The ‘Just Sitting’ practice has been part of the FWBO’s system of meditation since the very beginning yet is not often discussed and not always understood. Here Subhuti gives his own inspiring and brilliantly refreshing take on the practice as a central element in his own meditative life. A must-listen piece for all those enthused by ideas of formal and ‘formless’ meditation – ‘Just Hear’ it and you”ll see what we mean!
Free Buddhist Audio
“Just Sitting” practice with Subhuti
[Music] [Music and singing] [Music and singing] [Music and singing] [Music and singing] [Music and singing] So this morning, I'm supposed to be introducing and leading the just sitting practice, if you can talk about leading just sitting. First of all, let me just make clear. I was actually asked to lead or introduce the formless practice. I have no idea what that is, and I rather disapprove of the terminology to be frank. I don't disapprove of the people, but the terminology I do. And in fact, I think I'd like to get rid of it. There are lots of things I'd like. [Laughter] I also have often heard the terminology of a contrast between pavanar and non-bavanar practice. I think that's erroneous. I think we should get rid of that too. I'll say more about that in a minute. Likes and dislikes over. I've never been taught just sitting. What Bante used to say when he introduced it was, "No, we are going to just sit. Don't make an effort. Don't not make an effort." I used to find that amazingly inspiring and the paradox of it actually deeply meaningful. It precipitated me into an experience that is presumably what he intended. Sometimes not understanding what it meant, sometimes understanding what it meant, sometimes being with it, sometimes not being with it. So for me, that has always been enough. So yes, I've never been taught more about it, and I've never talked before about just sitting. So I haven't got much to say, just a few things that might be helpful. It is, in some ways, my main practice these days. I do other practices, which I do in conjunction with this, but it's the main way I have of meditating. So whether that means I'm qualified or not, let's see. The first thing I want to point out is that in the system of meditation, in Bante's system of meditation, which is the meditational accompaniment of what we've been studying in the last few days, it has an absolutely integral place. In the account that Bante gives, it accompanies each of the stages so that you do the stage of integration, especially through mindfulness of breathing, and then you do just sitting. You do the stage of positive emotion, especially through my tree bhavana, and then you do just sitting. You do spiritual death through six-element practice, then just sitting. You do spiritual rebirth, especially through the visualization of Buddhism, Bodhisattvas, and then you do just sitting. And it's quite clear when you listen to the original talk and see it written, that for Bante it was absolutely integral. I don't know whether everywhere, this is the way we present it and think about it. But if we don't, I suggest that we need to adjust that, do something about that. When I first used to go on retreats with Bante as a beginner after three months, he used to do triple meditation, first thing in the morning, usually mindfulness of breathing, then my tree bhavana, and then just sitting. As the retreat went on, it would often be my metabhavana or mindfulness of breathing, just sitting, just sitting, and there would be quite a lot of just sitting all the way through, probably more of the practices of my tree bhavana and upon a sati, but only just, and as the retreat went on, there would be more of it. We used to teach and practice like that, and I don't know whether that's still a custom. I have a feeling it's probably not universally. And there's a very, very important reason for it. And a lot of the things that I'm hearing coming out of people's disquiet with the movement's presentation of meditation, seems to me to be to do with this element not being sufficiently stressed, so that there's an element in people's experience that they're not getting from their teaching, they're being taught within the FWBO, so they get revelations from external sources. But actually, I think it's integral to what we do. So, let me now just give you a few useful Pali terms that I think may help to get us to grips with what we're doing when we're just sitting. First of all, a term I've only come across quite recently, so I haven't been able to follow it up in other places in the Pali canon. It's "panidhaya bhavana" and "upanidhaya bhavana". So note they're both bhavana, but "panidhaya" means directed. "upanidhaya" means non-directed, undirected. So it's bhavana which is directed, bhavana which is not directed. The context in which I've found it so far is in the context of satipatana, of mindfulness of the body, feelings, mind and mental events. And what's said is that you're trying to do Kaya on Upasana, mindfulness of the body, and there's a fever in the body. In other words, the body becomes intensely restless. There's a sluggishness of the mind, or there's a sluggishness of the mind. In other words, tinnamidha. And one's mind is distracted outwardly. So it starts to go out rather than being simply aware of the body. So what you do then is you direct your mind to an inspiring sign. And that inspiring sign is something like the Buddha, or even it can be an object like the breath in order to concentrate your mind. As a result of engaging with an inspiring sign, gladness arises, rapture arises, tranquility arises, and sakya arises, samadhi arises, and yes, you're concentrated. And so you withdraw the direction. You stop directing your mind to a sign, and you just come back to Kaya on Upasana, just to mindfulness of the body. And without directive thought, internally mindful, the Bhikkhu says, "I am happy." So you use directed attention, directed development, when your mind is not in a fit condition to be simply mindful. And when it is in a fit condition to be simply mindful, you stop directing your mind to the inspiring object. So I think this gives us quite a strong clue to what we're doing in a practice, if you can call it a practice, a non-practice such as just sitting. You're not focusing your mind on an object, but that does not mean you're merely drifting, or that you're just in a dull, sluggish state, or that you're outwardly distracted, or that your mind is sort of frothed up. It means that you're happy and happily aware, especially of your body. Although it's worked out in terms of the other sakti-patana, it's frequently referred to in the connection with Kaya on Upasana. So that's the first set of terms that I think are helpful. What you're doing in just sitting is it's still a bhavana, it's still a development, but it's a bhavana that is not directed, that doesn't contain direction to an object. You're simply aware. So then there's a second pair of terms that I found very useful in thinking about what's happening. And that's sankata and usankata. You've heard me talk about this already both in the talk I gave the night before last, and in the introduction to the six element practice. So sankata means constructed, fabricated, put together, confected. Usankata means, well, really, interpretively, it means spontaneous, without any effort, without any direction, as it were any deliberate effort to put something together. So in a practice like the mindfulness of breathing, a practice like the maitre bhavana especially, you're making an effort to bring something into being. In the metabhavana, you're making an effort to bring metar into being. So that is sankata. And as we've already seen, the problem with sankata is that it involves a certain amount of, if you like, even strain. The application of the right efforts involves a sort of division of yourself. If you have to sort of say to yourself, I am going to make myself move into something new. So there's an element of strain within the mind, which is difficult to sustain over long periods of time, and is ultimately unsatisfying. So you need also to experience usankata. Of course, you have to be careful, because there are plenty of spontaneous states that have nothing to do with spiritual life. In fact, the very reverse, instinctual behavior is usankata, it's spontaneous. If we understand spontaneous in the broadest sense, it includes giving way to anger, giving into craving lust and so forth, and allowing ourselves to just fall into the patterns that our previous karma have established. So when we don't make an effort, certainly in the earlier stages of our spiritual life, until Shila has really begun to be second nature, usankata is a pathway to unskillfulness. It was the famous discussion in the life and liberation of Bharma Samba, who misunderstood teachings about spontaneity, and just indulged himself and ended up for 10,000 rebirths as a toe-sucker. You have been warned. So when we're talking about spontaneity, we mean a spontaneity which is allowing to unfold of skillful mental states that are arising as a result of one's previous action. I think it's very, very important in our practice of meditation that we balance effort with spontaneity. And I'll say more about this in a while. I think this is something we could draw out much more. I think there's some issues around in Shabdha and so forth of people sort of feeling that they've been forced all their order life, all their movement life, and that they hear some other teaching which encourages them to relax and allow something to unfold within. And this comes to them as a revelation. For me, this has always been part of it because of the way Bante taught in the first place, because I do the Manjushri Stutti Sadhana in which after the dissolution of Manjushri into yourself, you sit in Samadhi as long as it lasts. So in other words, you allow the effects of the effort that you've made to meet with Manjushri just to echo within you. Completely spontaneously. As long as it lasts, is that quite important? When it stops, when it begins to fade, when it becomes distracted, then you need to either rise from meditation or apply some new effort. So I think that there always needs to be a balance. Certainly once one has any depth of experience in meditation between bringing something into being and sort of enjoying it. If you like, path and fruit. And I think that from quite early on, that needs to be encouraged, that the fruit unfolds. So there you are, there's a dichotomy. You could even talk, and I'm extending the metaphor, you could talk about micha, a sankata, and sama, a sankata. In other words, a spontaneity that is unskillful and that comes merely from the indulgence of previous karmic unskillful patterns. And a spontaneity that comes from some previously developed impulse of skillfulness, which you allow to resonate with India. So there's a third term, it's a single term this time, it's dasana, dasana, darshana in Sanskrit, simply means seeing. And in several, several important such as the Buddha offers this as one of a range of alternative ways of dealing with unskillful states. There's one important sita right at the beginning of Majim and Akhaya, the Asavada, the waning or elimination of asavas. Sita, which gives seven different ways of getting rid of asavas. And the first of these is dasana. So what happens is that you're aware, states of mind arise, and as soon as they arise, you see them. But you're seeing is not merely a sort of superficial contact with them, it's seeing them as they really are with wise attention. You see them fully, deeply, roundedly. So if those mental states that arise are predisposing factors for asavas, well seeing that, they just go. It's in a way you don't have to make an effort, it's that the clarity of your perception of them itself dissolves. Once you know something as an asavas or is productive of asavas, well you can't persist in them. Of course, if you've really got dasana, sometimes we're so perverse that we know that it's not good for us, but we do it anyway. But in a way we haven't really then seen it deeply enough, fully enough. It's just an intellectual or a superficial self-telling, this is not good, rather than a real experience of what that mental state is. So dasana is this, you could almost say you don't make an effort, because you don't need to make an effort. The perception of the mental state itself dictates what happens next, if you see what I mean. Because you recognise it as productive of Asrava, therefore of pain for yourself and others, you don't go there. But presumably in so far as you're needing to be aware that it may be like that, you're still not free from asavas, they're still a rise. But their rise within a mind that is immediately aware of what they are, and just rejects them, but that immediate awareness of what they are prevents them from developing any further. So I think these three Pali terms are helpful in understanding what we're trying to do in just sitting. So in trying to think about this, I came to conclusion that there are a number of different things that go on when people are just sitting. Depends who it is, what time of day it is, and what day of the week it is, what happens when you just sit. And probably what I'm going to say, I hope recognise something of what happens to you at some times when you're just sitting. This is my own list, and it's rather hastily inspired this morning in my meditation. So I can't say it's definitive or anything like that, but this is, as I say, not something I've talked about before and I just was asked by Dhammerati and I always do what Dhammerati asks me mostly. So it's the five justs, sounds like something out of the Chinese Communist Revolution, doesn't it? The five justs. So the first just is just settling. So you sit, there's nothing to do, you're not giving yourself any instruction, nobody's giving you any instruction, and you're just sitting there, but your mind is all over the place. You've just come in from a heavy conversation or a busy email session or whatever it is, you just sit down and your mind settles. You allow your mind to settle, just like a lake that's mud is stirred up in, and you just let it settle down. It may not even be that it settles very far as it were, but it settles down far enough for you to be able to actually feel something going on right here. And I think this is worth mentioning because I think it's something that people need to do and that we need to help people to do before they meditate. Again, thinking back to my own early experiences of meditation with Bante, he used to sort of talk us down as it were. Not, I wasn't aware that's what he's doing, it's only in retrospect that I can think that's what he's doing. He didn't even do it deliberately, but that very calm, very quiet, very positive voice, very slowly just sort of talking you into a meditative situation. And then he'd often do a body scan in the early days. But to begin with this is just settling down and he'd encourage people to go into the shrine room and just sit before the session started, this beginner's level. And often before the actual meditation would start, people would sit around in the little waiting room and Bante would sit there and complete silence. So we would all in terrified social embarrassment or be silent too, being good Englishman. But at the same time it had a function of sort of settling things down. So I think it's an important element to introduce before a meditation session and it's important for us to do it ourselves. You don't really do much, you don't try to do anything, you just try not to do something, you just try to let your mind settle down by being quiet. It's really just being quiet and it's sometimes the best thing that we can do. So the second just is just waiting. It's a little bit beyond what I've just been talking about. You're sort of present, your mind is no longer just jumping here and there, or if it is jumping here and there, there's a bit more of a base to it. But most commonly it's accompanied by the experience of boredom. There's nothing very interesting going on, nothing very inspiring going on, nothing very worthy going on, but you're just waiting. And I think what one needs to do in this kind of aspect of just sitting is have a sort of patient and faithful readiness. And it's a practice that I've done a lot over the years, not just in sitting meditation but in sitting in a chair in the morning or after doing something or even in a state of upset. A lot on solitary retreat. Just sitting bored, bored and with my own mind just chumtering on like weekend trippers, just an idle conversation at the back of my mind, going round and round and round. You just wait trying not to let anything catch you take you away. I think of it a bit like a bardo and what you see is your mind constantly wanting to be reborn. It's seeking an identity, seeking a solid reality, a story to tell itself. And your effort is simply to stop that happening prematurely. You just don't let it go anywhere before you think it's somewhere worthwhile for it to go. And my experience is that if I wait with sufficient patience and with sufficient confidence, something bubbles up. Either I become concentrated or I become inspired. And the way in which that happens depends on circumstances and so forth but the practice is having a faithful confidence that something will arise from a deeper level. What it amounts to is that you're not engaged with anything. That's boredom. So it's almost the cultivation of boredom. We talked a bit about this in our discussion group but I think boredom is a very, very precious state. This is a very early teaching of bantas that boredom is a sort of gateway to a real and deeper engagement. So you stay with the sense of unengagement which is boredom and wanting craving, some engagement, almost anything. I sometimes find myself doing sitting and all my books start calling to me, read me, read me, read me. And you know that they won't engage you because there's something missing here. So you have to sort of wait and eventually if one waits long enough in the right spirit, something arises. So that's just waiting. Then thirdly there's just watching. There's a bit more like Dassana and perhaps it's for it to be fully Dassana in the sense that your awareness itself transforms, demands quite a high degree of development of mindfulness, one that I can't often arise to. But there's a sort of step before that where yes things do arise, you watch them and to some extent you have to grapple with them a bit because they start precipitating into thoughts, they precipitate into plans, etc. But you retain sufficient mindfulness not to allow that to go too far. And often I find that real problems that I've got in the world itself, usually with other people, get worked out in this way. You can't stop myself from going over the problem in the usual way, but I'm standing slightly further back and not allowing that process to take me too far until I get another perspective and then I can let it go. So as sort of things come up that are the issues of the moment, you don't exactly go with them, but you don't exactly reject them. And you try to find the deeper perspective on them, the deeper feeling awareness of them which dissolves them. I hope I'm communicating something, these are just my own fleshings out of what goes on. And sometimes it doesn't work and you just get lost in what you're doing and well then you just, what I have to do is sit for a very long time until either it gets worked out or it gets too painful and I have to work in another way. But the broad effort is to give enough space to whatever emerges which will be the issues of the moment, all the issues of the past. I've found on a long solitary retreat things that even seem to go back to another lifetime emerging. And it's the question of giving enough space so that they are not rejected, but they're not indulged and they dissolve. It may take days, it may take weeks, it may take months, but often once one becomes practiced it can be quite quick. Then fourthly there's just enjoying. You float on the current of your previous effort. So this is what I talked about as Asankatta in the summer sense, in the positive sense. You've made an effort, you've done the mindfulness of breathing, your mind is quite concentrated. And at the end of the session you stop and you remain in the state that's left. And you just allow that to continue as long as it continues. This is the thing I was saying earlier that I thought was extremely important that we encourage people to do. Otherwise I think that people's relationship to their own mind's conscious effort is to do with a conscious world effort rather than a deeper experience. So I think people are constantly short circuiting themselves. You make an effort, you get somewhere and then you cut that short because you make another effort. But I think you have to sort of fling the ball, let it fly, then walk over to it, pick it up and fling it again. If that works. So there's a relationship between the effort and the result, the karma and the parlour, the path and the fruit. Which of course you get wrong, sometimes you don't make enough effort, so there's not enough fruit, so there's nothing to drift on as it were. Sometimes you make too much effort and don't allow the fruit to emerge and so on. But you get to know your own mind and know well when you have to just, well when it's appropriate just to sit and float on the current as I put it. And when you need to come back and make an effort. And this of course also relates to the directed, undirected. Because if the floating then just becomes drifting, in other words you're not going in a skillful direction at all, then you may need to come back to some directed effort. In other words through primarily body mindfulness is the traditional way of talking about it. And especially mindfulness of breathing. But probably it's a question of experience and type. But maybe other things that you can come to, like the Buddha. I found that very very interesting that you use the reflection or the inspiring image of the Buddha to lift you out of a drifting state. Or just a sloppy mind, an unfit mind. So yes I think that just sitting in the broader sense works best when there's quite a lot of active effort going on. When you're on retreat and you're doing mindfulness of breathing, matter of barfner, sadhana, six element practice. So there's quite a lot of effort to bring more skillful mental states into being. Then you're more likely to be able to just enjoy. If you've been practicing for a long time it becomes easier and easier. Usually if I sit for long enough I'm able to just enjoy. But I have to do quite a bit of settling down, waiting and even watching. And then the just enjoying is possible. So yes I'd like to suggest that right from the start we build this in and that we talk about it and that if we don't already I'm out of touch so you may all be doing this. So you know when there's a mindfulness of breathing session what I would do what I do now in India is after the third bell or sometimes I didn't even ring the three bells, the last bell. I just say okay now stop making an effort and just see what's going on in your mind and just enjoy the effects of what you've done so that you direct people's attention to the effect. I think it's quite important anyway because often people have a discourse that they're no good at it, they're not getting anywhere, nothing's coming of it. But almost any effort is going to have some effect even if it's you know pretty tatty it's going to have some effect. So I think it's good to encourage people to notice what's happening and it's always said that good learning consists of review in review of what you've learned. So in this sense I think it's good to review the state that you've got but also to learn to float with the current of that state. So finally there's just sitting proper, the fifth just. So you're sitting with complete unshakeable equanimity allowing the productions of time to flow through a pure awareness but without any illusion. So times productions appear before you within you and you are aware of them but without any stickiness, without any attachment, without any interpretation, you just see them, you just watch them but not watching in a separated sense. And a deep and loving sympathy with whatever arises and the feeling of being inseparable from the mystery at the heart of things. So this is something very very profound indeed which occasionally if you practice just sitting in the form of four ways will come to some extent, you'll get some flavour of it where you really are doing what Bantu says, just sitting without making an effort and without not making an effort, without making an effort not to make an effort. You're just there in a very simple, very profound way, very very warm full of my tree but without a sort of sense of something pumping is just there, very gentle, very sensitive and a sense of being in connection with what matters most, not being in connection with it but almost being what matters most. So just sitting at this point becomes a picture in the highest possible sense, in the transcendental sense and it's important to add this element in to the discussion of just sitting because it's what everything else circles around. It's as if everything else sort of tends in towards that experience of just sitting, it's the completion of just sitting in the sense of just settling down, just waiting, just watching and just enjoying. It really is just sitting, you're doing nothing else but sit but with such a wonderful sense of completeness, a wonderful sense of nothing to do, nothing to achieve. The few moments when one achieves that, it's such a glorious relief, a wonderful sense that there's nothing driving, nothing to take you away from anything and you can just sit completely poised. And it's sort of important to bear that in mind, that's what we're aiming at, we're not aiming at, that's what we're trying to allow to emerge by just settling down, just waiting, just watching and just enjoying. So these are my reflections on the just sitting practice, I hope they're helpful, they are rather personal as it were and I've given my own terminology but I hope that the background of terminology from the Pali Canon is helpful. And even just a reminder of how important it is in Banti's system is significant, maybe others are well aware of this but if you're not, I think we need to revisit it and look at how we present meditation and make sure this dimension is there. I think quite a lot of the senses of dissatisfaction that some people have experienced to do with things in this area and that actually they're already here and we just need to refocus on them, draw them out. For me, they've never been absent, they've always been part of what I've understood Banti to have taught but I get the impression that that's not universal. So, off past, come back together again and we'll try just settling down, just waiting, just watching, just enjoying and even just sitting.