Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

by Daniel M. Ingram

I started writing the small pamphlets and locally printed books that would one day become Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (MCTB1 hereafter) somewhere in early 1997, which seems quite a long time ago at this point. A lot has changed since then about my own practice, the world of meditation, my understanding of the world of meditation and mental development, and the world in general. The rise of the internet has facilitated unprecedented cross-pollination and collaboration, allowing obscure and isolated practitioners around the world to suddenly come together and share their experiences and ideas about practice. The effect on the dharma has already been profound. I doubt we have seen anything but the tiny beginning of what is possible.

I also came to the profound realization that those darn Buddhists have worked a ton of good stuff out. They have come up with very simple techniques that lead directly to remarkable results if you follow instructions and titrate to the best dose for you. The essential premise that if you want to know more about something you should pay careful attention to it has a simple, elegant brilliance. I wanted to know something essential about my experience and so I paid a lot of attention to it and learned about it. It made sense then and still does. While some people don't like this sort of cookbook approach to meditation, I am so grateful for the recipes that words fail to express my profound gratitude for the successes they have afforded me. Empiricism has always appealed to me, and Buddhist meditation at its best allows you to see for yourself.

This book is for those who really want to master the core teachings of the Buddha and who are willing to put in the time and effort required. It is also for those who are tired of having to decipher the code often found in modern and ancient dharma books, as it is designed to be honest, explicit, straightforward, and rigorously technical.

I have tried to include enough information to make this book capable of standing on its own as a manual of meditation and for walking the spiritual path. However, I have also tried to focus on those areas that I consider to be my core competencies and those areas of the spiritual path that I do not feel have been adequately covered in works that have come before this one. This book shines in areas of technique, the maps of meditation, and the fine points of high-level practice. However, the spiritual life is vast beyond measure and cannot possibly be adequately covered in a single book, so I haven't even remotely tried to make this the complete encyclopedia of meditation or spiritual practices.

One side of me very much wants to write something that is purely secular, utterly devoid of any explicit reference to any ancient frameworks, totally scrubbed of anything religious, and free of any term that is in any way alien to the predominant linguistic sensibilities in the area of the world where I reside. Were this book free from those terms, I naively imagine that it could serve as a general textbook in schools and for scientific study without raising any red flags related to its religious and spiritual references.

As a highly regarded senior meditation teacher and scholar (who will remain anonymous) said to me after skimming through an earlier draft of this book, “Most Buddhists are just aging boomers who want to do something to feel better about themselves as they get older and are not really interested in this sort of thing.” I wish them great success in getting those valid needs met. I must reluctantly advise such individuals to avoid reading this book or at least the chapters marked with a lightning bolt. This is simultaneously an admission of the limitations of this work, an invitation to adopt a more empowering view of what is possible on the spiritual path, and a warning.

I greatly prefer the company of fellow adventurers who wish to explore the mysteries of this life together than any other sort of relationships, particularly those that potentially disempower one or more of the parties involved.

That said, I do have the explicit goal of facilitating others to become living masters of this material so that they may go forth and help to encourage more people to do so. The more people can teach from a place of deeply established personal experience, the more people will be able to learn the dharma well, and the saner and happier the world will be.

To rewrite the operating system rapidly while it is running doesn't always go so well in the short term or occasionally in the long term. Thus, while I will include nearly endless exhortations to find the depths of power and clarity that you are capable of, I will also add numerous warnings about how to keep from frying yourself.

May this work be for the benefit of all beings. May your practice be for the benefit of all beings. May you aspire to be of benefit to all beings. May you realize what you are truly looking for, pursue it relentlessly despite all obstacles, and find it.

To inspire a broader audience, I will use both spiritual and practical language when discussing some of the elements concerning the Buddhist path. My preference, however, is generally for the practical language. You could throw out many of the religious trappings of the Buddhist path and still have a set of basic practices that lead to the expected effects. You could also keep all the religious trappings, do the basic practices, and produce the same results, assuming of course that you had the extra time and resources necessary to do both.

From my perspective, training in morality has as its domain all the physical, verbal, and mental behaviors belonging to every single aspect of life that is not explicitly meditative.

Let me now be completely clear on this: morality cultivated throughout our entire lives is critical for everyone, and particularly for those who want to train in concentration and wisdom!

Rather than accepting our current level of intellectual, emotional, and psychological development as being beyond our power to change, we consciously and explicitly adopt the empowering view that we can work with these aspects of our lives and change them for the better. We assume that we do have the capacity to change our world and our attitudes towards our world. We take responsibility for our actions and their consequences.

Crucial to the control of what happens in our lives is our intention. Thus, training in morality places much emphasis on intention, with the basic assumption being that the more our intentions are kind and compassionate, the more we are likely to be able to manifest kind and compassionate thoughts, words, and deeds.

By “compassionate”, I mean that we work to understand and relieve the suffering, problems, or unhappiness of others and ourselves.

Training in morality tends to be discussed in terms of what we should and shouldn't do. The standard Buddhist short list of the five actions that practitioners should refrain from doing are referred to as the five precepts: killing, stealing, lying, taking intoxicants that lead to heedlessness, and sexual misconduct, which includes such actions as cheating on a partner or using sexuality in a harmful way (Sutta Nipata [SN] 2.14). These are not unique to Buddhism, and seem to be part of the basic set of standards for behavior that societies and cultures throughout the ages have found to be helpful and practical. The standard list of things that we should try to do includes being kind, compassionate, and appreciative of the successes of others.

Additionally, in the Karaniya Metta Sutta (SN 1.8), we find the following advice: “Those who are skilled in good and wish to attain the state of peace should be able, upright, perfectly upright, compliant, gentle, and humble. Contented, easily supported, of simple livelihood, with few duties, controlled in senses, discreet, not impudent, they should not be carried away by the emotions of the majority. They should not commit any slight wrong such that the wise ones might censure them.” The rest of the sutta is also very worthy of reading and practicing.

Some have criticized the first edition of this book for not going deeply enough into the specifics of morality. It is a fair criticism, but I think that it has already been done well in so many other places, such that if you wish to explore the basics of training in morality as approached in the context of Buddhist traditions, I suggest that you check out some of the following works and look around for others that inspire you to take care of yourself and the world around you: For a Future to be Possible, by Thich Nhat Hanh; A Heart as Wide as the World and Loving-kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, both by Sharon Salzberg; Light on Enlightenment, by Christopher Titmuss; and A Path with Heart, by Jack Kornfield.

Those with a taste for more controversial aspects of the dharma might look towards John Stevens’ Lust for Enlightenment: Buddhism and Sex. I personally also look to the work of Dan Savage for many relative aspects of navigating modern adult lay life.

One pitfall that must be addressed here, however, since it is so common, is guilt. We in the West have grown up in a relatively privileged culture in which we can be extremely hard on ourselves, causing ourselves staggering amounts of pain to little good effect. If we can learn to substitute wise remorse, which simply says, “Well, that didn't work, and that is unfortunate. I will try my best to figure out why and hopefully do something better next time,” we will be much better able to train successfully in living a good and useful life.

The basic spirit is that these trainings are fun, a magnificent adventure in learning and growing, a remarkable opportunity to have many fascinating and transformative experiences, a wonderful experiment in what is possible in this life: these attitudes make a huge difference in all the trainings we will discuss here. One more great thing about training in morality is that it is indispensable for the next training: concentration. So, here's a tip: if you are finding it hard to concentrate because your mind is filled with guilt, judgment, hatred, resentment, envy, or some other harmful or difficult thought pattern, work on the first training.

I was on a retreat in 2003 with a mighty meditation master named Sayadaw U Pandita Jr., so named to differentiate him from the late meditation master Sayadaw U Pandita, who was a senior monk and one of Venerable Mahasi Sayadaw's direct successors, and author of such classic books as In This Very Life, and On the Path to Freedom (both of which I recommend). The former gave a long talk on the Pali word danta, meaning “tamed” or “restrained”. He explained it as carrying the qualities of being poised, dignified, and stable. “Restrained” means refraining from ill-conceived or harmful (to oneself and others) actions of body, speech, and mind. Practicing with a sense of ourselves as being dignified, mature, capable, balanced, poised, steady, and able to be comfortable in our own skin while doing simple things like sitting and walking: this way of working and seeing yourself is of great benefit all around.

So, let's say we wanted to create the part of our own character sheet that dealt with some very simplified axes of development of the vast training of morality, we might come up with something that looks like this:

This list I have come up with is very arbitrary and woefully incomplete, and is meant to serve as a general example of a concept, not a definitive guide, and I would encourage you to take time to consider what your own list would look like and how you have done over the years, as well as what you aspire to in the future, since explicit goals and frameworks help galvanize and direct energy for progress.

The second training is also called training in “samadhi” (meaning depths of meditation), or sometimes “samatha” (Pali) or “shamatha” (Sanskrit) practice.

The essential point about meditation is this: to get anywhere in meditation you need to be able to steady the mind and be present in the present. That's all there is to it and it is largely a question of just doing it. There is an important shift that happens in people's practice when they really make the commitment to develop concentration and follow through with it. Until we do this, not much is likely to happen in our meditation practice!

If you decide to do a concentration practice, stay on the chosen object like a dog with a bone until you have enough stability and skill such that the mind can rest on it effortlessly. Let me say here that there are various types of concentration, with the relevant distinction being continuous concentration versus moment-to-moment concentration. Both types develop concentration, but they feel different. For this section, I am talking about continuous concentration, which feels steady, smooth, and analog, rather than the concentration required to investigate individual sensations moment by moment that will be addressed when I discuss training in insight.

The first formal goal when training in continuous concentration is to attain what is called “access concentration”, meaning the ability to remain focused on your chosen object with relative ease to the exclusion of distractions. This is the basic attainment that allows you to access the higher stages of concentration and to begin the path of insight, which is the t...

Regardless, for the sake of discussion, when you can keep your attention on your object of meditation second after second, minute after minute, without letting it go to other objects, but before any interesting, blissful, unusually steady alteration of perception happens, that is what I call access concentration.

We end up with various factions struggling to control the meaning of that sanctified single term, in this case “access concentration”, but also, as we will see, nearly all the other map terms as well. What generally happens is that, instead of doing the intelligent thing, which is to recognize that we need more terms, and instead of using those, we mostly just battle it out in sectarian ways like dysfunctional, territorial academics.

The essential formal concentration practice instructions are: pick an object (the list on page 13 is a great place to begin), find a place to practice where you are as free from distractions as possible, pick a sustainable posture in which the spine is relatively straight (it doesn't really matter so much, but for this training it helps if it is somewhat comfortable), focus your attention on the object as completely and consistently as possible for the duration of that practice period, allowing as few lapses in concentration as possible, and learn to stabilize all of your attention on that object. The more you practice and the better your practice, the better you will become at concentrating. Find the balance of effort and steadiness that works for you. If your effort is too light, your mind will slide off the object, but if it is too tight you will wind yourself up and be too tense to settle into steady concentration. Be kind to yourself when the mind wanders, returning it with minimal fuss to the object of concentration again and again. Practice again and again until you can attain access concentration.

Should you need someone to tell you how long to practice, start with ten minutes a day and work up to an hour or two each day as your life allows. If you can learn to hold your attention completely on your chosen object for even one solid minute, you have some strong concentration skills. That said, you might have ten or more hours a day to devote to practice. Don't let me hold you back!

Concentration can also lead to very pleasant states referred to as “jhanas”. These can be extremely blissful and peaceful. Being able to access these states of mind can be ridiculously enjoyable and profound. These states are valuable in and of themselves and serve the important function in the Buddhist tradition of providing a disposable foundation for insight practice, in that you can build those states up and then tear them down with investigation of the sensations that make them up, which is the third training.

The world of concentration is vast and contains within it myriad skills that can be developed to remarkable degrees. As the number of objects that we can get good with and the many ways we can tune our minds are remarkably complex, it is hard to clearly delineate a simple and manageable inclusive list of all the things we can learn in the vast realms of concentration. However, were we to try, we might start with the following: The speed with which we can get into skillful altered states of awareness (generally called here “concentration states” or “jhanas”). The depth to which we can get into each of those states. The number of objects that we can use to get into each of those states. The stability of those states in the face of external circumstances. The various ways we can fine-tune those states (such as paying attention to and developing their various sub-aspects).

The given—rarely stated explicitly but often implied—is that we must be willing to stay on a sensate level, at the level of the actual sensations that make up experiences, if we wish to gain the promised insights. The corollary of this premise is that we must be willing to set aside periods of practice time during which we abandon ordinary ways of functioning in the world and even the unusual way of working with skillful altered states of consciousness that belongs to the training in concentration. We proceed from the premise that the teachings on wisdom point to universal truths that can be perceived in all types of experience without exception. We accept that if we can simply know our sensate experience clearly enough, we will arrive at fundamental wisdom.

The primary purpose for doing insight practices is to increase our perceptual abilities so that the truths accessed by skilled meditators become obvious. Thus, rather than caring what we think, say, or do, or caring about what altered state of consciousness we are in, when training in wisdom, we actively work to develop the clarity, resolution, precision, consistency, and inclusiveness of the experience of all of the constantly changing sensations that make up our experience, whatever and however they may be: such are the formal insight practice instructions.

Insight practice can seem more daunting, complex, or bizarre than other forms of practice. However, it is oddly simple. There are six sense doors. Sensations arise and vanish. Notice this for every sensation. These are cave-man simple instructions, yet somehow people make them much more complex than they need to be. As a preview of things to come, towards the very end of the book you will see me repeat this same message as basically the punch-line to the whole book, since that was what I found the most profound and helpful of all the Buddha's teachings. So, should you find your practice getting bogged down in fascinated or aversive reactions to the fancy and flashy topics that follow, return here, as this points to where the real treasure is: your own immediate sensate reality.

The gold standard for training in morality is how consciously harmless, kind, skillful, and compassionate our intentions, words, and actions are and how well we lead a useful and moral life.

The gold standard for training in concentration is how quickly we can enter into specific, skillful, altered states of consciousness on our own meditative power, how long we can stay in them, and how refined, complete, and stable we can make those states.

The gold standard for training in wisdom with insight practices is that we can quickly and consistently perceive the true nature of the countless quick sensations that make up our whole reality, regardless of what those sensations are, allowing us to cut to a level of understa...

This is called insight meditation, which is designed to produce a form of knowledge or wisdom that can transform and free us from our core perceptual misinterpretations of sensate reality.

In short, most of what you assume as making up your universe doesn't exist most of the time, from a purely sensate point of view. This is exactly, precisely, and specifically the point. Knowing this directly leads to freedom.

However, when practicing insight meditation, it is far better to perceive one sensation arise and pass away. What do I mean by this? I mean that sensations arise out of nothing, do their thing, and vanish utterly. Gone. Entirely gone. Then the next sensation arises, does its thing, and disappears completely. “That's the stuff of modern physics,” we might say. “What does that have to do with practice?”

It has everything to do with practice! We can experience this, because the first set of vibrations we have access to isn't actually that fast. Vibrations. That's right, vibrations. That's what this first characteristic means: that sensate reality vibrates, pulses, appears as discrete particles, is like TV snow, the frames of a movie, a shower of vanishing flower petals, or however you want to say it.

We are typically quite sloppy about distinguishing between physical and mental sensations (memories, mental images, and mental impressions of other physical or mental sensations). These two kinds of sensations alternate, one arising and passing and then the other arising and passing, in a quick but perceptible fashion. Being clear about exactly when the physical sensations are present will begin to clarify their slippery counterparts—flickering mental impressions—that help co-create the illusion of continuity, stability, or solidity.

The whole goal is to experience momentariness directly, that is, things flickering, and what those things are doesn't matter one bit!

When doing insight practices, try to limit yourself to no more than a few minutes of skillful reflection per hour of meditation. This should be more than enough. There are simply no substitutes for this sort of momentum in practice. If you can get that reflection down to no minutes at all, so much the better.

How fast are things vibrating? How many sensations arise and vanish each second? This is exactly what you are trying to experience, but some very general guidelines can provide faith that it can be done and perhaps point the way as well. Begin by assuming we are initially talking about one to ten times per second. This is not actually that fast. Try tapping five to ten times per second on a table or something. It might take two hands, but it's doable, isn't it? You could experience that, couldn't you? That's the spirit!

Not good at counting beats per second? Here's a quick trick. If you count, “one, one-thousand”, at a steady pace, that is about one second per “one, one-thousand”. Notice that it has four syllables. So, you are counting at four syllables per second, or 4 Hertz (Hz), which is the unit of occurrences per second. If you tapped your hand each time you said or thought a syllable, that would be four taps per second. Try it! Count “one, one thousand” and tap with each syllable. So, you now know you can experience at least eight things in a second! You experienced the four syllables and the four taps that went along with them. You probably experienced all sorts of other things also, like sigh...