Once the turning has begun and the life has begun to be simplified, the traditions offer practices. Here their variety is greatest. A Greek monk repeats a short prayer with every breath; a Sufi circle chants the names of God; a Zen student sits facing a wall; a disciple of Ramana Maharshi asks, over and over, who am I?; a Carmelite friar washes pots in a monastery kitchen and says that he is as close to God there as at the altar. It is easy to conclude that the traditions agree on ethics and disagree on everything else.
Look closer and a single thread runs through the practices. Each is a training of attention. Ordinarily attention is pulled from one thing to the next by desire, fear and habit, and rests nowhere. Each practice gathers it, steadies it, and turns it toward what the tradition takes to be most real. Simone Weil, who came to the contemplative life by way of philosophy, put it in a sentence that could stand over the door of every monastery: attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer (Weil 1952, “Attention and Will”).
The Daodejing describes the aim in two phrases: bring emptiness to the utmost degree, and guard stillness with unwearying vigour.11 Laozi, The Tâo Teh King, chapter 16.1, translated by James Legge: “The (state of) vacancy should be brought to the utmost degree, and that of stillness guarded with unwearying vigour. All things alike go through their processes of activity, and (then) we see them return (to their original state). When things (in the vegetable world) have displayed their luxuriant growth, we see each of them return to its root. This returning …” Read in context James Legge’s translation of chapter 16. Patañjali defines yoga itself as the stilling of the movements of the mind (Patañjali 1914, I.2). Marcus Aurelius, who was no mystic, practised a version in the middle of an empire: to do the task in hand with simple dignity, and to give himself relief from all other thoughts by doing each act of his life as if it were the last.22 Marcus Aurelius, The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus, section 2.5, translated by George Long: “Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and feeling of affection, and freedom, and justice, and to give thyself relief from all other thoughts. And thou wilt give thyself relief if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last, laying …” Read in context George Long’s translation.
The common element is not a particular technique but a direction: from many objects to one, from agitation to stillness, from the surface of the mind toward its depth. What differs is the object the attention is given, and the traditions’ practices fall into four broad families according to it.
The first family gives the mind a word to hold. In the Eastern Christian tradition it is the Jesus Prayer, a short invocation of the name of Christ repeated, in the method the hesychasts taught, in time with the breath until it seems to pray itself in the heart (Kadloubovsky 1951). In Sufism it is dhikr, remembrance, in which a name of God or a phrase of the Qurʾān is repeated, alone or in company, sometimes with movement and breath. In India it is japa, the repetition of a mantra or divine name. In Pure Land Buddhism it is the nembutsu, the name of Amida Buddha, which Shinran taught was not a technique for winning salvation but an expression of gratitude for a salvation already given (Shinran 1997).
The English author of The Cloud of Unknowing gives the same counsel without any tradition of chanting behind him. Take a short word, he advises, of one syllable rather than two, such as God or love, and fasten it to your heart, so that it becomes a shield and a spear against every thought that rises (The author of The Cloud of Unknowing 1912, ch. 7). The word is not meant to be thought about. It is meant to occupy the place where thoughts would otherwise arise, so that attention can rest on what lies beyond them.
The second family gives attention no object to hold but asks it to watch. Buddhist mindfulness (sati) attends to the body, feelings, states of mind and the elements of experience as they arise and pass, seeing each as impermanent and not a self. The Dhammapada praises the quality behind it: earnestness, or heedfulness, is the path to the deathless, and heedlessness the path of death (The Buddha 1881, v. 21). The word it uses is the opposite of the Sufis’ heedlessness, the forgetting described in the second essay of this series.
Zen carried the method to its simplest form. Dōgen taught “just sitting”, a meditation without goal or object in which practice and realization are not two. His most quoted lines describe what such sitting uncovers: to study the way is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to be confirmed by all things (Dōgen 2010, “Genjōkōan”). Watching, followed far enough, turns back on the watcher.
The third family turns attention directly toward the one who attends. Ramana Maharshi taught a single method, self-inquiry. Every thought, he said, arises for someone; when a thought appears, ask to whom it appears, and the answer, “to me”, leads back to the question who am I? Pursued without wavering, the question traces the sense of “I” to its source, and the question itself, he said, is consumed at the end, like the stick used to stir a funeral pyre (Maharshi).
Inquiry differs from the other families in that it uses thought against thought. It is closest to the philosophical traditions, and to the Delphic command with which this series began. But its masters insist that it is not speculation. The question is not answered by a theory of the self. It is answered, if at all, by the falling away of what was mistaken for the self.
The fourth family does not withdraw from ordinary activity at all. Brother Lawrence, a lay brother in a Carmelite house in seventeenth-century Paris, spent years in the kitchen and said that the time of work was no different for him from the time of prayer; in the noise and clatter of the kitchen, with several people asking for different things, he possessed God as tranquilly as on his knees before the sacrament (Lawrence). The Bhagavad Gītā teaches a discipline of action in the same spirit: your concern is with the deed alone, never with its fruits; act without attachment, and the action itself becomes a way (Vyāsa 1882, II.47).
This family is easily mistaken for a relaxation of the others, a way of being spiritual without the discipline of sitting. Its teachers say the opposite. To keep attention on God while answering a dozen demands is harder than keeping it there in an empty room. Most of them practised the quieter forms as well; Brother Lawrence spoke of his years of struggle before the practice became easy.
Almost every tradition gives the body a part in the practice of attention. Patañjali asks only that the posture be steady and easy (Patañjali 1914, II.46). The hesychast teachers of the later Byzantine centuries describe sitting on a low stool, head bowed, gathering the mind into the heart and slowing the breath with the words of the prayer (Kadloubovsky 1951). Zen sitting attends with great care to the spine, the hands and the eyes. The Buddhist practice of mindfulness of breathing makes the breath itself the object: breathing in, one knows one is breathing in; breathing out, one knows one is breathing out.
The reasons are practical. The body is always in the present, so attention anchored in it is drawn out of memory and anticipation. Breath responds to the mind and the mind to the breath, so steadying one steadies the other. And a posture held with care is itself an act of attention, a small daily discipline that does not depend on mood. The traditions also warn against making the body’s techniques an end: breathing exercises pushed hard can do harm, and posture is a support, not an achievement.
They agree, too, on rhythm. Regular practice counts for more than intense practice. The Imitation’s advice to renew one’s resolve every day, as if each day were the first (Kempis, I.19), applies to the practice of attention as much as to the turning. A short period kept daily, the teachers say, outweighs long retreats followed by neglect.
The question raised in the third essay returns here with full force. Is practice a means of producing the goal? Most traditions answer no, in one way or another. Patañjali pairs practice with dispassion, an effort that includes letting go (Patañjali 1914, I.12). Dōgen refuses to treat sitting as a means to an end at all. Shinran turns the nembutsu from a practice into thanksgiving. The author of the Cloud insists that the work is God’s and the contemplative only consents to it. In each case the practitioner works with great diligence at something they say they cannot achieve by working. The paradox is not a confusion. It describes the peculiar effort, mentioned in the second essay, of learning to stop doing something.
The traditions are frank about the difficulties. The first is boredom. The desert monks gave it a name, acedia, and Evagrius called it the noonday demon, the most oppressive of all, which makes the day seem fifty hours long and fills the monk with hatred of his cell (Ponticus 1970, Praktikos 12). The second is dryness, when practice brings no consolation at all; the sixth essay of this series will take it up. The third is pride: practice becomes an accomplishment, a technique mastered, a self-improvement project, which is the spiritual materialism the third essay described.
The fourth is harm. Intensive practice without guidance can unsettle body and mind. Hakuin, the great reformer of Japanese Zen, describes how years of fierce practice brought him to a physical and nervous collapse he called “Zen sickness”, from which he recovered only through a gentler method taught by a hermit (Ekaku 1971). This is why every tradition embeds its practices in a community and a relationship with a teacher. The practices were developed within those structures, and they do not travel well without them.
The traditions do not regard attention as a private skill. Its end, they say, is love. Weil, who wrote that attention at its highest is prayer, also wrote that the capacity to give one’s full attention to someone who is suffering is very rare and difficult, almost a miracle; and that school studies are worth pursuing chiefly because they train that capacity (Weil 1951, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies”). The attention gathered in prayer or meditation is the same attention that can be given, undivided, to another human being. The practice that does not end there, the traditions would say, has not yet found its purpose.
Notes
1.Laozi, The Tâo Teh King, chapter 16.1, translated by James Legge: “The (state of) vacancy should be brought to the utmost degree, and that of stillness guarded with unwearying vigour. All things alike go through their processes of activity, and (then) we see them return (to their original state). When things (in the vegetable world) have displayed their luxuriant growth, we see each of them return to its root. This returning …” Read in context James Legge’s translation of chapter 16. Back
2.Marcus Aurelius, The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus, section 2.5, translated by George Long: “Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and feeling of affection, and freedom, and justice, and to give thyself relief from all other thoughts. And thou wilt give thyself relief if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last, laying …” Read in context George Long’s translation. Back
Evagrius Ponticus. The Praktikos; Chapters on Prayer. Translated by John Eudes Bamberger. Cistercian Studies. Cistercian Publications, Spencer, Massachusetts, 1970. Praktikos 12.
Shinran. The Collected Works of Shinran. Translated by Shin Buddhism Translation Series. Jōdo Shinshū Hongwanji-ha, Kyoto, 1997.