[Buddha-l] Vipassana?

[curt]

In Zen you can consider yourself lucky if you can find anyone who will 
provide you with any kind of "meditation instructions" at all. In 
Vipassana you can consider yourself lucky if you can remember half of 
all the stuff you were told to do during meditation. However, as zen has 
caught on in the west, there has been a tendency to elaborate a little 
more - or even a lot more. The same has happened with vipassana - but in 
the opposite direction - there has been a tendency to simplify a little, 
or even a lot. Perhaps this process of accommodating to western 
sensibilities has managed to make zen and vipassana sound the same or 
very similar. One can argue that that is a good thing - but one can also 
pretty easily see the potential dangers inherent in modifying meditation 
instructions in order to suit your audience.

There is an underlying theoretical difference between Vipassana and Zen 
that helps to explain their different "meditations". In both Vipassana 
and Zen one could say that meditation is a tool for "investigating the 
dharmas", and in Vipassana there are lots of "dharmas", but in Zen there 
is, at most, only one. What "dharma" means here is "a thing that has 
inherent existence". These are the things that are "real", or "really 
real" - the things that everything else is made out of - but which 
themselves are not made from anything else. If you took the Universe 
completely apart until you couldn't take it apart any more - all you 
would have left is "dharmas". Vipassana meditation tends to be somewhat 
complicated precisely because it assume that there are actually lots of 
these things ("dharmas") to investigate. Zen on the other hand reflects 
either a Madhyamaka approach - in which there is "nothing" or "no thing" 
to investigate (as in "all dharmas are marked with emptiness"), or a 
Yogacara approach - in which there is just "one thing" to investigate 
(note: what you call the "one thing" hardly matters - so calling it 
"mind" is probably just a ruse to throw off the easily thrown-off.)

But things are more complicated than that - because "vipassana" is not 
limited to schools or traditions that do not embrace Madhyamaka or 
Yogacara (and its far from clear who really embraces those 
"philosophical" schools anyway). Many "Mahayanists" adopt a 
developmental model to teaching, by positing multiple "turnings" of the 
"wheel of Dharma". In this approach the "Hinayana" is always the first 
turning of the wheel - and so that's where people are supposed to start. 
The meditation associated with "Hinayana" is usually very much like 
Vipassana, and can actually be called that or possibly something like 
"samatha-vipassana". The way in which meditation is taught and practiced 
and written about in Mahayana Buddhism is actually incredibly complex - 
and probably involves the importation of lots of non-Buddhist 
influences, including Central Asian Shamanism as well as stuff from 
"Hinduism" (like, for instance, Gods and Goddesses and Mantras and 
Dharanis).

The above is a crude oversimplification that very likely violates 
"Einsteins rule of simplification": make everything as simple as 
possible, but no simpler. Paul Williams explains this business of 
"dharmas" a whole lot better in his "Buddhist Thought", but I don't 
think he explicitly draws out the implications for meditation. However, 
in my opinion, his ontological orientation in that book reflects an 
underlying assumption that Buddhism is fundamentally nihilistic. As far 
as I know I am the only person who has ever detected this bias - so it 
possibly isn't "really" there - but that begs the question: what is?

- Curt

d f tweney wrote:

> Can someone give me (or point me to) a good description of what makes 
> "vipassana" meditation unique -- or what differentiates it from, say, 
> Zen meditation? I have read descriptions of vipassana meditation, 
> which is sometimes called "insight meditation," but the 
> descriptions/prescriptions seem to differ very little from what I've 
> read (and experienced) of the Zen approach. Is there a difference of 
> focus, or emphasis?
>
> thanks!
>