Preface · The Door That Opens Back Toward the Light

The book in your hands is about the most easily mistaken word among the six perfections of the Buddha's house—concentration.

Easily mistaken, because when most people today hear "concentration," what rises in the mind is a tower to climb, or a button to press. The tower-image goes: the longer you sit and the deeper you enter, the higher you climb—concentration as an inner attainment that can be counted, compared, and certified. The button-image goes: when the mind frets, sit a while; the sitting done, the mood leveled, go back to work—concentration as a stress-relief tool that fits in a pocket.

Two imaginings: one lifts concentration too high, the other puts it to too shallow a use—and what they miss is one and the same thing. What this book will lead you to see is exactly that thing.

The Words of a Man Standing at the Very Top

Twenty-five hundred years ago, Siddhattha, at the start of his search for the Way, relied on two teachers famed for meditative concentration, and personally entered the highest states they taught—the deepest, most silent concentration then known in the human world. Then he left. The scriptures record his reason for leaving in a single sentence:

This dharma does not tend toward knowledge, does not tend toward awakening, does not tend toward nirvāṇa.

Look clearly at who it was that said this: not someone who could not get there, but one already standing at the very top of concentration. Looking down from there, he still said—it does not tend toward nirvāṇa. Depth and silence, in themselves, do not reach the final end.

Yet what he set aside was not concentration. He set aside the teachers' concentration, and what he established in its place was still concentration—the four jhānas; on the night of awakening, it was exactly these he relied on. Only, this concentration had been given a new position: no longer the end of the road, but a station upon it, set facing toward wisdom. The same concentration: in the teachers' school it was the end-point; in the Buddha it is a path-factor—the difference lies not in depth, but in whether it faces toward wisdom.

This book walks down along that one setting-aside and that one establishing. From the boy's first jhāna under the rose-apple tree, all the way to the Chan school's "walking is Chan, sitting is Chan," on to that machine in your pocket and mine that ceaselessly scatters attention—it walks the whole road to its end.

Concentration Is Subtraction

To walk this road, you must first change your sense of direction.

We suppose that cultivating concentration is accumulation—skill hoarded higher and higher, states stacked deeper and deeper. But this book will let you see that the ladder of concentration, from its very first rung, has been doing subtraction: the first jhāna sets down coarse agitation; the second sets down vitakka and vicāra; the third sets down rapture; the fourth sets down even ease, leaving only one pure thought of equanimity. Every step up is a setting-down of what the step before held tight. Going deeper still, the Mahāyāna teaches one to set down even the posture of "abiding in concentration"; the sword of prajñā cuts off even the thought "I am setting down"; the Chan school says outright that concentration is not a room you enter, but the living ability to meet objects with a mind unconfused; and by the Huayan, concentration has grown as large as the whole dharma-realm—and the single thought and the dharma-realm were never apart.

Subtract to the very end, and what remains? A lamp remains, and a room. The Dazhidu lun (Mahāprajñāpāramitā Śāstra) says: nirvāṇa is born of true wisdom, and true wisdom is born of one-pointed meditative concentration—where the wind strikes, the lamp's light cannot be of use; set the lamp in a sealed chamber, and its use is complete. Concentration is that sealed chamber. It is not the light; it is the room that lets the lamp of wisdom rest unshaken, its light put to full use. What makes concentration precious is exactly its willingness to be the sealed chamber: its perfection lies not in being seen itself, but in letting another thing's light come into full use.

This Book Does Not Teach Sitting Meditation

One thing must be agreed with you first: this book, from its first page to its last, does not teach sitting meditation.

This is not the hoarding of a secret. This book is a book of "what it is," not a manual of "how to do it." It tells what concentration is, how the Buddha and the patriarchs of every generation taught it, how the sūtras and treatises came to know it layer by layer—deeper, and then open; it issues no steps, gives no formulas, offers no shortcut of "entering samādhi in seven days." The cultivation of concentration has its own lines of teachers, its own training grounds; a book's pages cannot carry what belongs on the cushion.

Then what do you gain when this book is read? A pair of eyes that can discern. Knowing that deep concentration is not yet bright wisdom; knowing that the pleasure within concentration is a flavor, not the end; knowing that a state within concentration is a state, not a realization; knowing that the very thought "I sit well" is itself to be watched; knowing that this inward door was set up, from the first, to open back toward wisdom. For one who truly means to practice, this pair of eyes comes before any method of sitting—because not one of the forks on this road is avoided by posture; every one of them is recognized by the eyes.

From a tower to climb, to a subtraction that sets things down rung by rung, to a sealed chamber content to stay behind the scenes—this is how concentration is recognized back. One sentence says this whole book: Concentration is not an attainment that deepens the longer you sit; it is a door that gathers inward—and when that door has gathered to its deepest, it goes no further in: it opens back, toward the light of wisdom. The deepest concentration is one in which even the state of concentration is ungraspable.