Dharma Talk: Signless Samadhi

This recording is a Dharma talk given at the Kuan Yin Centre, Lismore NSW, Australia on Sept 28 2022 describing Signless Samadhi. The speaker considers that Silent Illumination and Shikantaza are the same meditations, in that it involves meditation without concepts. He describes samadhi, then what signs are, then signless samadhi.

Transcript

Welcome to tonight's talk.

Tonight is the 28th of September 2022.

And what I'd like to talk about is something called signless samadhi.

In Theravadan Buddhism,

It's called signless samadhi,

Which as far as I understand,

Is what in Chan Buddhism they call silent illumination.

And in Zen meditation,

In Zen Buddhism,

They call shikintasa,

Something similar to that.

So I'll begin with explaining what I understand as samadhi.

And I think samadhi is often referred to as both a verb and a noun,

Actually.

But I like to think of it as a verb.

Samadhi is the bringing together of mental energies,

Gathering them together and placing them in one spot.

In other words,

Concentrating.

Often the term used for samadhi is called concentration.

And usually,

It's referred to as that.

But it's different than the concentration we're used to.

We're used to being told to concentrate at school and concentrate.

It's different to that.

It's a gathering in and unification of attention and mental energies.

And sometimes it's referred to as a noun,

In that we have samadhi.

But I think probably the better term for that would be jhana.

Like jhana is a state of high concentration.

And we use samadhi to attain the jhanas or to reach the jhanas.

There's various jhanas,

Eight or nine,

Some people talk about as nine.

But there's eight jhanas.

And it's not a talk on jhanas,

But it's a talk on samadhi.

Samadhi is this concentration.

But I'd just like to mention something.

There are five jhana factors which are useful to know.

The jhana factors,

These are factors that are present in jhanas.

Jhana factors are initial application,

Meaning you choose an object to focus on and you direct your attention to it.

Sustained application,

Which means you initially apply your attention to something and you get into it.

You get sustained on that.

So it's like you're going into it.

The next factor is called pīrti.

Pīrti,

Sorry,

The Pali for initial application is vittika.

The Pali for sustained application is vichara.

And the next factor is pīrti,

Which is often translated as rapture or joy.

And it's this energetic,

Uplifting,

Bubbly experience.

You know,

It can manifest in all sorts of different ways,

Like waves of joy and waves of pīrti and you know,

From the subtle through to the very refined and blissful.

The next jhana factor is called sukha or happiness and it's much more refined than this kind of gross,

Not gross,

But you know,

Intense energetic experiences of bliss at one end of the spectrum.

And it's more of a light heartedness,

It's just a happiness,

It's more subtle than joy.

And the last factor is called ekagata and it means the unification of attention.

Sometimes it's called one-pointedness.

And one-pointedness in the sense of laser-like power for concentration.

And I prefer to think of concentration or samadhi as this gathering together of all one's mental energies rather than being dispersed and you know,

Going here and there and all the rest of it.

They're just all going in the same direction.

So it's good to understand these factors because when we practice samadhi we might start to begin to see the factors of jhanas.

So samadhi is usually gathering attention around a particular object and in Theravada Buddhism anyway there's in the Vasudha Marga which is a path of purification which is a very big fat,

Very thick text written by a scholar called Buddha Gossa in the nine centuries after the passing of the Buddha.

It talks about various objects of samadhi and there's a description of 40 different objects.

They include the kasinas which are like light colours and also elements like elements of earth,

Water,

Fire and air and also colours like yellow,

Blue,

White and so on and reflections and the breath and so on.

There's many different objects of samadhi.

And usually what happens with samadhi is we have an object and the factors arise,

The jhana factors arise and we become absorbed into that object.

It's about absorption into that object and the object becomes absorbed into us.

So there's a kind of a union of attention and there's absorption.

Okay so that's samadhi.

What about signlessness?

What does that mean?

So signlessness means without a sign.

What's a sign?

Well the term for sign in Pali is nimitta,

A nimitta.

And there's two ways we can understand what nimittas are.

And one way we can understand it is how a nimitta is described in this Vasudha Marga which is this kind of gold standard of Buddhist meditation that was written 900 years after the Buddha.

And in this case a nimitta is an object to focus on.

It is a vision,

It's a sort of a vision or a sign of a highly concentrated mind.

One may be meditating away and getting very concentrated,

Say one may be meditating on the experience of the breathing at the nose tip and then what will happen is there will be a vision or a kind of a sign of concentration arise,

Usually in the form of light,

Like it's a illumination.

And I've heard that there's a neurological explanation about this.

It's like some of the posterior cortex begins to have something happens when we concentrate so we have these visions of light.

But sometimes nimittas aren't always light but they're kind of a feeling experience indicating that we're highly concentrated.

In the Vasudha Marga it describes nimittas as the object you take up once you've developed a high concentration on your nose tip for example to enter jhanas.

Because they say in the Vasudha Marga you can't enter jhanas based on physical experiences.

It has to be a kind of a mental experience.

The nimitta becomes an object of attention that one gets absorbed into.

So that's one way of explaining nimitta.

But in early Buddhism,

In the time of the Buddha,

The term for nimitta meant as a sign of something.

As a sign.

And a sign of,

It's a way we kind of recognise something.

Like I walked into the room and I looked around the room and I recognised two people I knew and one person I didn't know.

I didn't recognise one person but I recognised two other people because they have a sign about them.

There's something I recognise as Rozi and Ellen.

Oh,

That's the sign of Ellen.

I recognise her.

And we have signs everywhere.

It's like a concept.

It's this concept of perception we have.

I'm looking out there and there's a camera.

I'm seeing the signs of camera and I recognise that as a camera.

This is a paper.

That's a bell.

And it's the way we make sense of the world.

We have nimittas about the world.

They're called signs of things.

It's the way we create the world.

We operate in the world with a bunch of signs.

Like I said,

That's a bottle and I know that's a bottle and it's got water in it and if I was thirsty I would drink it.

Drink the water,

Sorry.

I couldn't drink the bottle.

But these are all signs.

So what do we mean by sign of samadhi now?

Sign of samadhi means that our attention gathers,

Our mental entities gathered,

They become unified but they become unified not around a sign.

Like we normally do mindfulness of breathing for example.

The breath is the sign,

Is what we're paying attention to.

Or we might be doing a mantra.

I might go butto,

Butto,

Butto.

My samadhi gathers around that mantra butto and I become absorbed in it.

In this case what happens is the mind collects but there's no sign.

So what does it collect around?

It collects around,

It doesn't collect around animata,

It collects around the raw experience of here now prior to concepts,

Prior to creating something that I'm concentrating on,

Prior to the vision of animata for example.

So rather than creating a concept that we absorb into,

We're sitting,

We're hovering,

Prior to that we're hovering in the bare experience of the senses.

And when we do that the mind becomes illuminated.

It's like there's a brightness about it.

This is a sign of samadhi.

There is,

What we tend to do is we tend to create the world with our concepts.

Like I'm sitting here,

I've got this concept of a room,

I've got a concept of you guys out there and camera in front of me,

I'm in Lismore Heights,

Down that direction is my home and I work tomorrow etc etc.

There's this whole world that I'm creating and it's just my world.

It's not the same as your world but there's a consensual agreement about our realities,

Our world.

So we can work together and we can talk and we can communicate and we operate in these worlds of concepts.

But if we experience,

If we have experience prior to that conceptualisation,

What is there?

What is there?

One thing about the self for example,

And I know in Buddhism we talk about no-self,

The self is largely a concept.

It's a view and a concept.

Sakaya Ditti is the view of self.

And a lot of our ideas about a big self comes from functions of our brain actually,

More in the left hemisphere than anything else and also a place called the default mode networking.

There's the language centres of our brain.

We kind of create a big self.

It's a big fiction.

So what we're doing is with Srima Samadhi we're not buying into those fictions,

We're not buying into these creations and we're coming back to the raw experience just here now.

And as far as I understand,

Shikantasa is this practice as well.

I remember doing some practice with Zen Master Hogan,

Hogan San,

And he would say just this,

Just now,

Prior to conceptualising,

Just being present,

Completely present.

So I did a retreat not so long ago with Venerable Analia and a Chan Master,

Chan Master Gogol,

And he explained the practice of silent illumination.

It was really cool.

What he emphasised was progressive muscle relaxation,

Just relaxing,

And then putting ego out of the road,

Putting thoughts out of the road,

Putting everything out of the road and just tuning into the raw experience of life,

Just this,

Prior to thinking about it.

And in that there's silent illumination.

So I think I'd like to finish this very brief explanation about silent samadhi.

What it does actually,

I'll just say this much,

It breaks down our concepts of the world.

It breaks down our created realities so that we see things actually as they are rather than as we're projecting on them.

And it's indicated in a very famous sutta from the Buddha,

The Buddha Sutta,

Where Bahiya was a teacher in Western India,

And he thought he was enlightened and a deva who was recently deceased relative of his,

Come up and said to him,

No,

That's wrong,

You're not at our heart.

And Bahiya said,

Well,

How do I get training in being an Arahant?

If I'm not an Arahant,

How do I wake up?

He said,

There's a teacher in central India,

North Central India.

They didn't call it India in those days,

But there's a teacher over there called the Awakened One and go and find him and he'll give you a teaching.

So he went and searched him.

So kind of long story short,

He met the Buddha on Pindapath on arms round.

And he went to the Buddha and said,

Please,

Venerable Sir,

Give me the essence of the teachings.

And the Buddha said,

No,

Not right now.

I'm on arms round.

It's not the right time.

And he said it,

He said it again,

Oh,

Please,

You know,

We don't know what's going to happen to us.

At any moment we might,

You know,

We may be killed.

Life is uncertain.

Please give me the essence.

And the Buddha said no.

Then he asked a third time,

The Buddha said,

Okay,

I'll give you the essence.

This is what he said.

Here in Bahiya,

As you train yourself,

In the seen will be merely what is seen.

In the heard will be merely what is heard.

In the sense will merely be what is sensed.

In the cognised will merely be what is cognised.

In this way,

You should train yourself Bahiya.

When Bahiya,

For you in the seen is merely what is seen.

In the cognised is merely what is cognised.

Then Bahiya,

You will not be with that.

When Bahiya,

You are not with that.

Then Bahiya,

You will not be in that.

When Bahiya,

You're not in that.

Then Bahiya,

You will neither be here,

Nor beyond nor in between the two.

Just this is the end of suffering.

After hearing that Bahiya woke up.

And he goes on to say,

The story goes on to say that the Buddha complete his arms around and on the way back,

He realised that Bahiya was recently gnawed by a bull.

So he'd been killed.

And when the monastics asked,

What is the outcome of,

You know,

Where has he gone?

The Buddha said,

He's a fully awakened one.

No more will he come back to this realm of cycles of suffering.

So when we can stay with the bare experiences of the senses,

Prior to conceptualisation about the experiences,

Our conceptual realities break down.

And so does our creation of our suffering.

And we are free.

So we see the world around us and us just truly as they are.

Just this.

And we are neither here nor there or anywhere in between.

So thank you very much for your attention.