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

Problems connected with the tension between the authority of the rst person and that of
the third are explored by Chaudhary in the light of practice, and highlighted by Weiser’s personal
research on various schools. Bhikkhun Anul notes the differences between Chan and Southern
schools but sees a crucial rst-person sense of search as a key linking feature. Nizamis examines
some complex philosophical questions associated with the notion of ‘self’, reassessing traditional
early Buddhist interpretations of the notion in the light of modern philosophical investigation.
Sivayathorn and Puntasen argue that Buddhist methodology both denes the problem and suggests
a means of deliverance, through experience, rendering Buddhism into what they term a mind-based
science. The presentation of such dilemmas as the appropriate use of language also animate ancient
difculties in grappling with the expression of the ineffable or the endless challenge of evoking
the middle way in the presence of apparently irreconcilable contradictions. How can one use logic
to communicate the non-logical, or the poetic to evoke experiences whose effects could also be
subject to scientic scrutiny, for instance?
The difculties, challenges and creative possibilities of language are frequent themes in
the papers addressed in important and distinct ways, or perhaps one could say registers, as different
forms of linguistic understanding and articulation are both used and explored. This may be seen in
work on individual twentieth-century teachers, such as in Waistell’s reading and analysis of metaphor
in Thich Nhat Hanh’s publications, and in Pyle’s examination of the use of paradox by Ajahn Chah.
Cheungsirakulvit explores poetic expression as a means of communicating truth, as represented in
Buddhadsa’s poetry. From a radically different discipline, Sumi Lee explores the hermeneutics of
the encounter of antithetical, logical positions, such as found in Ngrjuna’s emptiness doctrine,
and the ongoing dynamic in narrating and understanding meditative-based insight and experience
through such means.
Of course practice is based on the experience of humans, and the human body acts as its
ground, object and basis. Owen’s study of the very down-to-earth aspect of the body and the Tibetan
practice of bodily preservation after death, offers a glimpse into the way a practice can develop in
one area as a kind of distillation of a particular theoretical understanding. From the point of view
of living human ritual, the function of blessings ceremonies at crucial life events in Sri Lanka is
examined by Jayatilleke, who notes their restorative and therapeutic benet on a number of
practitioners, across social scale and class as practice-based measures encouraging psychological
health.
A sense of different levels, or interpenetrating layers, like geological strata, occasionally
emerges. A plant that grows well in one level may not thrive at another, but may also do
surprisingly well, and the different soils of various arguments show us the meditative traditions and
their theories in many ways. Yuanci’s contribution is suggestive when he illustrates that various
meditations are better suited for individuals with certain types of personality-characteristics - rather
than everyone just performing the same endeavor. The way authors address these many issues
sometimes feels like discovering fertile outcrops, minerals or plant life forms at the meeting place
of various strata at various points in a cliff side: often the most productive comments emerge when
one level meets another. Indeed one writer in the panel observes that Buddhist teaching seems to
have been formulated so that interpretation itself is part of the process of fostering elucidation and
realization.
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