IB World Religions 2.5.2. Conversion and Meditation: Realizing Maya, Non-attachment and Veneration Notes

2.5.2. Conversion and Meditation: Realizing Maya, Non-Attachment and Veneration

Conversion in Buddhist terms

1. Buddhism has no single act that makes a person a Buddhist the way baptism makes a person a Christian. Most Buddhists are born into the tradition and never mark a moment of entry at all.
2. The nearest formal equivalent is tisarana, going for refuge in the Buddha, the dhamma and the sangha, recited in Pali or in a local language.
3. Its role is unlike that of a conversion rite. The formula is repeated daily and at almost every ceremony, so it works as a renewal of commitment rather than as a threshold crossed once.
4. Adults who take it up formally usually add the Five Precepts, undertaking to abstain from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, false speech and intoxicants.
5. Buddhism has nonetheless spread by persuasion for two and a half thousand years. Buddhists have generally presented the teaching for testing rather than pressed for a decision.
6. Mass conversion does occur in the modern period. In 1956 B. R. Ambedkar led several hundred thousand Dalits into Buddhism at Nagpur, presenting the move as an escape from caste as much as a change of religion.

Insight into maya

1. When Buddhists do describe a decisive change, they describe it as seeing rather than as being persuaded. What falls away is maya (illusion), the appearance of things as solid, lasting and owned.
2. Avijja (Sanskrit avidya: ignorance) is the underlying condition, and it is presented as misperception rather than as missing information. A person can know the doctrine thoroughly and still not see it.
3. The first irreversible turn has a name. A sotapanna (Sanskrit srotapanna: stream-enterer) has seen the teaching directly, and the tradition holds that such a person cannot fall away from the path.
4. What drops at that point is specified rather than vague. The stream-enterer is said to lose belief in a permanent self, doubt about the path, and reliance on rites and rules as sufficient in themselves.
5. The branches differ over the pace. Ch'an and Zen argued at length over whether awakening arrives suddenly, and Japanese Rinzai practice aims at kensho, a sudden seeing into one's own nature.
6. Even where insight is sudden, the tradition treats it as needing to be lived out. Teachers routinely warn that a moment of clarity is not the end of greed, hatred and delusion.

Non-attachment

1. What insight produces in practice is viraga (dispassion), usually rendered in English as non-attachment. Buddhists describe it as loosening a grip rather than as losing interest.
2. The thing released is upadana (clinging), and texts distinguish clinging to sense pleasures, to views, to rites and rules, and to a doctrine of self.
3. Non-attachment is not withdrawal from people. The same tradition requires karuna (compassion) and metta (loving-kindness), which would be impossible if the goal were indifference.
4. Buddhists usually explain the difference by how loss is met. An attached love demands that the other stay and behave, while a non-attached love wants the other's welfare and can survive their going.
5. The Middle Way rules out the opposite extreme too. The Buddha is described as abandoning severe asceticism once starving the body proved as useless as indulging it.
6. Lay non-attachment looks ordinary rather than heroic. It shows in generosity, in holding possessions loosely, and in upekkha (equanimity) when plans collapse.
7. Buddhists are frank that the work is slow. The precepts and daily devotion are presented as the means by which most people make progress at it.

Forms of meditation

1. Bhavana (mental cultivation) is the general word for meditation, and its literal sense of bringing into being is the tradition's own account of what is happening.
2. Two families are usually distinguished. Samatha (calm) steadies attention on a single object, while vipassana (Sanskrit vipashyana: insight) examines experience for impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and absence of self.
3. The objects vary widely. Anapanasati watches the breath, maranasati contemplates death, and the brahmaviharas cultivate loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity.
4. Deep concentration has its own map. The jhanas (Sanskrit dhyanas) are successive absorptions, and Theravada texts treat them as powerful but not liberating on their own.
5. Zen works differently again. Rinzai sets a koan against the reasoning mind, while Soto practises shikantaza, sitting with no object and nothing to be gained.
6. Vajrayana adds visualisation, mantra recitation and practices working with the body's subtle channels, all received from a teacher rather than taken out of a book.
7. Buddhists insist that meditation sits alongside conduct rather than replacing it. Sila (ethical conduct) is presented as the condition that makes concentration possible at all.

Meditation among monks and laity

1. Meditation has historically been a monastic speciality, and even within monasteries it has not been what most monks spend their days doing.
2. Theravada recognised the division itself, distinguishing the vocation of study, gantha-dhura, from the vocation of meditation, vipassana-dhura, with most monks taking the first.
3. Lay meditation on any scale is a modern development. Burmese teachers led it, among them Ledi Sayadaw in the early twentieth century and later Mahasi Sayadaw and U Ba Khin.
4. Their students carried it further. S. N. Goenka taught ten-day silent courses across the world, and the Thai forest tradition drew lay retreatants to teachers such as Ajahn Chah.
5. The picture in Buddhist countries remains uneven. Studies in Thailand, Myanmar and Sri Lanka consistently find that regular meditation is a minority activity among lay Buddhists.
6. Western convert Buddhism inverted the pattern. It arrived largely as meditation instruction, so many Western Buddhists meditate regularly while doing little of the merit-making that occupies Buddhists elsewhere.
7. Secular programmes have widened access again. Mindfulness courses in clinics and workplaces teach techniques drawn from vipassana without the doctrine, and Buddhists disagree over whether that counts as the teaching spreading.

Veneration as everyday practice

1. For the majority of Buddhists the daily religion is veneration rather than meditation, and the tradition does not treat that as second best.
2. In practice it means bowing before an image, offering light, incense and flowers, chanting, giving to monks, keeping the precepts, visiting temples and going on pilgrimage.
3. Punna (merit) is the usual frame for these acts. They are held to shape a better rebirth, and a better rebirth is understood as a step toward eventual liberation rather than as a substitute for it.
4. The tradition also counts veneration as practice in its own right. Buddhanussati, recollection of the Buddha's qualities, appears in the standard lists of meditation subjects.
5. Upaya (skill in means) accounts for the range. Mahayana teachers hold that different practices suit different people, so Pure Land recitation and Zen sitting can both be genuine paths.
6. Buddhists therefore describe one goal reached at different speeds. Veneration, non-attachment and meditation are presented as parts of a single path that most people walk slowly, not as rival kinds of Buddhism.