Calm & Insight

It’s general knowledge that there are two kinds of meditation: samatha, which means calm, and vipassana, which means insight. When you have two kinds of meditation, the question comes, “How much do you need to do samatha first before you can do vipassana?” In other words, “How quiet does the mind have to be before you can develop insight?” Or, “Can you do vipassana totally without samatha?”

Those questions don’t come up in the texts, though, because the Buddha never taught them as types of meditation. Calm, he said, is a quality of the mind. Insight is a quality of the mind. And you need them both.

It’s not the case that you first do one and then the other, although most people will do it that way. They tend to have either more calm in their minds or tend more towards insight—in which case, the Buddha says, work on the other one. In other words, if you’re already good at calm, try to develop insight. If you’ve already thought a lot about the Buddha’s teachings and understand them in an abstract way, you’ve got to work on the calm. Ideally, he says, you develop the two together.

Each of them depends on a different set of questions. To calm the mind, you want to find someone who’s good at calming his or her mind, and you ask, “How can the mind be made steady? How can it be unified?” “Steady,” in the sense of being with one object; “unified,” in the sense of actually becoming one with the object.

As when you’re focusing on the breath: In the beginning, your mind is hovering around the breath, trying to adjust the breath, trying to make it comfortable. When it becomes comfortable, then you can move in. It’s like a dog lying down to rest out in the open. It lies down and, well, there’s a rock here or a root there. So it gets up and it scratches, scratches, scratches, circles around, makes sure everything is out of the way, then lies down again. In the same way, you try to adjust the breath so that it becomes a good place to stay. Then you settle into it. You’re surrounded by the breath. You’re in the breath—remembering that the breath is not the contact of the air at the nose. It’s the feeling of energy throughout the body. In some places it’s more prominent than others, and you want to focus your main attention there.

Then eventually, as that area becomes more comfortable, you want to think of that comfort spreading throughout the body. Your awareness spreads throughout the body, so that you’re bathed in breath and awareness.

As for insight, the questions are: “How do you view fabrications (the word is saṅkhārā)? And how do you understand them with insight?” The viewing has to do with the different types of fabrications there are. There are two main sets.

There are what are called the five aggregates, the five khandhas: the form of the body as you feel it from within. Feelings, which are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions—the labels you put on things, either as individual words or as images. Thought fabrications, where you put things together and think in full sentences. Then, consciousness which is aware of all these things.

These are said to be fabricated because the way you experience them is that there’s a potential for each of these that comes from the past. Sometimes you have many potentials coming up in the present moment, and your mind focuses on some and not on others, fabricating them into your actual experience of the present.

For instance, you could be sitting right here focusing on whatever potentials there are for pain in the body right now and making yourself miserable. But if you focus on whatever potentials there are for pleasure, it becomes a lot easier to settle down. There’s an intentional element in all of your experience. That’s what the whole point of looking at things in terms of saṅkhārā is all about—trying to figure out the intentions you’re acting on: “Is it a good intention or a bad intention that makes me shape things the way I do? And if I’ve got some bad or unskillful intentions, what can I do to change them?”

The other way of looking at fabrications is in terms of what the Buddha calls three fabrications—bodily, verbal, and mental. These cover some of the same territory, but divide it up in a different way: Bodily fabrication is your in-and-out breath, sensations in the body that correspond to breathing in, breathing out. Verbal fabrication is what’s called directed thought and evaluation. Very simply put, it’s how you talk to yourself. You focus on a topic—that’s the directed thought—and then you make comments on it, ask questions about it, try to come up with answers: That’s the evaluation. Then, there are mental fabrications, which are perceptions and feelings.

We try to divide these things up in these ways so that you can see them as individual actions that you do, individual choices you make. The present moment is not just a given. It’s not a monolith. There are lots of activities going on right now. The Buddha’s pointing to the fact that the way we engage in these activities is why we suffer because we do it in ignorance. The whole point of insight is to do all this with knowledge, so that these factors that can lead to suffering can instead become part of the path to the end of suffering.

Once you see these activities clearly, you can evaluate them as to whether you want to keep doing them or not. That’s how you view them with insight.

So those are the questions for insight: “How do I regard fabrications? How do I learn how to view them with insight?”

The Buddha says you develop both of these qualities—calm and insight—by trying to get the mind into concentration. And you get the mind into concentration by working with these qualities. The two sides help each other along.

In other words, you try to bring the mind to one object, like the breath. Then you try to understand how you’re relating to the breath so that you can relate in a better way: Look at the way you’re breathing. Look at the way you talk to yourself about the breath. Or if you’re talking about something else, how you can stop talking about something else and come back and talk about the breath?

What perceptions are you holding in mind? Like the image of the breath as a whole body process or using the word ‘bathing in the breath’, ‘wearing the breath’: What does that do to your experience of how you breathe in? How does it make it different from just thinking of the breath as a sensation at the nose?

You begin to see how much your intentions really do shape things. So you try to shape them into a state of concentration where you’re really settled here.

When the Buddha discusses how to bring the mind into concentration through focusing on the breath, it involves both calming things, being sensitive to how you’re fabricating things, and then calming those fabrications. So you’re working on calm and insight together. That, for the Buddha, is the ideal way to meditate.

Then as the mind settles down, things get calmer, the insights get sharper, more subtle, and the concentration goes deeper still. All these processes help one another along. It’s simply a matter, at any given moment, of which is being emphasized more than the other.

The Buddha never recommends doing calm without insight or insight without calm. He wants you to work on both. Calm, of course, is what enables you to see. If you’re running around all the time, you’re not going to see very much. Conversely, the insight helps you get more calm, as you begin to understand the ways in which you’re disturbing yourself by the way you fabricate your experience and how you don’t have to do that.

So focus on being with the breath. Try to notice how your intentions shape your experience of being with the breath. Then, notice how you can calm the body, calm the mind. When you do that, all the questions about when to do calm, when to do insight fall away because you’re doing them together.

Ajaan Lee’s image is of a person walking. You can’t hop on one foot very far. But if you walk using both feet, you can go quite far. Sometimes you lean to the left, sometimes you lean to the right, but the leaning is what propels you forward. If you lean too far in one direction, of course, you fall down. So learn how to balance these two qualities. That’s how your meditation can progress.