The Formless Realms
when people don’t realize that this is what they have become and pretend that what they are doing has something to do with insight practices, that’s annoying and sad.
To try to clearly differentiate between concentration practice and insight practice, I will now give a detailed description of the stages of insight so that the contrast will be as clear as possible. Pay careful attention to how different these descriptions are from those of the pure concentration states.
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24.THE PROGRESS OF INSIGHT
The progress of insight is a set of stages that diligent meditators pass through on the path of insight. Some of the “content based” or psychological insights into ourselves can be interesting and helpful, but when I say “insight,” these stages are what I am talking about. Just so that you have seen the whole list of the names of these stages, the formal names of stages of insight in order are:
1. Mind and Body
2. Cause and Effect
The pre-vipassana stages
1st jhana
3. The Three Characteristics
4. The Arising and Passing Away
2nd jhana
5. Dissolution
6. Fear
7. Misery
The Dark Night
3rd jhana
8. Disgust
(dukkha ñanas)
9. Desire for Deliverance
10. Re-observation
11. Equanimity
4th jhana
12. Conformity
13. Change of Lineage
14. Path
15. Fruition
Nirvana (one of two meanings)
16. Review
I will give detailed descriptions of them shortly.
I will refer to these stages by their shortened titles, their numbers and occasionally short-hand slang. These are formally known as
“Knowledge of” and then the stage, e.g. “Knowledge of Mind and Body,” but I will just use the part after the “of.” They are also called
“ñanas,” which means “knowledges”, usually with a number, as in “the First Ñana.” Notice that I use the word stage rather than state. These are stages of heightened perception into the truth of things, opportunities to see directly how things actually are, but they are not seemingly stable states as with concentration practice. The jhanaic groupings refer to vipassana jhanas, which will be covered in more depth later, but they borrow their perspectives and certain fundamental aspects from their
The Progress of Insight
samatha jhana equivalents. In other ways they may diverge widely from the experience of pure samatha jhanas.
One of the most profound things about these stages is that they are strangely predictable regardless of the practitioner or the insight tradition. Texts two thousand years old describe the stages just the way people go through them today, though there will be some individual variation on some of the particulars today as then. The Christian maps, the Sufi maps, the Buddhist maps of the Tibetans and the Theravada, and the maps of the Khabbalists and Hindus are all remarkably consistent in their fundamentals. I chanced into these classic experiences before I had any training in meditation, and I have met a large number of people who have done likewise. These maps, Buddhist or otherwise, are talking about something inherent in how our minds progress in fundamental wisdom that has little to do with any tradition and lots to do with the mysteries of the human mind and body. These stages are not Buddhist but universal, and Buddhism is merely one of the traditions that describes them, albeit unusually well.
The progress of insight is discussed in a number of good books, such as Jack Kornfield’s A Path with Heart in the section called Dissolving the Self, which I highly recomment. A very extensive, thorough, accessible and highly recommended treatment of it is given in Mahasi Sayadaw’s works The Progress of Insight and Practical Insight Meditation (on BPS out of Sri Lanka), a partially castrated version of which appears in Jack Kornfield’s Living Dharma. It should be noted here that Practical Insight Meditation is my favorite dharma book of all time with no close competitors. If you can ever lay your hands on a copy, do so! Even the section of it that appears in Living Dharma is much better than having access to none of it at all.
Sayadaw U Pandita’s In This Very Life also covers this territory, and is a bit of a must have for those who like lists and straight-up Theravada, but he leaves out a lot of juicy details. The Vis
uddhimagga , a 5th
Century text by Buddhaghosa, also does a nice treatment of these stages, and contains some interesting and hard to find information. It focuses largely on the emotional side-effects and thus misses many useful points.
Another good but brief map appears in Ven. Khenpo Karthar
Rinpoche’s Dharma Paths. You could also check out Bhante
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The Progress of Insight
Gunaratana’s The Path of Serenity and Insight if you would like to know the dogma well. It is a thorough and scholarly work.
Matthew Flickstein’s Swallowing the River Ganges is a light
treatment of basic Buddhist concepts and contains a very superficial treatment of the stages of insight. It is kind of like what would happen if you condensed a medical school textbook down to a 5th grade science text. It focuses almost entirely on the emotional side effects and thus misses a huge amount that is worthy of discussion, but it comes from a good place and is harmless enough. It doesn’t add anything to the above sources but is easy to read.
There are many less accessible maps of insight as well. The Tibetan Book of the Dead
, Li
beration Through Hearing in the Bardo requires
some prior familiarity with this territory to sort out the wild symbolic imagery. A 12th Century Sufi map is given in Journey to the Lord of Power by Ibn 'Arabi, but again the medieval symbolism is somewhat hard to untangle unless you are already personally familiar with these stages. It also provides a very interesting if quite cryptic description of the higher stages of realization. St. John of the Cross’ The Dark Night of The
Soul does a good job of dealing with the most difficult of the insight stages. His map is called The Ladder of Love. Unfortunately, the translation of the medieval Spanish and thickness of complex Catholic dogma make it a fairly inaccessible.
I strongly recommend that you consult some of these other sources, particularly the first five mentioned. While I consider the treatment of the stages of insight that follows shortly to be by far the most comprehensive and practical explanation of the stages of insight ever written, and I mean that honestly, there are still lots of great points made in those books, and you should check them out. There is a huge amount of valuable information left out in all of these sources, perhaps due to the Mushroom Factor, but perhaps due to some of the
difficulties in describing all the little nuances of the subject in all its possible variations. Thus, working with a teacher who has personal mastery of these stages (regardless of what they call them) is an extremely good idea most of the time.
The model terminology I am using is from the ancient
commentaries on the Pali Canon of the Theravada tradition. This 168
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model is used mostly in Burma but is also used to some degree in the other Theravada traditions. Zen is quite aware of these stages, as all Zen Masters had to go through them and continue to do so, but they tend not to name them or talk about them, as is their typical style. This can be helpful, as people can get all obsessed with these maps, turning them into a new form of useless content and a source of imprisoning identification and competition. This is the ugly shadow side of goal-oriented or map-based practice, but it often (though not always) may be overcome with honest awareness of this fact.