Meditation as an end in itself

Meditation is one of the three elements of the threefold Buddhist Path (together with morality and wisdom). It involves direct cultivation and training of mental states, whether through formal “sitting” or otherwise. It is probably the aspect of Buddhism that has had the most effect on the most people in the West, for not only Buddhists use Buddhist meditation techniques, but a wide range of other people use it for stress relief or other therapeutic purposes.

As a practice within Buddhism, however, it clearly does have a wider context and purpose and should not be an end in itself. The “inward” focus and reflection has the purpose of developing the whole character, affecting the “outward” actions of one’s activity in the world generally. The withdrawal into meditation does not just have the goal of a pleasant inward experience, but is part of a difficult total transformation which also includes the examination of one’s beliefs and actions from the bottom up.

This being the case, why have I nevertheless so often received the impression that, for many Buddhists, meditation is an end in itself?

Perhaps the strongest examples which appear to support this come from Tibetan Buddhism. Traditionally, some elderly Tibetan monks have had themselves walled into caves, with a chink to receive food, there to end their lives meditating. These monks can hardly have thought that the Path consisted of anything other than meditation, if that’s all they had left to do. Even in the British Tibetan Buddhist community, there are three or four year meditation retreats[1]. A retreat of that length can hardly be aimed at integrating meditation with other aspects of the path – indeed many other aspects of the path must be forgotten altogether in the intense ascetic focus of such a retreat.

The Zen tradition goes in instead for marathon meditation sessions called sesshins. Here it is not even the quality of the meditation itself that seems to matter, but simply how great your endurance is at continuing to sit. Even the Buddha is depicted as sitting down to meditate until he reaches enlightenment, no matter what. The assumption here seems to be that if you keep sitting and sitting and sitting, you must eventually reach a breakthrough – but intense physical discomfort and mental rebellion are far more likely, even for experienced meditators who go on for too long. As human beings we have limited powers of adaptability.

At a more personal level, my own experience of several retreats at Vajraloka, the FWBO’s specialist meditation centre in Wales, was that the retreat leaders seemed to be trying to pack in as many hours of meditation as possible, no matter whether they were productive or integrated with the rest of the Path. Perhaps the most advanced meditators, like the most advanced musicians, after working up gradually over a long period of time, may manage to practise for up to eight hours a day. But to subject a group of no more than average meditators who have turned up for a retreat to such a programme seems crazy. And is meditating for eight hours a day really desirable, given the diminishing returns that are likely to follow from the extra time spent sitting?

Don’t get me wrong here: I do think that meditation is an extremely useful thing to do. The world would be a better place if more people developed greater mindfulness, concentration, compassion and insight in the course of a daily meditation practice. Maintaining that daily meditation practice is also not at all easy, and any training we can get from more experienced meditators may be helpful with this. However, the value of meditation is the sort of value that only arises in a larger context, when the benefits of meditation are seen in daily life and help to transform one’s approach to other activities. Someone who focused on meditation alone would be like an artist who painted a picture only containing reds and pinks, forgetting about the blues, yellows and other colours. Even if it was of predominantly red and pink objects, such a picture would lack depth and perspective because of its limited colour range.

Part of the reason why Buddhists may often treat meditation as an end in itself may be found, again, in the life of the Buddha. The Buddha is said to have gained enlightenment in meditation. He is described as gaining ever higher levels of dhyana (meditative absorption), before gaining enlightenment. It may be that enlightenment is for that reason seen basically as a meditative attainment, despite the distinction made in Buddhism between dhyana (meditative absorption) and insight (wisdom about ultimate reality), and the other ways of developing wisdom that exist outside meditation. This provides, then, another reason for not holding beliefs about enlightenment and not holding it as a goal, but simply attempting gradual progress within experience.

Another part of the reason may lie in the aesthetic pleasure to be found in meditation (when it is going well). If one manages to attain dhyana, or even the preparatory stage of access concentration, great feelings of exaltation and deep contentedness can arise. This is naturally something that one then wishes to repeat. However, in my experience, the more you try to repeat a good experience in meditation, the more you will be attached to it, and the less likely the subtle conditions required for a repeat of the earlier experience are to arise. It may be that those who seem hooked on meditation, and not able to see it in perspective, are just continually hunting that elusive experience of pleasure in meditation. However, as any good meditation teacher should tell you, it is better not to meditate in order to seek good experiences, but to seek overall spiritual development.

Nothing I have said here about putting meditation in context, in fact, might not also be said by a good meditation teacher. Buddhism certainly widely recognises the limitations as well as the potentialities of meditation. However, the issue, as ever, is how consistently Buddhist views and attitudes actually reflect that recognition.