For676 any formal session of hearing, contemplating, and meditating, one is encouraged to begin by taking refuge in the Buddha, dharma, and saṅgha and giving rise to the excellent motivation of bodhichitta.
The first step is assuming a comfortable posture. The recommended general posture for meditation has seven points:
1. The legs can be comfortably crossed. If you cannot sit cross-legged, sitting in a chair with both legs perpendicular to the ground is fine.
2. The hands can rest, palms down, on top of the knees or thighs. Alternatively, the hands can be placed in the “gesture of equipoise” by laying one hand on top of the other, with both palms facing up and the two thumbs touching each other, around the level of the navel.
3. The back is straight but relaxed enough not to require constant muscular effort. Taking a deep breath while stretching your spine in the beginning will help align the spine in a way that it naturally sits upright.
4. The shoulders are even and relaxed, yet slightly drawn backward to facilitate a straight spine.
5. The chin is slightly tucked in to press down gently on the Adam’s apple.
6. The mouth is slightly open, with the tip of the tongue joined with the upper palate above the teeth.
7. The eyes gaze softly downward, naturally open yet with no specific visual focus, toward the space in front of the nose.
One begins in earnest by practicing shamatha, or “calm-abiding,” meditation to settle the mind and to support the qualities of relaxation and focus that will be required for the analysis. There are many ways in which one can practice shamatha, but one straightforward method is to focus one’s attention on the coming and going of the breath.
Breathing naturally, place your attention on the movement of the breath as it enters and leaves the nostrils. In particular, rest your mind on the out-breath, while allowing the mind to relax spaciously during the inbreath. Allow your mind to simply be with the process of focusing on the out-breath and relaxing with alertness during the inbreath. You do not need to generate any other thoughts, nor do you need to combat or suppress thoughts that arise. If you notice that a thought has distracted you, simply acknowledge that a thought has arisen and return to relating to the breath as just described. It does not matter how many times you return to the breath after becoming distracted, nor does it matter how many thoughts arise in your mind without necessarily distracting you in a coarse way from the breath. Repeating the practice again and again, and cultivating familiarity with resting the mind, with or without thoughts, is foremost.
Depending on how familiar you are with the practice, you may wish to practice shamatha for ten, fifteen, twenty, or thirty minutes, etc., prior to beginning your analysis. In any case, you should have a sense of being both relaxed and focused as a result of resting your mind before you start analyzing. Don’t set the bar too high: whatever constitutes a relative state of being relaxed and focused for you will suffice.
To do an analytical meditation on a section of the Entrance to the Middle Way, it is best to have not only read the section you will be contemplating many times, but to have received teachings on it from a capable teacher in person, and to have had the opportunity to ask questions or discuss difficult points with fellow students. If this is not possible, simply read the section several times and contemplate its meaning before engaging in the formal session of analytical meditation. In this way, you will be practicing analysis as an essential prerequisite to analytical meditation.
For the main practice of analytical meditation, it is always good to have an authoritative scriptural reference to serve as a basis for the topic of analysis. Many practitioners find it helpful to recite a verse or prose quotation out loud three times as a way to tune their minds in to the topic of investigation. In the case of analytical meditation on the Entrance or on sections of Feast for the Fortunate, verses or prose quotations from the Buddha or from the authoritative Indian treatises are abundantly available in the main body of this book.
It is also good to have a “game plan” mapped out, on paper or mentally, with regard to the topics of contemplation you would like to cover during the session, along with the stages of analysis you would like to go through. It is advisable not to try to crowd the session with too many topics, but to start off sparsely and build up from there. For example, you might plan to yourself, “From the refutation of the self of persons, I would like to do an analytical meditation on the twenty reverse views of the transitory collection. From among these, I want to investigate how form is not the self.” You might start off with just that one topic on your “list” for the session. Later, if you feel that including more topics will help your analysis, you could, for example, add the other three views that relate to the form aggregate. Alternatively, you could use the first view of the transitory collection and apply that to each of the five aggregates: forms are not the self, feelings are not the self, discriminations are not the self, formations are not the self, and consciousnesses are not the self.
After the initial period of shamatha, begin by mentally or verbally reciting the quotation to yourself, one, three, or however many times you feel inclined to recite. For a meditation on the twenty reverse views of the transitory collection, you could recite the root text from the Entrance:
Form is not the self; the self does not possess form;
The self does not exist in form; form does not exist in the self.
These four statements should be understood to apply to all the aggregates.
The reversals of these statements represent the twenty views of the self. (6.144)
Now, bring your planned topic of analysis clearly to mind. Analyze, using the questions and topics of investigation you had set up for yourself earlier. Working with the current example of “Form is not the self,” you might begin by asking, “How do I conceive of my body as the self? What part of my body do I consider to be the self? Do I consider my whole body to be the self, or just certain parts of the body?” Shāntideva, in his Bodhi–charyāvatāra, outlines wonderful stages of examination of the body as the self in the ninth chapter, on wisdom. You may feel inspired to ask yourself some of the questions that Shāntideva provides at this stage.
When analyzing, permit yourself to make the analysis speak to your own experience. This is not just a theoretical examination of how a body cannot fulfill the characteristics of a self. Rather, the question is, how does my body appear as the self to me? In what ways do my thoughts take the body as the support for the thought of “I”? When I ask myself whether or not the body is the self, what thoughts does my mind offer in response? Engage in a dialogue in this way with yourself, allowing your map of the session and the words and concepts of the source text to keep you on track.
When you analyze in this way, at any stage of your analysis certainty may arise with regard to the main topic. For instance, you might be engaged in analysis of how you think your head is the self when you have a headache, yet when your back aches your thoughts of the self are centered on your back. A clear thought may arise, “The body is not ‘me.’ My mind simply has habits of identifying with the body in certain situations—other than that, there is no ‘self’ in the body at all.” Alternatively, a mere feeling of certainty in selflessness may briefly arise in your experience. You might not have brought your analysis to its full conceptual conclusion, but your experience in the present moment feels markedly different, and this difference is, without doubt, related to your contemplation.
The instruction at this stage is to drop the analysis and rest within this certainty. We do not need to set lofty goals as to what constitutes certainty, thinking, “For as long as I have not directly realized emptiness, I will not rest my mind, but continue analyzing.” If we push ourselves in that way, not only will we never receive an opportunity to rest, the quality of our analysis will also probably not improve very much. Therefore, when a mere feeling of certainty arises, or when we have a clear conceptual insight related to the topic of analysis, we rest within that feeling, that experience of unique certainty, for as long as it lasts. After a few moments, mundane discursive thoughts will start to arise again. When this happens, we resume our analysis and check in with our “game plan” to see what we will analyze next. We analyze once more, using our thoughts in a controlled way. When due to our analysis we experience certainty again, we rest again, as before.
This practice of alternating analysis and investigation with resting in certainty is called analytical meditation. By analyzing and resting, analyzing and resting, we deepen our experience of the topic of contemplation. Selflessness and emptiness shift in our experience from dry understandings to realities that move us in some way. By resting in this conceptually generated certainty again and again, our understanding of emptiness becomes more and more refined, so that, at some point, we will be primed to experience the nonconceptual reality of emptiness, without the intermediary of thought or analysis.
Another gauge by which we may choose to alternate analysis with resting was taught by Jamgön Kongtrul Lodrö Thaye in his Treasury of Knowledge:
If, due to intense analysis, the ability to rest deteriorates,
Do more resting meditation and replenish the stillness.
If due to prolonged resting you no longer want to analyze,
Do analytical meditation and strengthen the mind’s clarity.
Thus, if we become distracted as a result of discursiveness generated by analyzing, we should temporarily let go of the analysis and practice the basic technique of shamatha to allow our mind to settle once more. Furthermore, if we find that our resting meditation has led to torpor, we clear away the torpor by resuming our topic of analysis.
In any case, when we become accustomed to alternating the two activities of analyzing and resting with certainty, there may come a point at which, in relation to certain topics, we do not need to rely on much analysis at all in order to give rise to certainty. Simply recalling the topic of analytical meditation will cause us to recall the certainty that is a product of our previous analysis. By recalling the certainty in this way, resting becomes the main activity of our meditation, and we no longer need to rely on extensive analysis. For this reason, analytical meditation has been summarized in three stages:
1. In the beginning, it is important to analyze.
2. In the middle, it is important to join analysis with meditation.
3. In the end, it is important to leap into the space of resting meditation, without relying on analysis.677
One can use these basic guidelines to do analytical meditation on any topic in the Entrance to the Middle Way or Feast for the Fortunate. At the end of the analytical meditation session, practice a brief period of shamatha once more to allow the certainty from the session to sink in further and to create a “speed bump,” if necessary, between the postmeditation state and any excessive discursive momentum that might have resulted from analysis. Conclude by dedicating the merit of your efforts to the enlightenment of all beings, yourself included, and by making positive and compassionate aspirations that accord with the dharma.