THERE IS no real word for meditation in the classical languages of Buddhism. The closest is one (bhavana) that translates best as something like “mental development.” The lack of such a word is probably no accident, for it is not meditation, per se, that is important to the Buddha‘s psychology; it is the development of certain critical qualities of mind, beyond that which we accept as the norm, that is essential to the Buddha‘s teaching. In the Buddhist literature, for instance, there is a famous parable in which the Buddha describes a man going on a journey who fashions a raft out of grass, sticks, and leaves and branches in order to cross a great body of water that is blocking his path. It occurs to him, upon reaching the other shore, that the raft has been very useful to him, and he wonders if he should carry the raft with him just in case he should need it again.
“What do you think, monks?” asks the Buddha. “That the man, in doing this, would be doing what should be done to the raft?”
“No, lord.”
“What should that man do, monks, in order to do what should be done to that raft? In this case, monks, that man, when he has crossed over to the beyond and realizes how useful the raft has been to him, may think: ‘Suppose that I, having beached this raft on dry ground, or having immersed it in the water, should proceed on my journey?’ Monks, a man doing this would be doing what should be done to the raft. In this way, monks, I have taught you dhamma—the parable of the raft—for getting across, not for retaining. You, monks, by understanding the parable of the raft, must discard even right states of mind and, all the more, wrong states of mind.”1
The raft of this story is meditation, permitting one to float where one would otherwise drown. The river is samsara, the Wheel of Life, the Six Realms of Existence, the mind, body, and emotions. Meditation, in this parable, is a method of mental development that permits us to traverse the waters of mind. This is a metaphor that the Buddha used time and again to describe the particular qualities of meditation that make it a useful vehicle for self-exploration. In the first text of the Samyutta Nikaya (Kindred Sayings), for example, the Buddha alludes to just this function of meditation:
“How, Lord, did you cross the flood [of samsara]?”
“Without tarrying, friend, and without struggling did I cross the flood.”
“But how could you do so, O Lord?”
“When tarrying, friend, I sank, and when struggling, I was swept away. So, friend, it is by not tarrying and not struggling that I have crossed the flood.”2
It is perhaps no accident that Freud, that great explorer of the watery depths of the unconscious, closed one of his only commentaries on an unnamed friend‘s experiments with yoga with a quote from Friedrich von Schiller‘s poem “The Diver.” Freud used this poem to justify a hasty turning away from what his friend had described as an exploration of “primordial states of mind which have long ago been overlaid.” Freud was uncharacteristically not intrigued by the idea of such an exploration. It was as if he feared drowning in the inchoate nature of his primitive mind. “Let him rejoice who breathes up here in the roseate light,” quoted Freud, rejecting his friend‘s fascination with what Freud referred to as “a number of obscure modifications of mental life.”3 What Freud did not entirely grasp was that the meditative experience did not have to be a floundering in the deep but could, instead, be a floating across that did not require the holding of the breath. It is, in fact, one of the great similarities between meditation and psychoanalysis that both counsel this middle ground between tarrying and struggling as the most useful mental approach to one‘s own experience.
I am reminded of a time of self-retreat that I once engaged in some years ago along with one of my meditation teachers, Joseph Goldstein. After we broke silence and emerged from the several weeks of intensive practice, Joseph‘s first words, uttered with an air of bemused incredulity, were the following: “The mind has no pride.” The double entendre was characteristic of Joseph‘s interpretation of Buddhist teachings: in a period of intensive meditation one sees many embarrassing things about oneself, but if one looks intently enough, one finds no one (no thinker) to be embarrassed by it all.
It is this combination of exploration, tolerance, and humor that has so impressed me in the experienced meditators that I have met. It is not a capacity that one finds at random, nor is it one that seems to grow predictably out of psychoanalysis alone.