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

by Daniel M. Ingram

See the difficult but excellent The Spectrum of Consciousness, by Ken Wilber, which aptly explains how to keep our paradigms straight without mixing them up, or perhaps his later work, which represents his own growth and, with it, revisions to his thought, such as Integral Spirituality.

First, most Western Buddhists don't really believe that after a few months of good practice you could awaken or awaken more. They do not believe it is simply a matter of following simple instructions, moving through the clearly defined insights, and tagging a path. In fact, I often tell this story to Western Buddhists, many of whom have been on numerous insight retreats led by teachers trained by the best Burmese masters, and they say things like, “What do you mean, ‘third path’?” It makes me want to explode in a great, world-shaking blast of magickal vajra wisdom when they don't even know the basic structure of the path to awakening, much less anything practical about it. Most Western teachers wouldn't have the guts to stand up and say, “Yeah, he did it, he got second path!” (assuming they were even able to evaluate such a person's practice). If they could even identify the attainment, it would still likely be a huge, taboo secret.

Later, I am going to go into details about a practice called mudita, or joyful appreciation, and it is the practice of rejoicing in the successes and good fortune of others. It is one of the four brahma viharas, or “divine abidings”, and is a fundamental practice taught by the Buddha.

Practice, practice, practice! This is the big difference between those who are merely giving lip service to Buddhadharma and those who really get what the old boy was talking about. Go on retreats with sane teachers and follow the instructions to the letter all day long. Find people who know how it is done and hang out with them. Keep it simple. Avoid magical thinking (except when doing magick, more on that later) and don't lose your common sense.

It is also true that numerous meditation traditions that have come to the West have many people teaching in them without the foggiest idea that they are not at all qualified to do so. The canonical and commentarial texts state that we should have at least crossed the A&P Event to teach, though in the primary tradition I come from they consider second path as the standard minimum requirement for any sort of teaching. Basically, chancing into a path is impressive, but being able to tag another one demonstrates reproducible competence.

Later, the ten armies of Mara came to be listed as: 1) sensual pleasures; 2) discontent; 3) hunger and thirst; 4) craving; 5) sloth and torpor; 6) fear; 7) doubt; 8) conceit and ingratitude; 9) gain, renown, honor, and undeserved fame; and 10) self-exaltation and disparaging others (SN 3.2). These are now useful guidelines for difficulties that must be avoided when possible and seen as they are for meditators to progress on the path of wisdom. They tend to occur in roughly that order, cycling as does everything else.

For those who have attained arahantship, the luminosity and centerlessness of perspective becomes such a natural part of perception that it seems incredible that it was ever otherwise.

I feel that the most important positive result that can come from stating, “I know that of which I write,” is the chance that this might create the sense that extraordinary things may be understood and attained by otherwise ordinary people such as and including me and you. I've done this stuff while holding down jobs, having relationships, and pursuing graduate studies. I did it on a few weeks or months of retreat time here and there and with a lot of daily practice. My total retreat time from beginning to arahantship was about eight months with the longest retreat being twenty-seven days.

The word to the wise is: don't believe me or anyone else. Take the time to verify these things for yourself through your own direct experience. I could easily be fooling myself, you, or both of us on numerous points and for all sorts of reasons from innocent to evil. There certainly is a well-developed and ancient tradition of doing so. However, “my” attainments shouldn't matter so much to you, as the only person's understanding that will really help is your own.

Two interesting and practical questions for you are, “Who are you in direct experiential terms?” and “What is it that knows?” Answer these, and you will come to know all of this directly for yourself. The first and last job of anyone who teaches meditation should be to make her or himself redundant. This book is the best I have been able come up with to help accomplish this, as I have tried my best to pack it with everything useful that I know.

hope that you will be able to draw on your own power, stand on your own two feet, own your own practice, and have your successes and failures (rather than someone else's) at the forefront of your mind, thus reducing the problems that projection, transference, and countertransference cause.

There are many things that I have some residual resentment about, among the biggest of which is being brought up in a world where meditative technology and theory were not well-established, mainstream, or widely incorporated into standard daily life and especially education.

I attended a hippie-run Quaker school from the second through the fourth grade in Durham, North Carolina. Every morning we would all sit in silence for ten minutes. I found this generally very difficult and remember feeling a tremendous restlessness and irritation. We weren't given any specific technique that I remember. We were just told to sit quietly. Looking back, I think that those daily sessions of silent sitting provided me with a sort of conditioning and training that helped later, though I certainly didn't appreciate this at the time.

One of the next formative events was my introduction to a book called The Dancing Wu Li Masters, by Gary Zukav, during my eighth-grade science class, taught by Mr. Smith.

I was a totally fluxing field of naturally resolving probability fields.

I went through a phase where my hands seemed to feel big and my lips and face felt big (something I would later learn is called “the homunculus”, which relates to the way that the brain maps physical sensations, and it turns out it is a first jhana territory thing).

I began trying to catch the watcher, second after second, really going after the visceral, perceptual experience of what was observing, and before I knew it, got into this rapid-fire back and forth, super-concentrated state of everything vibrating in my head, and the whole vibration zapped back through my skull at very high speed into a black space, and it was done. The whole process from start of contemplation to finish couldn't have lasted but a minute or two, and the quick zap lasted less than a second. There were no other fireworks, no bright lights, no amazing dreams, no bliss, nothing. Just that, but that was all it took.

had done no formal meditation practice since fourth grade, knew little of Buddhism, but on the advice of Kenneth Folk, I went on a nine-day intensive insight meditation retreat at IMS with Christopher Titmuss, Sharda Rogell, and Jose Reisig in August 1994.

Kenneth, who by this point had done the three-month retreat at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) and then, a few months later, went to spend six months on retreat at the Malaysian Buddhist Meditation Centre (MBMC) and then, immediately, six months more at Panditarama in Burma, for a total of a year-long retreat in Asia.

About six days into that first retreat, after various episodes of back, neck, and jaw pain, as well as the discomfort in my feet from walking on stone walls, I was just sitting there, and suddenly I noticed that my body was not solid, but instead made of zillions of tiny particles of energy, all moving around, zipping in and out of reality, and my body exploded, everything flashed black and white, and I felt as if I had been dropped back onto my cushion from space.

I had been getting straight As in that electrical engineering program and loved it. I also hoped it would get me a better job than my English BA had gotten me. Further, when I got to differential equations, I felt like I was staring in wonder at the language of God. Differential equations describe lots of systems uncannily well, but they are particularly apt at describing systems involving the oscillation of potential and manifest energy, as well as any other vibrating system. To me, it was like the deepest philosophy, the key to the essence of what was really going on. That differential equations do their magic using a number that doesn't exist, the square root of negative one, interestingly called “i”, was unusually profound to me at the time. I attribute that profound appreciation and remarkable ease of understanding of the deeper meaning and uses of differential equations to having crossed the A&P.

Just as many of the best addiction counselors are themselves recovering addicts, and many of the best psychiatrists have their own experiences with crazy, just so, many people who are living at the proverbial bottom of the barrel of the world have had to grow spiritually in surprising ways to cope with that.

Second, I remember Norman Feldman's late-night readings, particularly his reading of the Pali sutta that would later become one of my favorites, Majjhima Nikaya, 121, called “The Shorter Discourse on Voidness”. I found its words spellbinding, and the thought arose, “Ah, this is it! This is the real thing!” To this day, I still think that. I am very grateful for him sharing that text with us by candlelight late that memorable chilly night.

About five days into the course, if I remember correctly, I was sitting outside the Sayadaw's room and could hear a young Malaysian woman giving a simple, clear report of her ability to see thought as thought, intentions as intentions, mental images as mental images, and to see the physical sensations that were interspersed with these and how each led to the other.

Mahasi Sayadaw's approach, and the resulting book Practical Insight Meditation, published in English in 1971, represented a massive foundational shift in the world of meditation. Its plain language, simplicity without sacrificing technical sophistication, directness, and emphasis on lived (not theoretical) phenomenology, along with clear, reproducible landmarks in practice, were paradigmatically groundbreaking.

He also introduced me to Jack Vance during that visit (with Kenneth reading aloud from Eyes of the Overworld, specifically that priceless section where Cugel is at the door of the House of Cil arguing with Yodo to let him in). Vance would later become my favorite author, after Mahasi Sayadaw.

On day six of my fourth retreat, that being January 13, 1996, in Bodh Gaya, India, in the meditation hall of the Thai Monastery at about 10:30 a.m., I had largely stopped doing anything that could really be called practice. Everything seemed just right on its own without my doing anything. Instead, there was this little, vivid, fantasy-like daydream that showed up as I just sat there doing basically nothing. In it, I was imagining that there was this gerbil on a gerbil wheel, and that this gerbil was both a meditator trying to get somewhere and yet also God, and yet God was watching the gerbil that was God. Suddenly, the gerbil-God and the Big God who just happened to be what seemed to be subject looked at each other, they recognized in this instant they were the same thing, or that their awareness was the same, and in that moment the “observing” side collapsed totally into the eyes of the little God-gerbil (specifically, the no-self door, which you probably already guessed), everything vanished, everything reappeared, and then the aftershocks following stream entry started coming.

The November 20 Fruition changed my world. After that, realization was about waking life in a way that it simply hadn't been before except for a few brief phases. The sense of the centerpoint, doer, controller, subject had been seriously damaged and at times seemed basically gone.

Personality disorders are also quite common across all groups of people, including meditators, and this includes the relatively troublesome Cluster B diagnoses from the DSM-5 of borderline, antisocial, narcissistic, and histrionic personality disorders. As mentioned before, these are diagnoses you should read up on and understand well if you are going to teach meditation (or interact with the public at all), particularly if you think you fall into one of these diagnostic categories.

Most people generally don't get their concentration strong enough to get to the stage that is described in the old texts by the standard phrase “the mind made pliant and malleable”, but if they do, they will be richly rewarded. Someone practicing hard jhana all day long with few breaks except to bathe, eat, wash, use the bathroom, and sleep may, if they have talent and diligence, be able to accomplish this level of concentration in a few weeks or perhaps a few months. Success would also depend on many factors of the practitioner, practice, and setting that are hard to quantify. Talking and other interactions rapidly dissipate momentum.

The experiences of the siddhis can help people live in the world in a way so that they appreciate its richness and yet are not grasping at it.

For those not familiar with the brahma viharas, they are: a. Loving-kindness (metta), which is also accurately translated as “loving-friendliness”: the natural well-wishing for oneself and all beings and the recognition that all beings wish for happiness. b. Compassion (karuna): the natural wishing that our own and all others’ pain, problems, and suffering will cease, and the recognition that all beings wish not to suffer or experience misery. c. Joyful appreciation (mudita): the natural appreciation of our own and all others’ successes, good fortunes, abilities, and joys. Mudita is also often translated as “sympathetic joy”. d. Equanimity (upekkha): the feeling of peace that comes from realizing that all beings are the true heirs of their karma and that their well-being depends on their actions, and not on our wishes for them; it also entails a lack of attachment or aversion to any classes of beings and any individual beings. Note: there are many types of upekkha mentioned in the various traditions, so be mindful of how the word “equanimity” is used in various contexts.

As an aside, I frequently encountered that odd sort of disbelieving after becoming a doctor, and would find myself driving to work thinking, “Am I really going into a hospital to take care of patients? I don't know anything about that,” and then I would arrive at the emergency department and somehow know what to do. It turns out this sort of thinking is common in many people, particularly professionals, so it is not surprising it should apply to meditators as well.

I was taken aback a bit, since, for all my frustration and sense of failure, I was still pretty impressed with myself and my abilities. Reluctantly, however, I took his advice to heart with my standard macho bravado, yet a bit humbled at the same time, and began a project of going back to extremely simple assumptions, trying to go for one hundred percent capture, not letting a single sensation anywhere in the entirety of experience go by without perceiving the three characteristics clearly. I did this from the moment I woke up in the morning to the moment I fell asleep at night. This was real Vipassana 101, just six sense doors and three characteristics, but with the seemingly preposterous goal of the true and final perfection of momentary concentration and investigation.

First, we have some perception of intentions as they arise, but it is generally poor perception. That we know what we are going to do before we do it is powerful conditioning for the mind to get a sense that some “I” is performing the actions. However, while intentions arise on their own, naturally, causally, there is insufficient clarity to perceive that, so we get the sense that we are creating the intentions and so controlling actions.

Even before Mind and Body, one of the very first insights that practitioners have is that they can't control their noisy minds; going deeply into this basic first insight, taken far enough, leads to wisdom.

By the time of the A&P, many practitioners will be noticing all sorts of fascinating sensations, vibrations, pleasures, and other rapturous experiences welling up naturally, but many will be too enamored of these experiences to contemplate the remarkable fact of the natural, causal, welling-up itself. Still, if you know what to look for as you cycle through these stages, you can focus on that aspect, the aspect that debunks the agent.

At that point, we have perfectly glimpsed for just a moment not only the illusions that make up the agent, but also perceived that agent to cease, to be absolutely transient. In the restart of reality, we can notice how the illusion is re-established. That careful, meticulous, intentional focus of our investigative mind on the restart can finally convince us, layer by layer, that there truly is no agent and that causality and the lawfulness of reality are real and always have been. As these insights percolate through the layers revealed by each path cycle, we can finally be done forever with the illusion of an agent and never contract into that illusion again.

Most insight practices that are very direct, particularly very dry vipassana, as I was doing at that point on that retreat, have not only the potential to create deep wisdom but also have a strong potential to create these sorts of serious shadow problems. Stay on guard against this sort of apathy and self-rationalizing neglect when chasing any ideal such as this one. It is not that agencylessness isn't a key part of the final prize. It is. But any action, any thought, any intention, any word: all of that was already agencyless and you had yet to realize it. All effort, all drive, happens on its own. Thus, like all the ideals presented in the models of awakening, beware of solidifying it into something unwholesome or detrimental. All right, back to the story…

It felt like the worst thing my mind ever did, and my mind has done some pretty bad things. I did everything I could not to panic, but some degree of panic set in anyway. I was terrified I would never get it back. This derailed my practice for maybe an hour or two, and then, remembering what had gotten me there in the first place, I pulled it together, went back to core assumptions (six sense doors, three characteristics), started practicing again, powered up to total sensate comprehension again, and, relatively shortly thereafter, it flipped over, everything righted itself, the knot untangled, fundamental perceptual identification and division stopped, and it was okay, actually much better than okay: I was satisfied! Then, an hour or two later, it happened again, a shudder, a wobble, like a top spinning off-kilter as it begins to slow down, like a mud clot thrown into a clear, still reflecting pool, like some destructive warp in space caused by a bizarre alien weapon in a sci-fi movie.

Shortly thereafter, during a meeting with Sayadaw U Pandita Jr. about my practice, and while I was in the synced mode of attention, I said simply, “Cycles, stages, powers, experiences: they all come and go on their own,” and then I just smiled. He looked at me and said with a huge smile directed to the nun sitting next to me, “Did you hear what he said!?” like it was the most beautiful and important thing in the whole world, which it was to me at the time and still is.

It is because of that week of gaining and losing that pristine centerless clarity that I can tell you for certain that the perfectly synced way is better, vastly better, and the other way, by comparison, totally sucks, despite how impressive all the stages and states and all that may seem. The difference is simply huge. Those days of alternating between the two radically different modes of perception made the meaning of fundamental suffering abundantly clear, with that period of practice driving the point home with sickening regularity every time the pristine mode would break apart. Somewhere in this phase, Sayadaw U Pandita, Jr. gently said to me, “You know, some people are arahants only on retreat.” Those terrifying words galvanized whatever else in me had held back.

Thus, the answers are in Part One, as Part One states—in the initial, formal vipassana instruction—to be very clear about all sensations and to perceive all sensations arise and vanish. That is the high dharma that somehow hundreds of pages of this book come down to. It is that simple, at least from a vipassana point of view. That is the profound beauty of the dharma of the Buddha: it is excellent, straightforward, explainable, doable, immediate, based on very simple, clear hypotheses that are testable even early on in experience and continue to hold up all the way through to the end.