28 December 2022

Again I enjoyed the cool emptiness of the morning before most people were up.  Again the morning passed in the mediation hall firstly meditating - I seem to have a better grasp of things now - and then listening to the discourse before breakfast.  It struck me as I listened to today’s, covering some of the moral principles we are meant to be bound by during our stay here, that much of what we are being told comes in the form of entangled lists: we might hear about seven precepts that are divided into three principles each of which has two phases.  I now realise that historically this was as an oral philosophy and lists might make recalling things easier but here and now I find myself drifting away as my understanding gets bogged down in an entangled web made up of lists of ethical principles.

The question session draws from people the usual selection of silence, needless questions and, to me at least, assertive grandstanding (‘How can Buddha be a perfect man if he is clearly fallible since he has prejudices?’) but is followed by an excellent vegetarian beef wellington lunch and then a start to the afternoon that I can only say I found weird.

After lunch we moved to the next stage of our meditation, learning the Vipassana technique. It calls for the ability to start with a clear mind, hence the teaching of the last few days.  The teacher talked us through this now familiar first stage and then on to mentally scanning or bodies looking for sensations. As well as itching and soreness I felt pressure, tinglings and hands that felt as nothing more than a presence. But the strangest thing was when my whole body very suddenly heated up to the point I had to remove my jumper. As the hour progressed I found myself feeling different sensations in different parts of my body, sensations that dropped into the background as I moved my attention on but which I never managed to push completely away.  My whole body felt restless and I just wanted to get up and shake it out as you would a restless leg.

The sensations we all experienced are explained to us in the afternoon’s discourse, a discourse I found obscure, irrational and somewhat rambling.  A key aspect to ‘understanding’ Buddhism is accepting the idea of impermanence in everything including ourselves. As this idea has been introduced over the last couple of days people have pointed out that you can see this around you every day and for me the idea of impermanence in the individual is obvious from our aging and the billion pound industries that have grown up in trying to prevent it.  But our teacher explains it is more immediate than any of this and that according to Buddha everything is made of tiny subatomic particles, smaller than atoms, which include earth, fire, nutrition, and taste.  These ‘Kalpas’ separate and reform thousands of times a second and hence everything is in a permanent state of change and the sensations we feel in our meditation are this change.  I find myself becoming more detached from the teachings.  I also find myself wondering more acutely about the point of this meditation; it is supposed to bring ‘enlightenment’ but if that means accepting what we have been told about Kalapas then I am in a metaphysical dead end.  The aches and itches and soreness I sense while doing Vipassana and which frustrate and which I can not ignore seem to lead to nothing of value that I can relate to.