PurposeThe purpose of this blog is to catalogue my experiences in the
Basic Meditation Course from 12 July 2009 to 22 November 2009, organized by Vajiro (Richard) Chia.
Uncle Richard (as I call him) is actually a distant relative of mine: he is the brother-in-law of my auntie (阿姨), but I actually
really came into contact with him when I first attended the
Meditation Appreciation Course (which is now defunct) at
Awareness Place (at Bras Brasah) back in 2002. In that very short course, I learnt the basics of Buddhist meditation from Uncle Richard, and under his guidance, also experienced
jhana (more on this in future postings). He also opened my eyes to how pragmatic and practical Buddhism is, under the Theravada tradition; it was under his guidance that I had an "ah ha" moment, when it became clear to me that Buddhism was my "religion" (if a religion that has no god, no soul and no dogma can be called such).
My meditation learning was interrupted by my four years of tertiary education in the US, where I tried to find a teacher that will replace Uncle Richard. Try as I might, I never really found a teacher who combined extensive meditation experience and a realistic pragmatism which Uncle Richard has. (To date, I have not found a single teacher who teaches jhana like Uncle Richard, largely because this type of Buddhist meditation is very rarely taught and most monks have not been trained in this.) This was partially because in Houston, where I was, most Buddhists were Tibetan or Chinese Mahayana Buddhists, and not Theravada (which is the tradition Uncle Richard comes from).
I experimented with the other traditions of Buddhism, and while I found a common language of compassion, and a common practice of breath meditation, the direct "see for yourself" and logical reasoning found in Theravada Buddhism still appealed to me in a way that other traditions did not. There was also no guidance in the subtle meditative absorptions, which really need guidance by experienced meditators. Unfortunately, the sole Sri Lankan temple in Houston did not have monks who were experienced meditators (their focus seemed to be more on abhidhamma, or Buddhist doctrine), and there were no other Theravada temples that I knew of in Houston, then.
I haphazardly meditated on my own through the years, with a highlight being the period when I went for a 10-day
vipassana ("insight" or "wisdom" meditation) retreat in Dharamshala, India, where I was taught the basic method as outlined by
S.N. Goenka and his teacher Sayagi U Ba Khin, which is increasingly widely taught in India.
My memories of the 10 days (in the middle of the Indian monsoon at the Himalayan foothills) were of extreme cold and damp (it rained everyday), with a very mixed group of people in the retreat (there were two Sikhs, at least one Muslim, two Japanese, a number of Europeans and a lot of Israelis: in fact, the video of the nightly dhamma talk given by Goenka-ji [shown every night] had subtitles in Hebrew!) I distinctly remember a few afternoons when we were trying to meditate and to stay awake (a challenge when you are jet-lagged and your daily wake-up call is at 4am), only to have some random farmer down in the valley turn on his radio, and we would end up trying to meditate to Bollywood bhangra music!
The meditation was initially focused on the breath, ranging from whole body, and then later to the very subtle sensations above the lip. Later we then moved to vipassana. After a few days of it, it was a very weird feeling of watching my body so closely and with such concentration that my body was no longer concrete, but was bubbling and vibrating. It was also during this time that all body pains disappeared: for the rest of my retreat, I was no longer bothered by any pains at all, even if I sat for two hours straight. When I told Uncle Richard about this, he informed me that it was just the one stage of vipassana: there were further levels of insight, going beyond insight from body sensations. I was far from enlightened (as I can tell, from my cravings!)
But the course was still a milestone for me, as it proved that 10 days of complete silence is really not as bad as one thinks, even if one is suffering from the cold and wet, and having constant diarrhoea.
Now that I am back in Singapore, I've signed up for the Basic Meditation Course and intend to stick to this discipline of structured instruction in meditation. It helps that the course is on Sunday afternoons, rather than mornings, as it is easier to wake up for!
The session first opened with an offering session on the 2nd floor of the temple, where we basically did a
puja to the Triple gems (Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha), and chanted in
Pali. We then went upstairs to the fourth floor, where Uncle Richard gave some course background (the aim is to "avoid bad states of the mind, cultivate good states of the mind, and purify the mind") and course instructions (proper dress, etc.).
The focus will be on four different types of Buddhist meditation (with the aims of the meditation after the dash):
- Loving-kindness meditation (metta bhavana) - to reduce aversion
- Contemplations on Impurities of the body (kayagata sati bhavana) - to reduce attachment to the body
- Concentration meditation (samatha bhavana) - to train the mind to focus and concentrate
- Vipassana, or insight meditation (vipassana bhavana) - to gain insight and wisdom in order to be enlightened
Before all of this, however, the class today was focused on teaching one how to relax and breathe naturally.
Sitting on our chairs, we looked on the floor and closed our eyes "as though (we were) about to fall asleep", focusing on relaxing and letting go of the stress in our eyes. This simple act, of looking down and closing your eyes as though you were about to go to sleep, overcomes a frequent problem I had in past meditations: I'd try to relax and focus on my breathing, but would get too distracted by my eyes fluttering about as though it wants to see through my eyelids. Uncle Richard explained that if you look straight ahead, then look down on the floor, and you compare the amount of effort and strain that you experience when you're looking ahead or on the floor, you can feel that looking down relaxes your eyes and subsequently your mind a lot more.
After closing the eyes, the focus is then on letting your internal organs relax. This cannot really be described in writing, but has to be taught by an experienced meditator like Uncle Richard (he taught it to me by placing my hand on his tummy, which was a pretty eye-opening experience, as you can feel his insides relax even though the exterior looks exactly the same).
A good analogy that a fellow student-meditator (in Germany) taught me is to imagine your skeletal structure as a clothes rack, held upright (but not rigidly). Then let your muscles and organs hang off the rack. Let go. Mentally go through your body from head to toe, and ask if a body part is tense or not. If it is tense, let it go. "Let your body dissolve"
How do you know whether you have relaxed sufficiently? You know, when your whole body begins to breathe without your conscious effort to tell yourself to breathe in or out. Uncle Richard refers to this as a gentle "vibration". For me, the feeling is very similar to the gentle-rocking one feels when onboard a ship, only that it is a lot more subtle. So subtle, in fact, that the rocking sensation of natural breathing is sometimes overwhelmed with the "thud, thud, thud" from my heartbeat.
A few minutes of this, and it is makes a huge difference to one's energy level.
We proceeded onto the Contemplation of the Impurities of the Body meditation, where Uncle Richard taught us to mentally disassemble our bodies bit by bit, like Lego blocks. He told us not to "rationalize or over-imagine: don't imagine blood spurting out or feeling intense pain when you take out your hair, teeth, bones, etc. ".
Interestingly, when I did the meditation as instructed, initially my body became quite tensed up, and you can feel a pulsing energy around the body part which is being mentally removed ("now, pull out your hair, one by one". Note that you are not told to "imagine"!). After my whole body was 'removed', it was interesting that my breathing was there, but it felt like my body was not there! Instead, there was a vibrating pulsing energy, much like in natural breathing. When we concluded the meditation, I felt very awake and energized, as though I had slept a very deep and refreshing sleep. Very interesting (and useful).
As time goes by, I will update this with my meditation experiences as a running commentary and diary. Your comments and feedback are most welcome!
