by Tang Huyen

Meditation is to develop detachment, balance, and perspective,
and at a minimum presupposes mindfulness — the awareness
of who one is and what one does.

The successive nine attainments — the four form meditations,
the four formless attainments, and the cessation attainment
— are recognised in the early canon. The last, the cessation
attainment, is recognised as Nirvana (attainment of arhatship)
by the early canon and by some Great Vehicle scriptures such
as the Chapter on Kashyapa (kashyapa-parivarta). The
Abhidharma, including the Theravadin Abhidhamma, downgrades
it as a semblance of Nirvana and not the real Nirvana.

As I often say, meditative practice — Buddhist or otherwise
— can be used to an end different from or even contrary to
what is taught as its end. Such seasoned, grooved-in
practitioners as Richard Hayes use Buddhist meditation to
grow a huge self to cosmic size instead of doing away with
it, and it takes just a few words on the screen to get his
huge and prickly self to explode, almost on cue and at will.
The energy (kundalini) developed during yogic exercise
like meditation can boost the feeling of ego, and many
practitioners simply go along and use it to grow their ego —
it feels good and they get attached to it. Many other
practitioners learn to ignore the energy and other lateral
benefits, like the supernatural powers, and soberly go on
to end their suffering.

There is the problem of the reversal of means and end.
Concentration is a means, in view of insight or penetration,
but when it is wrongly developed it becomes its own end
and it becomes the master of its owner, so that its owner
becomes a slave to it. The owner surrenders control over
himself or herself to concentration, which operates on its
own and runs its owner like a machine. This phenomenon
shows itself often on these boards. If the practitioner is
paranoid and delusional, the paranoia can be exacerbated
by visualisation, but visualisation itself enhances
concentration on the object imagined, so that in the end
he or she gets his or her paranoia exacerbated by
concentration, by way of visualisation. It also shows itself
in fixation, whereby a poster bashes somebody else and
chases the latter around and around for weeks or months
or even years in uncontrollable rage, and would not stop.
When such a poster chases his or her targets, he or she
totally gets carried away by them and loses all notion of
perspective and balance, not to mention reality. Such a
practitioner is heedless — which is the contrary of mindful
— and is worth diddly squat, regardless of how many years
and decades he or she has spent studying under teachers
from exotic lands who look funny, talk funny, and dress funny.

Meditation is to develop detachment, balance, and
perspective, and at a minimum presupposes mindfulness —
the awareness of who one is and what one does — and here
everything goes in the opposite direction.

As for drugs: I believe that drugs are harmful to the ending
of suffering. They may give an initial feeling of strangeness,
that convention is not all there is to reality, and may spur
the search for whatever goes beyond convention — by means
of meditation or whatever — but other than that, when
pursued seriously, they wreck one, perhaps for good.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on January 24, 2005, in response to a discussion about jhana, Nirvana, and the relationship between meditation attainments and liberation. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

The essay is a sustained warning about the reversal of means and end. The canonical nine attainments are real, Tang Huyen grants — but the problem is that concentration, which is a means to liberation, can become its own master. He gives three specific mechanisms: ego-inflation through meditative energy (the grooved-in practitioner who has grown a huge self), paranoia amplification through visualisation (the object of concentration is the fear itself), and the fixation that looks like sustained practice but is actually sustained enslavement to its object. The corrective he names is mindfulness in its original sense: knowing who one is and what one does, which is the structural precondition that makes the rest of practice coherent.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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