ten stages of meditation

8/12/2019 Ten Stages of Meditation

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Upasaka Culadasa February 2012 1

THE TEN STAGES OF MEDITATION

"Mindfulness of in-and-out breathing, when developed and pursued, is of

great fruit, of great benefit. Mindfulness of in-and-out breathing, whendeveloped and pursued, brings the four applications of mindfulness to their

culmination. The four applications of mindfulness, when developed andpursued, bring the seven factors for awakening to their culmination. The

seven factors for awakening, when developed and pursued, bring clear

knowing and release to their culmination.

"Now how is mindfulness of in-and-out breathing developed & pursued so as

to be of great fruit, of great benefit?The Anapanasatti Sutta

Who hasn't found themselves planning, daydreaming, or just zoning out while sitting on

the meditation cushion? Some well-intentioned practitioners may even go through the motions

of sitting for years without getting anywhere. This happens when people lack a clear idea aboutthe nature of meditation: simply put, it is a skill. And like any skill, there are straightforward

goals and instructions. Also, it takes practice to get better. This is an overview of those goals

and instructions. They are easy to understand and work with even if sometimes they involve a

fair amount of detail. Yet, the road to improvement doesn't have to be a long one. You can

achieve success in months, or in a few years at most. You'll find the rewards of meditation are

closer than you think.

Traditional Roadmaps for Meditation

This presentation is the result of discovering how few long-time practitioners have ever

experienced any of the more exalted states of meditation, much less the profound realizations

that it offers. Meditators in general are reticent to discuss the details of their practice experience.

So it wasnt until I began to have conversations within the context of a teacher-student

relationship that I became aware of the extent of this problem. Essentially what I learned was

that even after many years of trying, people were making very little progress. The sincerity of

their aspirations and the amount of time they had spent practicing were definitely not the

problem. What they lacked was a clear understanding of exactly which skills they needed to

cultivate, in what order, and how to go about doing it. Put another way, they needed a clear mapof the process that describes the whole journey step-by-step: what needs to be accomplished at

each stage and how to do it; what things are better left until a later stage; and what pitfalls should

be avoided.

It isn't that these kinds of roadmaps don't exist, because they certainly do, but they are

largely inaccessible to most meditators. Some 2,500 years ago, the Buddha presented meditation


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training as a sequence of developmental stages, in a series of verses known as theAnapanasati

Sutta. Each verse describes one step in a progressive method for training the mind. Yet, these

verses are short on practical details, and so cryptic that they're incomprehensible to any but the

most experienced meditators. Perhaps there wasn't any need for the Buddha to go into specifics,

since there were so many others at the time who could interpret his words and provide clearinstructions.

Around 800 years later, Asanga identified nine distinct stages in the process of

developing concentration.1 Four centuries after Asanga, Kamalasila, who later taught in Tibet,

elaborated on these stages of training in his Stages of Meditation(Bhavanakrama). Yet another

invaluable source of information is thePath of Purification(Visuddhimagga), compiled by the

great Theravadin commentator Buddhaghosa in the 5th century. As all these masters realized,

teaching meditation by stages is an easy and effective way to help someone achieve the highest

goals of the practice. Unfortunately, these and many other excellent maps of meditation progress

lie buried in the "commentarial" literatures of different Buddhist traditions. The volume and

diversity of these commentaries is so vast that even the great masters of one tradition rarely

know what is available in other traditions. It's no wonder that the average Western meditator

isn't aware of them.

Part of the problem is that many of these works haven't been translated into European

languages. Few people other than Buddhist scholars are able to study and translate these dense

texts, full of obscure terminology and complicated language from a very different time and

culture. In the future, we can expect to see more and better translations. Another difficulty is the

closely related issue of interpretation. Since Buddhist scholars are rarely serious meditators,their translations are subject to distortions that come from knowing too little about the subject

matter being translated. Traditional meditation teachings can only be correctly understood if you

have personally experienced the kind of mental states being described. Purely theoretical

attempts at interpretation always fall short.

Also, as you might expect, these old but very precise roadmaps of the practice have been

greatly obscured by the passage of time. I remember when I first encountered Asanga's nine

stages of meditation. A lama in the Tibetan tradition was doing a presentation on them. I was

already very familiar with how meditation training unfolds, both from my own experience and

from the guidance of my teachers. I was immediately struck by two things. First, I was

impressed how accurate and brilliant was Asanga's summary of the training process. Second, I

realized how confused and distorted this particular lama's understanding of the material was. I

1The nine states one progresses through before attainingshamatha are described in Asangas Grounds of Hearers

(Sravakabhumi), Compendium of Knowledge (Abhidharmasamuchchaya), and Ornament for the Mahayana Sutras

(Mahayana-sutralamkara).


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doubt that anyone could have improved his or her meditation practice from hearing that

presentation. Nor was this an isolated incident. Similar experiences have shown me that,

although the texts themselves have been carefully preserved, they are not always well understood

by their preservers.

Meditation is still quite new in the West, and there is much yet to be learned. However,once its secrets are unlocked and the hows and whys are better understood, it will be easier to

achieve the true goals of meditation. With a clearer understanding, Westerners can then bring

their own unique cultural talents, including science and technology, to the teaching and practice

of meditation. We will eventually make meditation our own in the West, and hopefully use it to

help ourselves become a wiser and more humane society and advance human progress beyond its

current biological and cultural limitations. On an evermore crowded and over-burdened planet,

this may be our only hope for the future. The cumulative experience of thousands of years is at

our disposal. It only needs to be made available in a way that can be readily understood and

applied. This is a small attempt at doing just that.

A Modern Roadmap for Meditation

What follows is the product of several decades of personal meditation practice. To make

sense of my own meditation experiences, and whenever I needed guidance about where my

practice should go next, I turned not only to my teachers, but also to the Pali Suttasand the

commentaries of several different traditions. Over and over again, these traditional sources

provided an appropriate context to fit the pieces together and find the information I needed. I

have used my own experience with these sources to "reverse engineer" traditional meditationinstructions in a modern form. I then integrated that understanding with what modern

psychology and cognitive neuroscience have to offer.

The result is what you find in these pages. The structure of this presentation comes

directly from traditional teachings. But the substance of the meditation instruction that fleshes

out this framework is not an intellectual interpretation of ancient texts. It isa modern synthesis

based on first-hand experience and expanded on through the shared experiences of many other

dedicated practitioners. Also, this is an amalgam of teachings from different traditions. While it

is entirely consistent with all of them, it does not reflect any one tradition in particular. I believe

that this is one of its great advantages. As Buddhism and its associated practices diversified over

two and a half millennia, each tradition has evolved its own special contributions. The Indo-

Tibetan Mahayana meditation teachings fill in gaps in the traditional Theravadan teachings, and

vice versa. The fundamental techniques presented here apply to every kind of meditation

practice.

Keep in mind that all of the source teachings were intended for monastics living in


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supportive communities of meditators. There wasn't much need to provide basic instructions,

practical details, or to give examples. This isn't the case for modern lay practitioners. Most are

practicing with little guidance and often on their own. Therefore, while closely following these

original teachings, I provide much more detail and give examples. I have also added an extra

Stage "Establishing a Practice" to Asanga's nine stagesto help peoplewith jobs, families, andother responsibilities navigate the challenge of finding the time for meditation in their busy lives.

These and other minor differences in this presentation reflect the differences between practicing

as a householder rather than as a monastic.

As much as possible, I have used modern English to describe the Ten Stages. This is

partly to make it more accessible, but also because Pali and Sanskrit labels conjure up different

meanings for different people. Because English and European languages often lack words for

the concepts described by traditional meditation terminology, it has become common practice to

use Pali or Sanskrit words in English meditation texts. The problem is that the meanings of these

terms have changed with time and geography. It's not uncommon for the same words to mean

different things to teachers even within the same tradition, and the differences in meaning

between traditions that have developed far apart from each other are especially great. Even the

most basic meditation terminology is subject to confusing and often conflicting interpretations

and translations. Too often this results in people talking to each other using the same words but

with different meanings, whichcan make meditation discussions quite baffling.

On the other hand, the need for some kind of technical vocabulary is unavoidable. So,

rather than inventing new words to replace them, I will use words likesamadhi, sati, vipassana,

andsamatha. But when I do, I will always explain exactly what they mean in plain English. I amalso going to use words you already know, but I will employ them in a more precise, specific,

and useful way. Some of these "technical terms" are influenced by psychology and the cognitive

sciences. This kind of language may seem unfamiliar at first, but taking a little extra time to

learn the meaning of these terms will be immensely helpful. It gives us a precise language to

describe the practice and understand subtle experiences and states of mind.

The Ten Stages and Four Milestone Achievements

The entire process of training the mind unfolds through Ten Stages. Each Stage has its

own distinct characteristics, challenges to overcome, and specific techniques for working

through those challenges. The Stages mark gradual improvements in your abilities. As you

make progress, there will also be Four Milestone Achievements, discussed below. These mark

especially significant points of transition in your practice when you finally master important


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skills, taking your meditations to a whole new level. In other words, the Ten Stages can also be

divided into four distinct parts.

The Stages and Milestones, considered together, form a broad map to help you figure out

where you are and how best to continue. Yet, because each person is unique, the route your

spiritual journey takes will always be at least slightly different from that of somebody else. Forthis reason, we will also talk about how the process unfolds, how fast or slow you may

experience progress, and about what kind of attitude to have. The point isn't to force your

experience to match something you have read. You instead want to use this as a guide for

working with and understanding your own experiences no matter what form they take.

The more clearly you understand the Stages in cultivating attention and awareness and

why the happen in the order that they do the quicker and more enjoyably you will walk the path

toward happiness and freedom.

The Four Milestone Achievements

Your progress through the Ten Stages will be marked by four particularly significant

achievements. They are Milestones that divide all the Stages into four distinct parts: the Stages

of a novice (One through Three), of a skilled meditator (Four through Six), the transition Stage

(Seven), and the Stages of an adept (Eight through Ten). It is helpful to think of each Stage in

terms of the Milestone that lies ahead.

Milestone One: Continuous Attention to the Meditation Object

The first Milestone is continuous attention to the meditation object, which you achieve atthe end of Stage Three. Before this, you are considered a beginner a person who meditates,

rather than a skilled meditator. But when you reach this Milestone, you are no longer a novice

prone to forgetting the breath, a wandering mind, or dozing off. By mastering Stages One

through Three, you have acquired the basic, first level skills on the way to stability of attention.

You can now do something that no ordinary, untrained person can. You will build on this initial

skill set2over the course of the next three Stages to become a truly skilled meditator.

Milestone Two: Sustained Single-Pointed Attention

Once you have mastered Stages Four through Six, you have completed the development

of the abilities that make you aSkilled Meditator, the second Milestone. You have achieved the

2In traditional descriptions, this marks the beginning of what is called parikamma samadhiin Pali. Samadhiis often

translated as concentration, in reference to the unique concentration developed in meditation, but literally means a

"gathering together" of the mind.Parikammameans initial, first or "preliminary". There is nosamadhibefore

the preliminary samadhi of Stage 4.


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two major objectives of meditative training: stable attention and mindfulness. You have also

completely mastered single-pointed attention, which means you can focus on the meditation

object to the exclusion of everything else; your attention no longer alternates back and forth from

the breath to distractions in the background. Also, your scope of attention is stable; dullness has

completely disappeared; and mindfulness takes the form of a powerful metacognitiveintrospective awareness that is, you are now aware of the state of your mind in every moment,

even as you focus on the breath.

Milestone Three: Effortless Stability of Attention

The third Milestone is effortlessness also known as mental pliancyor the compliant

mind and is achieved at the end of Stage Seven. By this point, diverse mental processes have

been unified and the mind no longer struggles against itself. Instead, the mind functions as a

coherent, harmonious whole, directing its full power toward a single purpose. Because your

mind is unified, your meditations are effortless; no part of the mind is resistant or preoccupied

with something else. Stage Seven is a transition process through which you go from being a

Skilled Meditator to anAdept Meditator.3

Milestone Four: Persistence of the Mental Qualities of an Adept

When you have mastered Stage Ten, the many positive mental qualities that you

experience during meditation are strongly present even between meditation sessions. This means

that your life becomes imbued with effortless stability of attention, mindfulness, joy, tranquility,

and equanimity.4

This is the fourth and final Milestone and marks the culmination of the trainingof anAdept Meditator.

The Milestones and Mindfulness

I have talked about these Milestones in terms of your stability of attention. Yet, it's

important to mention that you will also be developing other, related skills at the same time. Only

by strengthening and refining peripheral awareness together with the skill of stable attention will

your mindfulnessgrow stronger. In other words, you don't just want to train your faculty of

3

This is the beginning of the samadhi called upacara, usually translated as access, which reaches its peak ofdevelopment in Stage 10. Access refers to the fact that bothjhana(absorption) and vipassana(insight) are readily

accessed from upacarasamadhi.

4These five qualities of the Adept meditator constitute five of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment, or satta

sambojjha!g"in Pali, that were described by the Buddha: effortless stability of attention (samadhi); mindfulness

(sati); joy or rapture (p#ti); tranquility (passadhi); and Equanimity (upekkha). The two remainingsambojjha!g"are

the investigation of phenomena (dhamma vicaya) and diligence (viriya), both of which are exercised throughout the

practice of the ten stages.


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attention to the exclusion of everything else. You need all the skills that contribute to

mindfulness in order to complete the later Stages and achieve the ultimate goal of the practice

Insight into the true nature of reality.

The Ten Stages Of Meditative TrainingEach of the Ten Stages on the path to becoming an Adept Meditator is defined in terms of

certain skills that you have to master. Only when you have mastered the skills of a particular

Stage will you be able to move on to master the next Stage. This is because your abilities as a

meditator gradually build on each other. Just as you have to learn to walk before you can learn

to run, you must move through the Stages in order, without skipping any of them. To make

progress, you should correctly determine your current Stage, work diligently with the techniques

you are given, and only move on when you have achieved mastery. Taking shortcuts just creates

problems.

Below, I offer a general sketch of all Ten Stages. This map will help you orient yourself.

I describe each Stage's distinct characteristics, goals, challenges, and the techniques for

achieving those goals and working through those challenges.

Stage One: Establishing a Practice

"Here, monks, a monk goes to the forest, to the foot of a tree, or to an empty

place, sits down, folds his legs crosswise, keeps his body erect, and brings

mindfulness to the fore. With mindfulness, he breathes in, with mindfulness

he breathes out.

The Anapanasatti Sutta

The goal for this Stage is to develop a consistent and diligent meditation practice.

Consistent means you set a clear daily schedule for when you're going to meditate and stick to it,

except when there are circumstances beyond your control. Diligencemeans that, instead of

spending your time on the cushion planning or daydreaming, you actually engage whole-

heartedly in the practice. The mind can generate all kinds of clever rationalizations for doing

anything but meditating, so being diligent is especially important.

Not surprisingly, the major obstacles you'll experience at this Stage are resistance and

procrastination. But there are other obstacles, too: fatigue, feelings of impatience or boredom,disappointment about how fast you're progressing, doubt about the practice or your abilities, and

a lack of motivation. The key to overcoming these problems is to learn to generate a strong

motivation. You can do this by reviewing your reasons for meditating, creating a practice

routine, setting specific practice goals, and cultivating discipline and diligence.


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You have mastered Stage One when you never miss a daily practice session or indulge in

procrastinating or other activities to pass the time while waiting for the practice period to end.

Stage Two: Interrupted Attention and Overcoming Mind-Wandering

Stage Two involves the simple practice of keeping your attention on the breath. This iseasier said than done! You quickly discover the restless nature of the untrained mind. A restless

mind produces all kinds of distractions, which make you forget that you're supposed to be

paying attention to the meditation object. Forgettingin turn leads to mind-wandering. Thus,

the entire sequence proceeds from distraction to forgetting to mind-wandering. During Stage

Two, your attention to the breath is often interrupted by forgetting, and the periods of mind-

wandering you experience are relatively long. For seconds, minutes, or sometimes even the

entire session, the meandering mind indulges in all sorts of thoughts and fantasies.

It's important to realize that forgetting and mind-wandering are two distinct events. At

this Stage, your main job is to reduce the amount of mind-wandering (the last part of the

sequence). For now, don't worry about forgetting. Instead, you will learn to make use of

spontaneous introspective awarenessto catch yourself when you're in the middle of mind-

wandering. Whenever this happens, take a moment to appreciate this awakening and your

capacity for introspective awareness, which is what allowed you to catch your wandering mind

in the first place. This kind of positive reinforcement encourages introspective awareness to

arise more often so the periods of mind-wandering get shorter. Then, once you have returned to

the breath, you will practice techniques for engaging with the breath sensations more closely.

These exercises help you sustain attentionon the meditation object longer.You have mastered Stage Two when you can sustain attention on the meditation object

for minutes, while most periods of mind-wandering only last for a few seconds.

Stage Three: Extended Attention and Overcoming Forgetting

Stages Two and Three are very similar to each other, but in Stage Three, you spend much

more time focused on the breath, and much less time having forgotten about it. At the start of

this Stage, your attention is more stable. Even though there's still mind-wandering, it doesn't last

as long and will happen for shorter and shorter periods until it stops altogether. The biggest

challenge you have to overcome during this Stage is forgetting. The second obstacle you will

probably experience is sleepiness.

You work through these challenges by intentionally invoking introspective attentionto

check in on the mind rather than waiting for introspective awareness toarise spontaneously.

By using intentional introspective attention, you become familiar with howforgetting happens

and learn to recognize the situations in which it usually occurs. You can then take preventative


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action to stop forgetting before it leads to mind-wandering. Likewise, introspective attention

will help you recognize the onset of sleepiness so you can take action before you doze off.

During this Stage, you will also increase the power of your mindfulness. You will

practice maintaining peripheral awareness while you focus even more closely on the breath at the

same time. As your perception of the breath sensations grows more vivid, you can engage morefully with the fine details, and be able to sustain your attention on the meditation object for

increasingly long periods of time.

You have mastered Stage Three when you rarely forget the breath or fall asleep.

Stage Four: Continuous Attention and Overcoming Gross Distraction and Strong Dullness

"Breathing in a long breath, he knows he breathes in a long breath, breathing

out a long breath, he knows he breathes out a long breath.

Breathing in a short breath, he knows he breathes in a short breath,

breathing out a short breath, he knows he breathes out a short breath.The Anapanasatti Sutta

At the beginning of Stage Four, you can stay focused on the breath more or less

continuously. This skill marks the first of the four Milestone Achievements. However, attention

still shifts back and forth between the breath and various distractions. That is, you never forget

the meditation object, but still haven't achieved single-pointed attention (i.e., paying attention to

the meditation object and to nothing else).

Whenever a distraction becomes the primary focus of your attention, it pushes the

meditation object into the background, but not out of awareness. This is calledgross distraction.The more agitated your mind, the more potential distractions there are, and the more often you

will experience gross distraction. But when the mind grows calm, there tends to be another

problem: strong dullness. To deal with both of these challenges, you shift from using

introspective attention to developing continuous introspective awareness to alert you to their

presence. You will still experience subtle forms of distraction and dullness, but that's all right.

For now, you can tolerate them they will even help you.

The gross distractions you will overcome during this Stage can take several forms. You

will probably have a fair amount of pain and discomfort. Also, as your attention grows more

stable and the mind calmer, material will rise up from your unconscious. You will have

powerful intellectual insights, visions, and emotionally charged memories all of which can

become distractions. You will learn to deal with all of these potential distractions without

indulging in the extraordinary experiences or trying to get away from the painful ones. By being

diligent, you can avoid both these pitfalls.


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You have mastered Stage Four when gross distractions no longer displace the breath, and

when strong dullness stops causing the sensations of the breath to fade and take on dream-like

distortions.

Stage Five: Overcoming Subtle Dullness and Increasing MindfulnessAt the start of this Stage, you have overcome gross distractions and strong dullness.

Now, your two goals are to increase the power of your mindfulness and to overcome the

tendency to slip into subtle dullness. Subtle dullness makes the sensations of the breath less

vivid and intense and causes your peripheral awareness to fade. But this type of dullness also

has certain pleasant qualities and is easy to ignore.

Because subtle dullness creates feelings of comfort and gives you the impression that

your attention is very stable, it can lead you to over-estimate your abilities and move on to the

next Stage. But skipping Stage Five would be a considerable mistake, leading to concentration

with dullness. Your practice will come to a dead end, and you will experience only a shallow

facsimile of the later Stages. But to truly become an Adept Meditator, having access to states of

profound joy, calm, and Insight, you have to work through this and be careful not to misjudge

where you are. You will find that the rewards are worth infinitely more than the pleasurable,

fuzzy feeling you get from subtle dullness.

To overcome subtle dullness, you must increase the power of your mindfulness, meaning

you will have clearer attention and awareness. You will develop two skills to do this. First, you

will cultivate a strong and continuous introspective awareness to watch for varying degrees of

dullness, so that you can correct for it. Second, you will practice a new body-scanningtechnique. This will make your conscious awareness stronger and sharpen up your perceptual

faculties.

You have mastered Stage Five when you cansustainor even increasethe power of your

mindfulness during a meditation session.

Stage Six: Subduing Subtle Distraction

"Experiencing the whole body while breathing in, he trains himself.Experiencing the whole body while breathing out, he trains himself.


You begin Stage Six with fairly stable attention, but it still shifts back and forth between

the meditation object and competing thoughts and sensations in the background. It's only

because you have close, sustained attention to the meditation object that these subtle distractions

don't displace it. But you are now ready to bring your faculty of attention to a whole new level.

Your focus will no longer alternate, subtle distractions will die away, and you will have


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exclusive attentionto the meditation object. This is also called single-pointed attention; your

focus is unwaveringly stable because you have learned to exclude all possible distractions and

focus on one single object. This is the goal for Stage Six. "Single-pointedness," contrary to how

it may sound, doesn't actually mean that the size of what you're focusing on is small. You can

attend just as single-pointedly to the sensations of the whole body as you can to sensations at thetip of the nose.

To subdue subtle distractions and cultivate exclusive attention, you focus your attention

on the sensations in one specific area. That is, you have a clearly defined scope of attention.

Then, you ignoreeverything outside that scope of attention. Ignoring distractions makes them

eventually fade from your awareness. You will also use a method called "experiencing the

whole body with the breath." Mental self-talk, as well as non-verbal thought processes, gradually

die away although they are still present "beneath the surface." When that happens, the

meditation object becomes relatively non-conceptual. These developments mark an important

change in the way that your mind processes information. Usually, we automatically overlay

whatever we experience with conceptual interpretations. In Stage Six, you start to do that less

and less. At the same time, you will develop a much more refined and selective metacognitive

introspective awareness5 an awareness of the mind itself.

You have mastered Stage Six once subtle distractions have almost completely

disappeared. Thoughts, bodily sensations, and ambient sounds rarely intrude, and only very

briefly. The end of Stage Six also marks the second major Milestone Achievement in the

progress of Samatha: you now have unwavering single-pointed attention together with vivid

mindfulness.

Stage Seven: Single-Pointed Attention and Unifying the Mind

Calming the body formations while breathing in, he trains himself. Calmingthe body formations while breathing out, he trains himself.


You now have strong control over the scope of your attention and can investigate any

object with however broad or narrow a focus you choose. But you have to stay vigilantand

make a continuous effortto keep subtle distractions and subtle dullness at bay. Your main goal

for this Stage is to achieve effortlesssingle-pointed attention and mindfulness.

Two very different obstacles prevent your meditations from being effortless. The first

problem is that, for now, distractions and dullness will return if you stop exerting an effort. You

mustmake the effort to sustain single-pointed attention and mindfulness for long periods of time,

5Satisampajjanain Pali.


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and it's only by doing so that they eventually become automatic. But once this happens, you

won't need to keep making an effort. Simply put, you have to keep exerting yourself until it's no

longer necessary.

But having made an effort for so long, it has become a habit. This is the second obstacle:

putting forth an effort after it's no longer required. The first step is recognizing that you can infact sustain the object of meditation effortlessly. This happens through a combination of lucky

accident, introspective awareness, and purposely relaxing your effort from time to time as a test.

Once you know that effort and vigilance are no longer necessary, then you can start to work on

letting go of the need to be in control.

Other problems you will face during this Stage are boredom, restlessness, and doubt.

These will arise due to long, tedious dry periods during which you won't notice any change in the

quality of your meditations. Also, bizarre sensations and bodily movements will often interrupt

the dry periods, distracting you from the practice. Patience and diligence are the key to dealing

with these challenges.

You have mastered Stage Seven when, even though you let go of all effort, the mind still

maintains an unprecedented degree of stability and clarity. This Stage concludes with the

unification of mind, when all potential distractions and dullness disappear. This effortless

stability of attention and mindfulness mark the third Milestone Achievement, which is also

known as the compliant mind.

Stage Eight: Mental Pliancy and Pacifying the Senses

Experiencing joy while breathing in, he trains himself. Experiencing joy whilebreathing out, he trains himself.

Experiencing pleasure while breathing in, he trains himself. Experiencing

pleasure while breathing out, he trains himself.


You begin Stage Eight as anAdept Meditatorwith a compliant mind. In other words,

you have a unique mental pliancythat comes with an impressive set of abilities: effortlessly

stable single-pointed attention together with clear, intense, and powerful mindfulness.6 When

6In the Buddhist Suttas the compliant mind is described as malleable andwieldy. Malleable refers to attention that

rests stably wherever directed, together with a quality of awareness that stays bright and sharp without sinking into

dullness. Wieldiness of mind indicates an ability to freely shift attention from one object to another without losing

stability. It also means the ability to hold a simple, open state of observation, noticing but not getting caught by

whatever happens to enter the field of awareness.


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you direct that mindfulness inward, using it to examine the activities and states of your mind

(i.e., metacognitive awareness), then the compliant mind is also called the superior mind7.

The goal for this Stage is the completepacification of the senses. This means that the

physical senses, as well as the mind sense8temporarily grow quiet while you meditate. One

result of this is that you no longer experience physical pain and discomfort when sitting for along time. This is calledphysical pliancy. It should be noted that pacification of the senses isn't

a kind of trance. You will observe that thoughts, sensations, and disruptive mental states still

intrude, rarely but occasionally, into conscious awareness. This clearly shows that all six senses

still function normally, even though they're pacified.

Complete pacification happens quite naturally as long as you keep practicing effortless

sustained attention and introspective awareness. As the process of pacification of the senses and

physical pliancy proceeds, you will experience a variety of unusual sensations and strong inner

currents of energy. These will happen with increasing frequency. The primary challenge of this

Stage is not to be distracted or distressed by these extraordinary experiences. Simply let them

be. They will gradually mature in time into more pleasant sensations that support rather than

disturb your meditation.

You have mastered Stage Eight when the eyes perceive only an inner light, the ears

perceive only an inner sound, the body is suffused with a sense of pleasure and comfort, and

your mental state is one of joy. With mental and physical pliancy, you can sit for hours without

dullness, distraction, or physical discomfort.

Stage Nine: Mental and Physical Pliancy and Meditative JoyExperiencing joy and happiness as mental formations while breathing in, he

trains himself. Experiencing joy and happiness as mental formations while

breathing out, he trains himself.

Calming the mental formations while breathing in, he trains himself. Calming

the mental formations while breathing out, he trains himself.The Anapanasatti Sutta

In this Stage, mental and physical pliancy are accompanied by meditative joy a unique

state of mind that brings great happiness and physical pleasure. Meditative joy is often

accompanied by an altered perception of the body and seeing an inner light. The intensity of the

joy is sometimes so strong that it perturbs the mind, distracting you and disrupting your practice.

Anticipating and desiring this mental state can also become an obstacle to consistently achieving

7Mahaggatam cittain Pali.

8Mano-ayatanain Pali.


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mental and physical pliancy. You may also be side-tracked by mistaking these experiences for

more exalted spiritual attainments.

Becoming familiar with meditative joy and its accompaniments through continued

practice ultimately surmounts these obstacles. As you grow more accustomed to mental and

physical pliancy and meditative joy, this initial excitement will fade away, to be replaced bytranquility and equanimity.

You have mastered Stage Nine when you can consistently invoke mental and physical

pliancy, accompanied by profound tranquility and equanimity.

Stage Ten: Tranquility and Equanimity

Experiencing the mind while breathing in, he trains himself. Experiencing the

mindwhile breathing out, he trains himself.

Delighting the mind glad while breathing in, he trains himself. Delighting the

mind while breathing out, he trains himself.

Making the mind tranquil and fresh while breathing in, he trains himself.

Making the mind tranquil and fresh while breathing out, he trains himself.

Liberating the mind while breathing in, he trains himself. Liberating the mind

while breathing out, he trains himself.The Anapanasatti Sutta

The final Stage has the qualities that you achieved in Stage Nine: mental and physical

pliancy combined with almost imperturbable calm, joy and happiness, and profound equanimity.

At first these qualities immediately fade after the meditation has ended. But as you continue topractice, they will persist longer and longer between meditation sessions. Eventually they

become the normal condition of the mind. Because the powerful focus, mindfulness, joy,

tranquility and equanimity never disappear entirely, whenever you sit on the cushion, you

quickly regain a fully-developed meditative state without having to pass through the intermediate

Stages.9 Once Stage Ten is mastered, the mind is described as unsurpassable.

10

9Unfortunately, mastering Stage 10 does not include permanent freedom from the mental afflictions of desire and

aversion and the suffering they engender, although they are held temporarily in abeyance by the fruits of this

practice. Suffering and the causes of suffering re-emerge with any prolonged interruption in practice, and also due tothe corrosive effects of time on the body and mind.

10Anuttaram cittain Pali. The unsurpassable mind has immediate access to the deepest form of meditative

absorption (jhana),and is the most fully developed form of upacara samadhi, or access concentration. With the

persistence of all these factors between meditation sessions, the applications of mindfulness(Satipatthana in Pali,

cf.Mahasatipatthana Sutta, DN 22) can be practiced in daily life with incomparable effectiveness. This

unsurpassable mind is the ideal mental condition for quickly achieving profound Insight into the true nature of

reality and a liberation that is notsubject to passing away.


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Mastering Stage Ten marks the last Milestone Achievement the consummation of the

meditation practice of an Adept.

How The Process Unfolds

Even though the Stages are presented as a linear path of progress, the practice doesn't

actually unfold in such a straightforward manner. For example, a beginning meditator will of

course be working on Stages One and Two at the same time striving to establish a regular

practice while simultaneously working on mind-wandering. As her practice progresses, she will

also find herself navigating several Stages at the same time, moving back and forth between

them over weeks, days, or even during a single session. Consider a meditator at Stage Three.

She will still forget the meditation object and experience brief periods of mind-wandering. Yet,

she may have occasional sittings where she doesn't lose focus on the meditation object at all

(Stage Four). Other times, she may be so agitated that mind-wandering dominates the entire

sitting (Stage Two). This is perfectly normal. You can expect to have days when you seem to

have jumped to a more advanced Stage, as well as days where you seem to have gone backward.

In either case, the important thing is to practice according to whatever is happening in

your meditation in the present. For instance, even if you have been practicing at Stage Five for a

long time, if you happen to have a day where you're experiencing significant gross distraction

(Stage Four), there's no point in trying to overcome subtle dullness. Dont get ahead of what is

actually happening. On the other hand, once you have overcome the obstacles for a given Stage

even temporarily, then you can work with the obstacles for the next Stage. For instance, when

Stage Four practitioners have periods without dullness or distraction, they should practice the

techniques for Stages Five and Six.

You will also notice that many of the techniques are similar in several different Stages.

A meditator at Stage Three uses introspective attention to overcome forgetting in the same way

that a meditator at Stage Four practices introspective awareness to overcome gross distractions.

A meditator at Stage Five uses very similar methods to subdue subtle dullness that a Stage Six

meditator uses to achieve single-pointedness. To summarize: you use similar techniques in many

of the Stages, but the goals for each Stage are always different.

The earlier Stages take longer to master. Yet, because the Stages build on each other and

the methods overlap, you start making faster and faster progress. Advancing from Stage Three

to Four might take a long time, but progressing from Stage Four to Five happens more quickly

since the skills you develop in one Stage are used in the next. The secret to rapid progress is

working with the specific goals appropriate to your current skill level. If you're on Stage Three,


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dealing with forgetting and mind-wandering, then being concerned about single-pointed attention

(Stage Six) will only slow your progress and make you frustrated. Likewise, if you're still

experiencing gross distractions (Stage Four) but try to tackle subtle dullness (Stage Five), you'll

be depriving yourself of the subtle dullness that can be helpful in subduing those distractions.

It's like learning to skate: you have to learn the basics before you can start doing triple-axels.It's common to have occasional or even frequent meditation experiences that correspond

to more advanced Stages. While this isn't very significant to your overall practice, such

experiences do have the benefit of showing you what your mind is capable of. Use them as

inspiration, while continuing to work toward mastering your current Stage. Once your practice

matures, you will have the knowledge and skills to consistently create these kinds of experiences.

Some examples will help illustrate this point. As mentioned earlier, at the end of Stage

Six, inner self-talk stops and the mind's experience of the breath becomes non-conceptual. This

accomplishment is frequently discussed and praised in books on meditation. Yet, having periods

without self-talk are not uncommon beforeStage Six. Even if discursive thought is absent most

of the time, it's not important if you still sink into dullness or get drawn into other kinds of

distractions. Until these major obstacles are overcome, the disappearance of inner dialogue is

beside the point. Another example: when a meditator at Stage Three or Four is especially calm

and focused, she may have a taste of meditative joy corresponding to Stage Nine, or a

combination of joy and tranquility corresponding to Stage Ten. In her excitement, she might

overestimate her abilities and try to replicate that experience, instead of working to master the

skills she needs for her current Stage. Even a beginning meditator at Stage Two may have

experiences that correspond to advanced Stages. Isolated meditation experiences can happen toanybody at any time. But if they cant be repeated, consistently and intentionally, then they are

of little value.

Keep in mind that the Ten Stages indicate levels of mastery. That is to say, mastery of

one Stage is a requirement for the mastery of the next. If you work diligently, without taking

shortcuts, it will be easy for you to find your way and make progress.

The Rate Of Progress Through The Ten Stages

Some books give the impression that it takes years or even decades to become an Adept

Meditator. This simply isn't true! For householders, mastery of the Ten Stages is possible

within a few months, or a few years at most.11

What you need is a regular daily sitting practice

11The Dalai Lama has said, If one knows the nature, order and distinctions of the levels explained above without

error and cultivates calm abiding, one can easily generate faultless meditative stabilization in about a year. The

Buddhism of Tibet, by H.H. the Dalai Lama, trans. & ed. by Jeffrey Hopkins. When I first began teaching

meditation, I also believed that with diligent practice most people should be able to master all Ten Stages in less

than a year. I have since learned that is not realistic in terms of mostpeople, and making a flat pronouncement of


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of one to two hours per day, in combination with some of the supplemental practices described in

the Appendices. Meditation retreats are quite helpful, but ones lasting months or years are

certainly not necessary. Diligent, daily meditation, combined with occasional longer periods of

practice, is enough for success.

That said, several factors will determine how fast you make progress. Some of them youcan influence, others you can't. To start with, different people have different natural abilities for

working with attention and awareness. Some lifestyles and career paths are more conducive to

developing these skills. Also, some people are better able to discipline themselves to practice

regularly and diligently. Regardless of your natural abilities, you absolutely must master Stage

One "Establishing a Practice" to make progress.

Life factors and stressful events can also affect the process. Losing your job, the death of

a spouse, or a health problem can set even an advanced meditator back to the earliest stages. In

fact, almost anything that happens outside of meditationpotentiallyhas this effect. This just

serves as another reminder that meditative accomplishments, like everything else, depend on

certain conditions and therefore can be influenced by worldly events.

Another factor that influences our progress is the problem of compartmentalization.

There is a common tendency to separate meditation practice from the rest of our lives. But if the

skills and insights we learn on the cushion don't infuse our daily life, progress will be quite slow.

It's like filling a leaky bucket. This may be one reason why some people consider long retreats

the only way to make real progress. Retreats are certainly wonderful and can help you bring

your practice to a whole new level. Yet, you can only experience the full benefits if the wisdom

you acquire permeates every facet of your life and that takes work. Otherwise, long retreatsare like filling an even bigger leaky bucket. Because this is such an important point, I discuss a

variety of supplemental non-sitting practices in the Appendices. I encourage you to take them up

as soon as you can.

The most important factor for improving quickly is a clear understanding of each Stage.

That means recognizing the mental faculties you need to cultivate, as well as the correct methods

to overcome specific obstacles. It also means not getting ahead of yourself. Be systematic and

practice at the appropriate level. Just as a scalpel can be more effective than a large knife,

skillful means and positive reinforcement are much better for pacifying the mind than blind,

stubborn persistence. Finesse and patience pay off.

that sort can be discouraging for those who have been practicing for much longer without attaining that degree of

mastery.


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Cultivating The Right Attitude

We naturally tend to think of ourselves as the agent responsible for producing results

through will and effort. And certain words that we can't avoid when talking about meditation,

such as "achieve" and "master," only reinforce this idea. However, holding such a view will

make it harder to practice effectively. This is because when you first start meditating, you try towillfully force the mind into submission. Inevitably, it doesn't comply. When that happens,

people tend to become discouraged and blame themselves. This can turn into a habit unless

you realize that there is no "self" in charge of the mind, and therefore nobody to blame. As you

continue to meditate, this fact becomes increasingly clear, but you can't afford to wait for that

Insight. For the sake of making progress, it's best to drop this notion as soon as possible.

In reality, all you're "doing" in meditation is forming and holding specific intentions

nothing more. In fact, while it may not be obvious, all your actions originate from your

intentions. Consider learning to catch a ball. As a child, while you may have wanted to play

catch, your arm and hand initially just didn't move in quite the right way. However, by

sustaining the intention to catch the ball, after much practice, your arm and hand can now

perform the task whenever you want them to. "You" don't play catch. Instead, you just intend to

catch the ball, and the rest follows. The mind intends and the body acts. In exactly the same

way, you can use intention to profoundly transform the way that the mind acts. Intention

provided it is correctly formulated and sustained is all you need to create the causes and

conditions for paying attention and remaining mindful. Intentions that you frequently repeat

during meditation lead to repeated mental actions, and those eventually become habits of the

mind.At every Stage, all "you" really do is patiently and persistently hold the intention to

respond in a specific way to whatever occurs. Setting and holding the correctintentions is

what's essential. If your intention is strong, the practice will unfold in a very natural and

predictable way. Once again, sustained and repeated intentions lead to repeated mental actions,

which become mental habits the habits of mind that lead to joy, equanimity, and Insight. The

exquisite simplicity of this process may not be easy to see in the early Stages. However, it will

become more and more apparent, until you reach Stage Eight and your meditations become

completely effortless proving the power of intention to you firsthand.

As we go into greater detail about the Ten Stages, you may lose sight of the underlying

simplicity of the process: intentions lead to mental actions, and repeated mental actions become

mental habits. Yet, this simple formula is at the heart of every Stage. To help you remember

this, I will briefly recap the Ten Stages, pointing out how intention works in each one. Refer

back to this description any time meditation begins to feel like a struggle:


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* The goal of Stage One (Establishing a Practice) is to sit down to meditate for a set

period of time every day. To achieve this, you form a strong intention to meditate and to

frequently rekindle your motivations for meditating. Put all your effort into forming and

holding a clear intention. If your intention is clear and strong, certain mental actions will

naturally follow, and you will eventually find yourself sitting down to meditate regularly.This is much more effective than forcing yourself to practice by disciplining and

chastising yourself. Your goal has been reached when sitting down to meditate becomes

a habit.

* The goal of Stage Two is for periods of mind-wandering to become shorter and periods

of attention to the breath to grow longer. Willpower can't prevent the mind from

forgetting the breath. Nor can you force yourself to become aware that the mind is

wandering. Yet, you can hold the intention to: appreciate the introspective awareness

that recognizes mind-wandering; gently but firmly redirect attention back to the breath;

and engage with the breath as fully as possible without losing peripheral awareness. In

time, you will reach your goal, and these three simple mental actions will be well on their

way to becoming mental habits.

* The goal of Stage Three is to overcome forgetting the breath. Set your intention to:

invoke introspective attention frequently instead of waiting for introspective awareness to

arise spontaneously; notice distractions and dullness before you forget the breath or fall

sleep; and sustain peripheral awareness while engaging with the breath as fully aspossible. These three mental actions, which simply expand on the ones from Stage Two,

will become habits, and you will no longer forget the breath.

* The goal of Stages Four through Six is to completely overcome every type of dullness

and distraction, as well as to develop metacognitive introspective awareness. Set and

hold the intention to be vigilant so that introspective awareness becomes continuous.

Also, hold the intention to notice and immediately correct for dullness and distraction.

The intentions you hold during these Stages will mature into highly developed skills. As

they do, your meditations will become evermore stable and alert, leading to exclusive,

single-pointed attention.

* From Stage Seven on, everything becomes even simpler. With the basic intention to

continuously guard against dullness and distraction, the mind becomes completely

accustomed to effortlessly sustaining attention and mindfulness the goal of Stage Seven.


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* In the last Stages, your intention is simply to practice the skills that are now effortless.

This creates the conditions for your mental states and faculties to become even more

refined. In Stage Eight, your effortlessly sustained single-pointed attention produces

mental and physical pliancy, pleasure, and joy. In Stage Nine, by simply abiding in thestate of meditative joy, profound tranquility and equanimity arise. In Stage Ten, by just

continuing to meditate, you experience profound joy, happiness, calm, and equanimity

accompanied by mindfulness and a powerful faculty of attention even between

meditation sessions.

As with planting seeds, at each Stage you sow the appropriate intentions in the soil of the

mind. Water these intentions with the diligence of regular practice, andprotect them from the

destructive pests of procrastination, doubt, desire, aversion, and agitation. These intentions will

naturally flower into a specific series of mental events that mature to bring forth the fruits of

your practice. Will a seed sprout more quickly if you keep digging it up and replanting it? No.

Therefore, don't let impatience or frustration stop you from practicing, or convince you that you

need to seek out a "better" or "easier" practice. Getting annoyed with every instance of mind

wandering or sleepiness is like tearing up the garden to get rid of the weeds. Attempting to force

your attention to remain stable is like trying to make a sapling grow taller by stretching it.

Chasing after physical pliancy and meditative joy is like prying open a bud so it will blossom

more quickly. But impatience and striving won't make anything grow faster. Be patient and

trust in the process. Care for the mind like a skilled gardener, and everything will flower andfruit in due time.

Putting this Practice into Context

Meditation has been at the core of Eastern spiritual practices for millennia. This hasn't

been the case in the West, except for the mystical traditions at the periphery of Christianity,

Judaism, and Islam. However, interest in meditation has been building in Europe and North

America for several decades now. The last few years have seen a veritable explosion ofmeditation groups and centers in cities of every size. These centers represent many different

traditions, and books on meditation are found in bookstores everywhere. Meditation has been

secularized as a form of therapy, is taught in graduate and medical schools, and is the subject of

scientific papers and research.

Almost everyone has heard of meditation, even if they've never done it, and the number


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of people who have learned to practice in one form or another is growing all the time. But with

the sudden access to so many different kinds of meditation, and the confusing and often

conflicting claims made by supporters of each, meditation can seem mysterious indeed. With all

that in mind, let's look at how the practice in this book fits into the larger context of Buddhist

meditation practices. This discussion gets a bit technical and you can certainly skip this if youwant. But at some point, you may find it useful to return to when you become confused by

contradictory claims and instructions.

Because the Ten Stages lead tosamatha, this practice is sometimes calledsamatha

meditation. Samathahas been translated in many different ways: "tranquility," "serenity,"

"quiescence," "meditative equipoise," "calm abiding," and so equivalent terms you might

encounter are Tranquility meditation or Calm Abiding meditation. But a peaceful state of

mind is only part of a means to an end: the main purpose of the practice described here is a mind

capable of generating spontaneousInsight(vipassana)12. Therefore, it is more accurate and

useful to call this technique "Samatha-Vipassanameditation," or "the practice of Tranquility and

Insight."

Samatha-Vipassanameditation is a systematic process for developing both stable

attention13and mindfulness14. For this reason, it has been referred to as both a "concentration

meditation" and a "mindfulness meditation." But to describe it as only a concentration practice,

as some people do, is quite misleading. Likewise, to describe it as just mindfulness meditation is

also inaccurate, not to mention that many people associate that term with the so-called "dry

Insight"15practices discussed below.

The fact is that stability of attention and mindfulness need to be developed together. Ifyour attention is stable but you lack mindfulness that fully awake and alert conscious

awareness you won't achievesamatha. Instead, it will lead you to a state of blissful dullness: a

dead end. Some meditation masters have suggested that blissful dullness is even harmful,

numbing the mind. Given scientific research showing that how we use the mind can change the

brain, this could very well be true. But just as concentration without mindfulness is a dead end,

the opposite is even more the case. You simply cannot develop mindfulness without stable

attention. Until you have at least a moderate degree of attentional stability, "mindfulness

12Vipassana(literally clear-seeing) is often translated as Insight, but specifically means supra-mundane insight

into the true nature of reality.

13Samadhiin Pali.

14Satiin Pali.

15Sukkha-vipassanain Pali.


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practice" will consist mostly of mind-wandering, physical discomfort, drowsiness, and probably

frustration. True mindfulness practice only begins when there's enough concentration to

overcome forgetting the breath and the mind-wandering that follows (the primary obstacles of

Stages Two and Three).

This may come as a surprise to those who have been taught that meditation practices areof two types, based either on concentration and tranquility (samatha), or on mindfulness and

Insight (vipassana). This distinction is often made by teachers of "dry Insight" practices from

Southeast Asia, and of therapeutic methods inspired by them like Mindfulness Based Stress

Reduction (MBSR).16 Yet, this distinction is false and misleading. Yes, these methods

purposely downplay the importance of concentration in favor of mindfulness. But they're not

called "dry" because they don't require concentration. They do. In fact, true Insight practice

only starts when your powers of concentration are at Stage Seven as described in this book.

The reason these Insight practices are called "dry" is because they lack the lubricating

"moisture" that comes with the fully developed mind ofsamatha: the unique and special qualities

of joy, tranquility, and equanimity. These qualities make it much easier to confront the

potentially disturbing and fearful experiences ofInsight into impermanence, emptiness, and

suffering. The mind of a meditator who cultivatessamathabefore achieving Insight is suffused

with these qualities, and is much less likely to experience a long and stressful "dark night of the

soul" as his or her practice matures.

In the dry Insight traditions, the fully developed mind of samatha is postponed until after

Insight arises. However, once a meditator has come to accept those Insights as inescapable

realities, he or she must continue with mindfulness practice untilsamatha is achieved. Theculmination of Insight the awakening experience occurs from a state of samatha.17 So, stable

attention and mindfulness always have to be cultivated together, andsamathaand vipassanaare

equally necessary for Awakening: like the two wings of a bird, both are required for flight. This

is an important point that the original teachings of the Buddha and the commentarial literature of

all traditions agree on.

The way thatsamathaand vipassana are combined varies. The Buddha described three

approaches:samatha followed by vipassana, vipassana followed bysamatha, andsamathaand

vipassanadeveloped together.18 The first approach involves cultivating concentration and

16I am referring specifically to the noting Vipassanapractice perfected by Mahasi Sayadaw, and its variations,

and the Vipassanapractice originating with U Ba Khin as taught by S. N. Goenka.

17The final stages of the Progress of Insight, as described by Mahasi Sayadaw and outlined in the Vissudhimagga

(the classic Theravadin meditation manual), correspond precisely to the 10thand final stage of Samatha described

here. Only the 10thof 18 stages can be reached before achieving Samatha.

18Yuganaddha Sutta, Anguttara Nikaya 4.170.


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This method is most appropriate for someone who is naturally good at concentration and

who can spend extended periods of time in retreat. It's not as helpful for a layperson who must

rely on short daily periods of practice. A variation on this approach is also found in the

Mahayana. The meditator engages in an analytical Meditation on Emptiness to develop a very

strong intellectually-based Insight. Of course, analytical meditation helps develop strongconcentration, but it's not strong enough forshamatha. Only later does the meditator develop

shamatha. Then, aftershamathahas been achieved, the intellectual understanding of Emptiness

that was cultivated previously is taken as the meditation object in a "Union of Shamatha and

Vipasyana."

The last approach is for a person to work on bothsamatha and vipassanaat the same

time. This means you work through the Stages leading tosamathawhile simultaneously

developing the Insight "Knowledges," based on spontaneously occurring Insight experiences.

This approach works well for a person whose natural concentration abilities are about average,

but usually requires some guidance froma knowledgeable teacher.

Another way of practicingsamathaand vipassanatogether is to alternatesamathawith

dry Insight practices, steadily making progress in both. To do this, simply take advantage of

bothsamathaand dry Insight teachers whenever they're available to you, and participate in

meditation retreats that emphasize either practice. This approach can work well for someone

who doesn't have regular contact with a teacher versed in the combinedsamatha-vipassana

approach.

In summary, the method presented in this book will take you through the Ten Stages

ultimately leading tosamatha. If you also have the guidance of a good teacher, it will lead to thefull development of Insight as well. However, you can practice these techniques in combination

with, or as a precursor to, any of the many Mahayana or Theravadin Insight practices. In other

words, these techniques aren't just another alternative practice. They are complementary to any

other kind of meditation practice that you do.

ten stages of meditation

Documents