01 Meditation Panel Preface.indd - United Nations Day of Vesak 2013

through explaining his teaching through metaphors that mediate these non-dualities. Most of
the metaphors used by Thich Nhat Hanh relate to organic growth in nature, reecting his caring,
nurturing and humanistic Buddhism. It is concluded that Thich Nhat Hanh’s particular privileging of
non-dual meditation enables the relationship between meditation and praxis – and that metaphorical
discourse is crucial for our understanding of meditation and daily life.
One of the means by which Buddhist principle is tested, examined and puried is through
the medium of language: articulation and expression are crucial in the communication of path, in
discussion about personal practice, and in the integration of experience and doctrine. Professor
Angraj Chaudhary takes the perspective of vipassan meditation as a medium for understanding
and accessing different levels of experience. In ‘The Philosophy of Suffering and the Practice
of Vipassan’, rst-person account of meditative practice is linked to doctrinal exposition of
the Buddha’s interchanges with Pohapdaand Mlukyaputta. The argument is made that
the practice of meditation, and vipassan in particular, provides a realizable means of pragmatically
pursuing knowledge. The author notes ‘In no other laboratory outside this fathom-long body can
it be proved that sensations cause desire’, and argues on the basis of a reading of these texts, that
the Buddha’s understanding and articulation of the interdependence of the four noble truths is rmly
based in vipassan practice, not intellectual understanding.
Charles Pyle, in ‘A Strategic Perspective on Buddhist Meditation’, considers the four noble
truths and addresses questions and paradoxes he identies as lying at the heart of the practice of
vipassan meditation. How can there be so much ignorance if the mind is naturally radiant? How can
the goal be found through lack of attachment to a goal? Quoting the work of Ajahn Chah, he argues
that Buddhism is a science rather than the religion it has usually been labeled, and, citing extensive
support for this hypothesis, stresses that the Buddha is said to have discovered a pre-existent path,
not a new one, just as Newton discovered pre-existing laws operating in natural phenomena. Morality,
hermeneutics and semiotics are discussed, which the author argues are not incompatible with
a scientic approach but essentially linked to its procedures, so that Buddhist practice, its language
and its expression, can be seen as a scientic discipline of its own: ‘Meditation is to Buddhism as
the microscope is to biology. Living in conict with the laws of nature causes suffering. Living in
harmony with the laws of nature brings happiness.’
For successful communication and transmissions of teaching to take place, there needs,
of course, to be a sense of personal contact and interchange. Debates about the manifold doctrines
connected to the bKa’ bgryud pa Great Seal (mahmudr), especially its paths outside the mantra
system, have for some time greatly occupied both academic researchers and Tibetan scholars. But,
as Jim Rheingans, in ‘Communicating the Innate: Observations on Teacher-Student Interaction in
the Tibetan Mahmudr Instructions’, argues, an often crucial factor in such doctrines is the role
of the teacher, whose soteriological signicance is often overlooked in modern scholarly analysis
concerning a teaching where the role of the guru is stressed far more than any particular doctrinal
system. In essence, the Great Seal contains immediate instructions for achieving Buddhahood by
transcending conceptual thinking (Skt. prapañca, vikalpa) and directly perceiving the nature of
mind. But Great Seal interpretations and categorizations differ even among the bKa’ brgyud pa
schools and its categorization became a point of continued debate. This paper explores features of
the Eighth Karmapa’s Great Seal: that conceptualization is perceived as Buddhahood, that it is taught
and explained in highly varied ways in different teachings and that the origin of these is perceived
to be the guru. This last feature, the author argues, is the real ‘secret’ of a practice that is completely
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