so-called “Eastern Religions”), let me explain my approach of teaching meditation.
Firstly, I need to emphasize that meditation is ubiquitous to all major world religious traditions. Nowadays, people normally think of the lotus position in Buddhism whenever the term “meditation” is mentioned; also, whenever the term “yoga” is mentioned, people normally have the idea of the varying stretching postures without particularly thinking of the lotus position of Buddhist meditation. However, all these popular notions about “meditation” are actually quite misleading. If we understand “meditation” as essentially a training of attention, and hence, as being an intensive inner work of human mind while the mind is pursuing varying causes, there is no world religious tradition which does not practice meditation. Accordingly, not only the lotus sitting of Buddhism or the stretching yoga postures of Hinduism [which is called hatha (force) yoga among varying yogas practiced by Hinduism] is meditation, prayers, ritual-performances, sleeping, walking, running, artwork, and a gazillion other aspects of human life can also be considered to be meditative.
Because of the variety of meditative activities that are practiced by human beings in varying religious traditions, I would lay out three major approaches to learn any of them, and these three approaches are technical, experiential, and philosophical.
Technically, we need to pay attention to how religions present their techniques of meditation, viz., how one starts and deepens their meditation in concrete ways. In the Yoga Sutras, we find the “eight limbs of Yogic practice,” starting from moral disciplines which urge meditators to be a good human being in their daily life at the first hand, and then, going through “posture, breath control and withdrawal of senses,” and eventually culminating on how to refine one’s mental state regarding an object in such steps as “concentration (dharana), meditative absorption (dhyana) , and integration (samadhi)”(Yoga Sutras, III.4, translated by Chip Hartranft). The latter three are further called a “perfect discipline,” and with a deepening training of this perfect discipline, meditators can eventually realize their “pure awareness” which remains unmoved, unperturbed, and perfectly peaceful regardless of the changing phenomenal world.
Experientially, which can also be called phenomenologically, we need to study how the experience of meditation in its varying states is described by meditators. This description is an important material for beginning learners to grasp so as to confirm whether they themselves get there or not. For instance, when the Yoga Sutras describes the “steady and easy” posture of yoga, it states poetically “It (the posture) is realized by relaxing one’s effort and resting like the cosmic serpent on the waters of infinity” (Kessler, pp. 75); Also, each of the three steps of the perfect discipline is specified by phenomenological descriptions about what happens to human mind if it is trained as such: “Concentration locks consciousness on a single area” (III.1); “In meditative absorption, the entire perceptual flow is aligned with that object” (III. 2); and “When only the essential nature of the object shines forth, as if formless, integration has arisen” (III, 3). Here, the three steps of perfect discipline of human consciousness is depicted experientially as a process starting from human mind’s endeavor of concentrating on one object, proceeding through steadily and uninterruptedly focusing upon the object, and eventually, letting the object occupy the entire mind so that no split between subject and object avails. Obviously, all these phenomenological descriptions are quite helpful if a reader of the text tries not only to intellectually understand it, but also starts to practice meditation.
Philosophically, we need to attend to how meditators in their writings weave every piece of their meditative experiences together, so as to articulate the truth or the broad meaning of such experiences. Patanjali was influenced by a Hindu philosophical school called Sankhya, and believes that the world of “pure awareness” is separated from and ultimately unperturbed by the material, natural world. Varying patterns of human consciousness such as desires, memory , latent impressions and intelligence for Patanjali also evolves from the natural world, and hence, Patanjali defines the goal of meditation is to “still the patterning of consciousness,” and describes the final state of yoga as such: “Freedom is at hand when the fundamental qualifies of nature, each of their transformations witnessed at the moment of its inception, are recognized as irrelevant to pure awareness; it stands alone, grounded in its very nature, the pure seeing. That is all.” (IV. 34). It is quite obvious that Patanjali’s yoga practice is grounded in an elaborate philosophy, and this philosophy states both its ethical ways of human living and also its ultimate soteriological goal of achieving ultimate freedom.
These three aspects of meditation are normally intertwined in given contemplative traditions. Techniques affect how meditators experience, the experiences inform their philosophies, while their philosophies also color and fashion how they report their experiences. If we look at these three aspects cross-traditionally, we’ll find a fascinating phenomenon that each of these aspects can be borrowed, revised, and accommodated within a new tradition so as to form a new relatively stable pattern of meditative style. For instance, Buddhists may use the same techniques of posture and breath control as articulated by Patanjali, but practice them using a different philosophy. For Buddhists, they do not typically think of the goal of meditation as discovering one’s genuine self since they believe nothing has a self, and accordingly, their vision about the position and destiny of human beings in the ever-changing karmic world is also different from the Yoga Sutras’ Hindu view. So, the question is: as beginning learners, what shall we do in face of this vast and complex body of meditation literature accumulated by so many religious traditions so far?
Two suggestions from me at this beginning stage of your learning and practice of meditation:
- (1) Whenever learning meditation from a given tradition or an established teacher, practitioners should broadly and critically examine all the three major aspects of meditation, and on the basis of this, form their own way of contemplative practice fit for their own lifestyle. This implies that you may borrow techniques from a certain tradition without necessarily buying into its philosophy; also, it may imply that you can feel differently from the established meditators in a given tradition during your meditating process, but as long as you have your own philosophy to coherently and positively connect your practice with other aspects of human life, the difference is warranted. In other words, while practicing meditation, we need to dedicatedly practice it while critically thinking over it.
- (2) For major meditative traditions in the world, they normally have their established ways to solidify the three major aspects into a coherent whole. This means that in order to reach a certain goal, it would be more practical for beginning learners to focus upon such an established way for a certain period of time. Therefore, it will do a disservice to beginning learners of meditation to delve into varying traditions superficially, and then, to hastily try to form their own meditative style. More ideally, beginning learners should find a teacher fit for their initial preference, practice that particular style for a while, and see whether it works and to what extent it works before deciding to change the approach or starting to create synthetically one’s own. After all, as similar to learning any other subject, a certain degree of dedication is still necessary for learning meditation.
Finally, in order to facilitate your learning and practice of meditation, I made a series of youtube videos with attached scripts about how to meditate in a Confucian approach. Some of these videos contain concrete guidance about how to breathe, sit, walk, etc. So hopefully, while pursuing the course, you can start to practice physically what you have learned intellectually. But please do not forget, while teaching meditation, my hope is not to promote any religion, but to have you critically study meditation in an integrative way so as to form your own unique contemplative lifestyle.