Forty Doors

1.5 Forty Doors

The scale is in place; where are the doors?

To practice calm, the mind must always be given a place to set its foot—an object. It can be the breath; it can be a disk (a colored disk, the maṇḍala, used for cultivating concentration); it can be the qualities of the Buddha; it can be loving-kindness. Tradition gathers all such objects under one name, the "meditation-subject" (kammaṭṭhāna)—meaning the standing-ground where the work is done. Later generations drew up a master table of them; the current count is forty; a treatise translated earlier—the Vimuttimagga—lists thirty-eight.

This chapter looks at that table. The conclusion first: these dozens of objects are not a menu to pick from by personal taste; they are a structured map. Which door leads to which depth on the scale is decided by the door's own nature.

The Suttas Give the Objects, the Treatises Draw the Map

First, one thing must be seen clearly: this table was not drawn up by the Buddha's own hand.

The Āgamas are indeed full of objects everywhere: counting the breath, the perception of foulness, the six recollections, loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, the contemplation of the body and the elements, the perception of the repulsiveness of food—material in glittering abundance. But each stands as its own discourse, scattered across the collections; when the Saṃyukta Āgama lists a dozen or so perceptions in one place, it says only, "each is its own discourse, just as set out above"—every one to be preached after the format of the discourse before it. What the suttas give is one practice after another, not a classified master table.

To gather the scattered practices, set them in order, and weave them into one framework was the work of the later treatise-masters. It is a real achievement—like drawing the whole sky of stars into a star-chart. Only remember, as you read: the star-chart is drawn by men; the stars were in the sky all along. However finely the map is drawn, the terrain is still the terrain; read the treatise-masters' table as a list set down by the Buddha's own mouth, and you have taken the map for the terrain.

The Vimuttimagga's thirty-eight fields-of-practice ("field-of-practice" is simply another rendering of "meditation-subject"), the full table as follows:

They are: the ten kasiṇa—earth, water, fire, air, blue, yellow, red, white, the kasiṇa of space, the kasiṇa of consciousness; the ten [perceptions of] foulness …; the ten recollections—recollection of the Buddha, of the Dharma, of the Saṅgha, of virtue, of generosity, of the devas, of death, of the body, of the breath, of peace; the four immeasurables—loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity; the analysis of the four elements, the perception of the repulsiveness of food, the dimension of nothingness, the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception. These are called the thirty-eight fields-of-practice.

The ten kasiṇa (practices in which a single color or feature—earth, water, fire, and the rest—pervades the whole object; also called the totalities), the ten perceptions of foulness, the ten recollections, the four immeasurables, plus four further items: exactly thirty-eight. The "forty" current in later times is the count of another treatise, differing slightly in how the items are divided—one same terrain, two slightly different maps drawn by two pairs of hands.

The Shape of the Door Decides How Deep It Can Go

The value of a map lies not in how many squares it has, but in the structure between square and square. Having listed the thirty-eight fields-of-practice, the Vimuttimagga goes straight on to sort them by "how deep each can reach":

Ten fields-of-practice accomplish the access to jhāna; eleven fields-of-practice accomplish the first jhāna; three fields-of-practice accomplish the third jhāna; one field-of-practice accomplishes the fourth jhāna; nine fields-of-practice accomplish the fourth and fifth jhānas; four fields-of-practice accomplish the formless.

Spread it out. Ten objects—the eight recollections, recollection of the Buddha, of the Dharma, of the Saṅgha and the rest, plus the analysis of the four elements and the perception of the repulsiveness of food—can bring the mind only to the doorway of concentration; the treatise calls this "the access," the place outside the door, about to enter, not yet in. Eleven—the ten perceptions of foulness together with recollection of the body—reach the first jhāna. Loving-kindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy, three of the immeasurables, reach the third jhāna; the immeasurable of equanimity reaches the fourth. The eight kasiṇa of earth, water, fire, air and the rest, plus counting the breath, can reach the fourth jhāna and deeper still. The four objects of space, consciousness and the rest open into the formless concentrations.

Why are the doors uneven? The reason lies in the shape of the object itself. An object like the qualities of the Buddha has too many faces—wisdom, compassion, purity; counting across them face by face, the mind is rich and active, well able to give rise to clear faith and joy, yet it cannot congeal into a single image one could sink into. So recollection can bring the mind to the doorway; it cannot carry it into the depths. A disk of earth-color, a single breath—single, homogeneous; the mind can press whole against it, sink whole into it. Only a door like that can bear the weight of deep concentration.

Readers who have read volume one, Mindfulness, will recognize familiar faces here: recollection of the Buddha, of the Dharma, of the Saṅgha, of virtue, of generosity, of the devas—the six objects of the mindfulness gate reappear on the concentration gate's map in the guise of meditation-subjects, and they land, neatly and exactly, in the square marked "to the doorway." This nails the border between volume one and this volume precisely. Recollection is one kind of object for calm; its strength lies in giving rise to faith, suppressing the hindrances, kneading the mind soft; to enter deep concentration, one must change to a single, homogeneous door. Mindfulness and concentration each have their own place—chapter one drew that line; here are its coordinates on the map.

How the Door Is Entered

The doors stand; now watch how the mind walks from outside the door to inside it. Describing one who practices the kasiṇa, the Vimuttimagga gives the complete line.

First comes "the learning-sign." The practitioner gazes at the disk; then, no longer relying on the eyes, takes up its image by attention—close the eyes, and the image is still there, though still tied to the disk the eyes once saw. Then comes "the counterpart-sign." With much practice, the image no longer depends on the outer thing; the moment the mind turns toward it, it appears—pure, bright, and keen. The treatise says:

Not by looking at the disk with the eye, but by taking up the sign through the device of attention—this is called the learning-sign. From practicing this again and again, the counterpart-sign arises.

By this step, the object is no longer an outer thing. It has become a shape the mind itself has taken up—the mind presses closer and closer to it, until at last it settles into that very form.

When the image is ripe and the five hindrances are suppressed, the mind has reached "the access"—outside the door, about to enter, not yet in. The treatise's author offers a simile: "as a road near a village"—the road has reached the village gate; the person is still outside the village. One step further, and the scattered, stirring mind turns wholly into the concentrated mind: this is "absorption"—full absorption, sunk in entire. The author offers a second simile: "as of arriving at the disk"—arrived, entered, fused into one.

This line had its seed in the Āgamas all along. The Saṃyukta Āgama, on recollection:

Because he recollects the Tathāgata, gladness arises in his mind; being glad, he becomes joyful; being joyful, the body grows tranquil; the body being tranquil, he feels ease; feeling ease, the mind becomes concentrated.

Gladness, joy, tranquility, ease, entry into concentration—a continuous gradation, already there in the sutta. What the treatise-masters did was carve two marks at the far end of this gradation: "access" and "absorption." The gradation was sown by the sutta; the marks on the scale are the treatise-masters' achievement. The measure between map and terrain shows itself plainly here once again.

One more word is owed on this book's measure: this chapter has described the structure of the doors—what kind of object, by its structure, leads to what depth—not how to choose a door or how to practice it. Which door suits which temperament, how to begin, how to apply the work: that is the work of actual practice under a teacher, and it lies outside the range of this book. What this book does is spread the map open, so that the reader knows: the doors number in the dozens, the scale has eight rungs, and the road has structure.

Part One Is Walked

Look back over the road these five chapters have walked. Three words have been told apart: samādhi is a faculty, samatha is a method, jhāna is an attainment. The Buddha's story raised a wall: the deepest worldly concentration is still not liberation. Calm and insight were matched into a pair: two tracks, one vehicle, and the direction is wisdom. Inside the track of calm a scale was set up: the four jhānas shed factors, the four formless transcend perceptions, and at the top the baton passes to wisdom. Last of all, the map of the entrances was spread open: dozens of doors, each leading to its own depth.

The Pāli roots now stand firm. The next step is to see what place this track of calm holds within the Buddha's teaching as a whole. When "concentration" is set into the noble eightfold path and named "right concentration"—which are the seven factors that come before it? How is it linked, ring by ring, with virtue, with mindfulness, with wisdom?

Part Two, the concentration in the Āgamas.