Evan Thompson on Vipassana

From https://parletre.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/test-post/#comment-21

I was invited on Twitter to engage with these posts, so I’ll begin at the beginning with this one and comment on the other posts at the corresponding pages. I haven’t listened to the podcast with Ingram or read his book, so my comments are general and not specific to his ideas.

On Mahasi style practice and its underlying theory of mind: Mahasi style vipassana practice is a modern Buddhist (Buddhist modernist) practice, one that doesn’t pre-date modern Burmese lay reform Buddhism. (See Robert Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience,” Numen 42, no. 3 (1995), pp. 228-283.) The same can be said about Goenka’s body-scan method. Although teachers like Mahasi and Goenka link their practices to the Abhidhamma, the connection isn’t straightforward. The Abhidhamma/ Abhidharma models aren’t the result of meditation practice; they’re neither a direct read- out of the results of meditation nor a theoretical elaboration of meditation. Rather, the Abhidhamma/Abhidharma originates as a scholastic interpretive genre—a genre whose aim is to systematize the prima facie divergent teachings found in the Buddhist sūtras. (It’s important to remember that we have no direct evidence about what the Buddha as a historical person thought and taught; all our evidence is from texts that are at least one step, and more likely several steps, removed from the Buddha.)

When one practices modern vipassana, one starts with a conceptual system (with ideas like “the six sense doors,” “moment-to-moment arising,” etc.) and imposes it onto one’s experience as one sits. So, one is actually shaping the mind according to a certain conceptual system, not directly observing experience “as it is in itself” independent of concepts.

So, this is brings us to the value/validity of that conceptual system. I agree that the model of mind at play is extremely impoverished. It’s impoverished from Buddhist philosophical perspectives and from the perspective of cognitive science. It’s also impoverished from a psychodynamic perspective. The model is indeed incapable of handling the latent depths of the mind—learning and memory. Buddhist philosophers recognized this, and so introduced concepts like bhavaṅga (the “life-continuum cognition”) in Theravāda or the ālayavijñāna (“store-consciousness”) in Yogācāra. Unconscious learning and memory are foundational concepts and huge areas of research in cognitive science. And the dynamics of the preconscious and unconscious are central to psychodynamic theories.

From a cognitive science perspective, the ancient Buddhist taxonomy of the “six sense doors” is thoroughly inadequate. It dichotomizes the senses, and so can’t handle synaesthesia and complex forms of cross-modal integration. It doesn’t properly describe interoception, proprioception, and kinaesthesia. It also doesn’t distinguish between all the varieties of mental processes (mental attention, working memory, metacognition, etc.).

Applying the “six sense doors” theory to the mind is like applying Platonic, Aristotelian, or Stoic theories to the mind. They’re interesting theories but outmoded given contemporary knowledge. Thinking that ancient Buddhist theories of the mind are somehow intrinsically better than other ancient Greek or Indian (e.g., Samkhya) theories is an example of what I call “Buddhist exceptionalism” (in my forthcoming book, Why I Am Not a Buddhist).

Regarding meaning-making: in traditional Buddhist contexts and cultures, this is provided by the whole backdrop of the Buddhist soteriological worldview. You can’t possibly get this worldview and meaning framework from just sitting and watching your conscious mind with modern vipassana practices. On the contrary, it’s already clear from canonical texts like the “Discourse on the Establishment of Mindfulness” that the meaning system comes first and the practice takes place within it.

I agree that “Recurrent training to attend to the sensate experience moment-by-moment can undermine the capacity to make meaning of experience.” This can happen if one excessively pursues that kind of attention divorced from other practices or from a larger framework of meaning. This often seems to occur in modern vipassana practice. It’s not clear, however, that these points apply to “meditation as traditionally conceived.” Modern vipassana isn’t a traditional practice (as far as we know) and in traditional contexts a rich background meaning framework (the Buddhist soteriological worldview) is present and shapes meditation practice.

— Evan Thompson