Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 17-minute session, Ven Jampa Ignyen distinguishes calm abiding meditation from mindfulness of breath, clarifying that concentration—not mindfulness—is the primary mental factor. Using concrete analogies (a steady hand chopping wood, a steady flame on a painting), he explains why calm abiding must be the foundation for wisdom into emptiness. He covers practical mechanics: using a visualized object, not sensory perception; how any form (a color, a statue) works; why the untrained mind naturally resists focus. The talk concludes with the mundane versus transcendent paths, noting that cultivating calm abiding alone, without wisdom, leaves practitioners bound in saṃsāra.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 22 2001 06 21 LR.mp3
UUID: 57ca0596-5ebb-45fd-850d-09e70f47a802
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: Lam Rim 2001 Month 04-06 (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 2001-06-21
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 16.7 minutes
Words: ~1,627
That is really what calm abiding is. Without that the bliss of pliancy, it’s not calm abiding. And then the author also goes on to say that there’s a reason for calling it shinne or calm abiding because he says that it abides—so for calm abiding, it’s called abiding because it abides single-pointedly on the focal object, which is internal, through pacifying the proliferation, or by pacifying the tendency of the mind to be distracted to various external objects. So it’s called calm abiding because it abides single-pointedly on the object through pacifying this tendency of the mind to proliferate or be distracted to external objects. That’s quite straightforward, isn’t it?
Calm abiding. Right. So having calm abiding is really the gateway to attaining the form realm as well. Yes. You’re holding the mind simply on one object.
It’s a little bit different than breathing meditation. Breathing meditation is mindfulness, where you’re mindful of a particular object. Here, it’s mindfulness of the body—like, right, in breathing meditation. Breathing meditation is included in mindfulness of the body because really we’re mindful of, say, the inner surface of the nose, which is aware of the contact of our breath. So right? It’s the sensory—the main mind there is sense awareness. And it’s a mindfulness. We’re actually just observing, keeping the mind on that contact. Whereas in calm abiding meditation, we’re using concentration, not mindfulness, as the main—what—the main mental factor that one’s developing.
So there is a difference between mindfulness of breath and meditation to develop calm abiding. Meditation to develop calm abiding. What’s the point of mindfulness of—Oh, that helps to—mindfulness of breath is overcoming discursive thinking, helping to quell the normal busyness of the mind, giving ourselves a bit of a rest from the normal process of just following our thoughts. Oh, it’ll be of great benefit to us. In fact, the Buddha said that mindfulness of breathing and mindfulness of death are two of the most beneficial types of meditation.
But here we’re not dealing—mindfulness is a cooperative condition, but here we’re dealing with concentration. So mindfulness and concentration are different. It takes a lot of concentration to be mindful, too. Concentration also arises then, but mindfulness is not concentration. Concentration is not mindfulness.
Concentration is holding the mind single-pointedly to the object, holding the mind to the object. Mindfulness is remembering the object, not forgetting the object. That sounds similar, but there’s a—in a sense, mindfulness is recalling the object, not allowing us to forget the object. Concentration is holding the mind single-pointedly there. So is it then an object that doesn’t move?
Yeah. We’re—it’s not a sensory object that we’re taking for concentration or for calm abiding. It’s a conceptualized object. We can’t use a sensory object to develop single-pointed concentration, but we can for mindfulness. We can use the breath as an object for mindfulness.
Will you use it to develop wisdom on comprehending emptiness? There’s no other way. In order to enter the great vehicle path, we need single-pointed concentration. Can’t have wisdom without concentration. Wisdom depends on concentration.
So firstly, develop concentration. As in that example that was given in the text about chopping a tree down, unless the hand is steady and continuously hitting the same point with the axe, the axe will not be able to cut the tree down. Also, if we’ve got a flickering flame and we’re trying to see a painting on the wall, we’re not gonna be able to see it very clearly. This is how it is at present. When we try and sit down and think about emptiness, it’s a bit like, you know, the flame in the wind. Gosh. You know? Where’s emptiness? Okay. What’s emptiness? Emptiness. Emptiness. Emptiness. Where is it? Emptiness. Emptiness. It’s not very clear, is it? It’s like that, isn’t it? It’s a bit like we’re trying to cut down a tree with—not only is the axe blunt, but we hit there the first time and, you know, a foot away the second time. Our hand is not steady. In other words, we don’t have clarity internally. We don’t have calm abiding. So firstly, calm abiding must be established for wisdom to arise. The flame has to be steady in order to see the painting. Yeah. When the flame is steady, then it’s possible to see it.
But it’s said that some masters say that even if one doesn’t need fully qualified concentration to understand selflessness, maybe just have a few seconds of it—if it’s correctly directed, you can understand. Maybe a bit like, even though you’ve got a flickering flame, if it’s bright enough and you’re waiting for it, you can see the whole painting at once, maybe. There’s one master in Thailand that says—Buddhadasa. He would say that you don’t need to have fully qualified calm abiding to develop wisdom of selflessness. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That would—that’s what he’s recommending in the text here. We take something like a statue and put it in front of us and look at it, and then we visualize it. It needs to be a visualized object.
But if we really—if we lose it completely, which is what we do, then it’s useful. If it’s there, we can open our eyes and then get some clarity again on the details. Yeah. You really need to do it with conception. You can’t do it with sense awareness for the development here of calm abiding. It has to be a visualized object. It can be anything. It can be a color—blue or yellow. Like the kasina objects in the Theravāda: blue is one, yellow, red, white, depending on the personality type. You can just take a color, just visualize a color.
But really, you’re holding the mind on that and not letting it—you’re forcibly engaging it and not allowing the mind to move from it. Of course, it will in the beginning. That’s when you—it takes forcible engagement. You really gotta force the mind back on the object again and again and again. And the reason for that—why isn’t it the case that we can just put our mind on an object and it will stay there? Why don’t we? We do have concentration. We have a certain level of concentration. Untamed. Why is it untamed?
You wonder why. Sometimes we wonder why our mind should be like it is. Why should it be—we try to do things with it and it just resists. It just doesn’t. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in fact, all of these are called faults. The fact that—well, it’s even for those people, you know, our ancestors, when they’re out there, they should have been looking around for predators. They’re probably distracted to one thing or another and got eaten by a tiger or whatever.
But our mind does tend to be naturally distracted. Yeah. Well, in a sense, the winds in the secondary channels and so forth, which are the supports of conception and so on, are quite active for us. But certainly, we’re just left in our natural condition. We’re just distracted to anything. And it’s not easy for us to hold our mind on an object. It takes a lot of effort. Anyway, this is said to be a fault, not a quality. Even then, when eating the chocolate cake, we drift off, we start thinking about other things as well. Anyway, it’s good to think about the advantages of developing calm abiding.
Because in future, if we think about the advantages a little bit, it does help us in future to progress more in that direction. Because even though we’ve attained calm abiding in the past, we have generally not used it to develop the wisdom that we actually need. To a degree, it does. Yeah. But it’s not necessarily the fully qualified renunciation that we’re generally talking about. In a sense, you’d have to renounce, you know, some comforts. You have to go and sit down and—but it doesn’t necessarily mean renouncing saṃsāra. Many beings attain calm abiding without renouncing saṃsāra. Yeah. It’s implied that in order to become a bodhisattva, we need concentration.
Entering the Middle Way. That actually comes up in the treatises on the perfection of wisdom—commentary by Maitreya called the Ornament of Realization. And in the fourth chapter, talks about the complete preparation, that complete preparation is qualified by single-pointed concentration, and it exists for all bodhisattvas. Oh, in the past, we’ve been reborn in the form realm. And if one is reborn there, one naturally has—karma—Oh, well—Oh, absolutely. We’ve put the effort into developing calm abiding and achieved it, and then progressed—developed the form realm states and the formless realm states. And in the following life, we’ve been reborn there countless times over. Well, yeah, one can take it. Once one has developed calm abiding, one can either maintain a mundane path or develop a transcendent path. And in the past, we’ve always just developed mundane paths. Mundane paths to higher realms, but they’re still mundane. They’re not transcendent. So we’ve done that many times over, including the mundane path. Anyway, we should stop there and just do a quick dedication.