Origins of the noting technique

So I know about Mahasi, was there anything before that? Anything specific, I guess. I mean, I think I understand that Buddha would probably be cool about the noting technique, and was into "clear seeing" and everything, but um, where does all this stuff pick up from? It was pretty heavy on samatha for quite a long while, yes?

I'm curious about this, too. In the Appendix (p54) of this - www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/mahasit1.pdf - essay it says Mahasi was criticized for using the noting technique, because it was considered his invention and was considered unorthodox. The Mahasians (?) fought back and argued that it was not contrary to the Buddha's teachings - though the technique does seem to be a recent invention.

The Mahasian defense seems to be based on the fact that the technique laid out in the Anapanasatti Sutta depends on the practitioner knowing when he's breathing in, knowing when he's breathing out, knowing that there's pleasure, knowing that there's a mental process, etc. Yet noting is just the verbal expression of this act of knowing.

Samatha is included in both the first two mindfulness tetrads; it also appears implied in the third.

It's unclear to me exactly how the practice of "doing jhana" got separated from "doing vipassana" in the tradition. Buddhaghosa treats jhana as something that people are rarely able to achieve, and yet in the Pali canon, people are doing jhana left and right. (Same thing goes for awakening, which is supposedly rare, and yet it's about as common as someone sneezing in the ancient texts - assuming they aren't killed by a cow first.)

Here's an argument for noting being somewhat part of what the Buddha taught in the suttas:

theravadin.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/iti-and-sallakkheti/

meaningness.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/the...einvents-meditation/

This is also useful and contains many links to references.

An important part of the thesis is that this is meditation designed to kill desires. I'm curious what everyone's thoughts on this are.

EDIT: I see that that is no actually mentioned in this piece (it's a theme throughout his other essays, though). The question still stands.

I have a question:

If it really works, does it matter where it comes from?

Just curious....

If you care about it, yes; if not, no. Not everyone has to have curiosity and passion about the same things. Isn't that great?

I found Chapman's claims pretty amazing. I have no idea if they're accurate or not. How could Vipassana have been lost? And for how long? It seems so natural and necessary to advance through stages, have fruitions, etc.... I was really tickled by the bit about Madame Blavatsky igniting the resurrection of Vipassana. (She also claimed that Krishnamurti was the Buddha. Win some lose some, eh?) One reason it may matter is to put the cultural background in perspective.

Regarding desires, if those beliefs about eradicating all desire were part of a tradition that was not based in awakening then they're not very compelling beliefs. And it's really open season as far as deciding how these practices should develop, what their purpose is, and what is possible. It's been open season for awhile around here, of course, but it's one thing to reform thousands of years of tradition and maybe another to glean the remnants of a lost tradition. Doesn't that elevate the potential influence of what practitioners are doing here?

Chris, if I remember you were very fond of John Peacock's take on pre-Theravada Buddhism - a much more remote, speculative area of history. Why no interest in practitioners who are only a couple of generations removed from you?

I am interested in this. I'm also interested in why this is interesting to others. Here's my take: this process we coalesce around here works. It's very efficient, too. It's interesting that it may be a recent development in meditation technology. It's interesting that it may have been practiced 2,500 years ago, then somehow forgotten and resurrected fairly recently. Figuring out the history of vipassana is like knowing who your ancestors were and where they came from 500 years ago. It's nice to know but has no real bearing on the present. I also have no doubt whatsoever that the practical dharma movement has a lot of influence, regardless of it's history. I have never felt constrained by tradition and in regard to meditation practices. I think the real value of practical dharma is that it works. That is, by far, the most important thing about it, and I believe that is the most solid basis on which folks should decide how to practice.

Make sense?

I posed the question because I wanted to see if folks think we should try to disentangle the history, see how much it really matters to us. After all, this community was founded on the principle that what works is best. That's why we call it "practical" dharma

"An important part of the thesis is that this is meditation designed to kill desires. I'm curious what everyone's thoughts on this are." -james-ing

I don't think killing desire is a result of this practice. There are plenty examples here of people who have been doing the practice a long time and yet who still experience desire.

"I was really tickled by the bit about Madame Blavatsky igniting the resurrection of Vipassana." -someguy77

Me, too. I've been reading a lot lately about late-19th century mysticism and reactionary politics and how this all fed into the rise of Nazism in the early-20th century, and how a big part of what we call "New Age" now came out of that same milieu. And as a graduate student I studied German thought and took a seminar on German Romanticism, so it's exciting to suddenly be thinking about all that again. I've been wondering awhile now why vipassana reminds me so much of German philosophy; now I know.

Also, it makes sense of the current emphasis on vipassana at the expense of jhana. Why is everyone in the suttas always only doing jhana, and yet at the retreat I went on this summer, jhana was compared to totalitarian communism (really) and told to be avoided. This history makes a lot of sense out of that mystery for me.

Chapman's blog in general is very good. I'm having fun poking around through it.

"I am interested in this. I'm also interested in why this is interesting to others." -cmarti

If you're interested, then participate in the discussion. I don't see how involving everyone in a metadiscussion/justification of their curiosity/interest is any more "pragmatic" than the original discussion. I'd rather just ignore a discussion I don't care about than risk coming across as off-putting/dismissive.

"I posed the question because I wanted to see if folks think we should try to disentangle the history, see how much it really matters to us. After all, this community was founded on the principle that what works is best. That's why we call it "practical" dharma

"

Chris, I see where you're coming from now.

One thing this history does for me is to shed light on some controversies. For example, Sayadaws who say noting is not real Vipassana. Or that you're not in Equanimity unless you can meditate for four hours without a break. These are arbitrary opinions and I don't need to worry about them. Claims to historical authenticity now appear disingenuous.

It occurs to me that the journals here and at DhO may be the best evidence-base for Vipassana there is.

I find the histories of these things interesting myself. My general tendency is to see documents about spiritual practice - whether ancient or modern - as largely being documents of a person's practice which may over time get turned into a lineage, school, scripture or even dogma. If they are taken instead as helpful suggestions of other practitioners, there's pragmatic use to be found in them. If they turn into dogma I personally think something of the original point gets lost in a mire of administrative regulations, rigid beliefs, what color robe people are wearing, what you're eating for dinner, contempt for those who don't believe and other such tangents. The freshness and benefit of 'pragmatic dharma' for me has been in its flexibility and looseness.

@apperception - interesting about Blavatsky et al. They had a remarkable influence on modern spirituality in unexpected ways. I read some of her accounts of travels in India at some point, but didn't know about her relationship with vipassana.

"I don't think killing desire is a result of this practice. There are plenty examples here of people who have been doing the practice a long time and yet who still experience desire." - Apperception

Yeah, I have absolutely had that impression from people around here. I was just curious about this since this claim comprises the core of David's argument that this isn't the practice that Westerners really want. I tend to agree with a lot of things he says on his blogs and he is responsible for my being interested in undertaking some Dzogchen practices (at some point: stream entry first!) and tantric perspectives/practices (Chod sounds particularly interesting). Indeed, I agree that many traditional Theravada corpse practices probably are designed to temper desires. I was reading Ajahn Brahms' latest and he says in there that relationships are suffering too, best to do without. That's a profoundly ascetic view - just because relationships pose difficulties they're *bad*. It seems sad.

On desire: I was just listening to Ayya Khema on Jhana practice (). She says, the only way monks and nuns can live happily without sensual pleasure is by practicing Jhana. Someone please tell the pope.

" meaningness.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/the...einvents-meditation/

This is also useful and contains many links to references."

Wow. Thanks. Very entertaining and informative.

I have a new respect for the King of Siam, a totally awesome dude. Mongkut ruled!

"It occurs to me that the journals here and at DhO may be the best evidence-base for Vipassana there is." -- someguy77

Agreed! The history seems to me to almost always be interpreted through a very misty past. This was originally an oral tradition, right? Supposedly nothing was written down for centuries after the Buddha's death. I suspect a lot of it is like that parlor game called "telephone." I tell a story, you tell the story, he tells the story, she tells the story and when it comes back around it has little resemblance to the original. I kind of like the idea that vipassana was invented in the last few hundred years, and that it might be a western invention. But I recognize that that, too, may just be another story. If there's anything our practice teaches us it's that almost everything is a story.

"Wow. Thanks. Very entertaining and informative.

I have a new respect for the King of Siam, a totally awesome dude. Mongkut ruled!"

inorite? That whole blog is pretty entertaining, even if not every entry is as well-cited as the one I linked.

Here's another useful/interesting article, this time by Thannisaro Bhikkhu, showing how the True Self notions in contemporary Buddhism come from German Romanticism:

www.tricycle.com/feature/romancing-buddha

"On desire: I was just listening to Ayya Khema on Jhana practice (). She says, the only way monks and nuns can live happily without sensual pleasure is by practicing Jhana. Someone please tell the pope."

Is the problem sensual pleasure or attachment to sensual pleasure?

I have heard different interpretations of these links of the Cycle of Dependent Origination: contact=>vedana=>desire=>attachment. Some say the problem is desire (tanha) because it implies attachment (upadana). My view is that tanha is neutral and no problem unless it leads to upadana.

I'm all for sensual pleasure. Sex, drugs and rock and roll. Well, no drugs for several years now.
jack

"Claims to historical authenticity now appear disingenuous." -someguy77

I agree. Also beside the point. If we value freedom, it doesn't make sense to chain ourselves to some partisan interpretation of ancient texts; better to try out various practices for ourselves and see what works for us.

"it doesn't make sense to chain ourselves to some partisan interpretation of ancient texts; better to try out various practices for ourselves and see what works for us" -Kenneth

This statement gets to heart of what is not quite right with the back-to-the-Buddha movement among some Western dharma teachers. While I have huge admiration for the likes of John Peacock, and benefited enormously from his retreat in the summer, there is a strange fundamentalism at the heart of his otherwise iconoclastic project. What he says is that tradition needs to be swept away to get back to what the Buddha was really on about. You hear this message quite a bit, and it crops up in MCTB too. But that approach, taken to its limits, would miss out on a whole host of meditation technologies that have been more recently developed. We end up making an idol of the Pali canon and valuing this more than our own experience. Now that's not what John Peacock does, but that would be the danger if his project was taken to its extreme. The irony, of course, with MCTB is that really it's less about the "core teachings of the Buddha" and more about the core teachings of Buddhaghosa and Mahasi Sayadaw, with backup from the Buddha!

I for one would like to see us treat Buddhism more like contemporary evolutionists treat Darwinism. You can be a Darwinist and recognise Darwin's enormous, revolutionary achievement, but also recognise that even though he was right about so many things, there is still room for the likes of Mendel, Crick, Watson and Dawkins to shake things up a bit and build on what he did. And when you get someone distorting Darwinism, perhaps even building a new school of thought which turns out to be misguided, as Herbert Spencer and others did with social Darwinism and eugenics, there's no need to idolise the original genius of Darwin and try to "get back to his teachings", you just correct the mistake and move on.

"The irony, of course, with MCTB is that really it's less about the "core teachings of the Buddha" and more about the core teachings of Buddhaghosa and Mahasi Sayadaw, with backup from the Buddha!"

I see this as one of the main problems with the No ******** approach to dharma. Both MCTB and KFDh present themselves as No-BS alternatives to the mushroom culture. But there's always going to be someone who's even less into BS, who's even more hardcore, whose own results make yours look like Jane Rainbow's.