Paths and "The Path"

See also on meditation and awakening.

Quite a few contemplative lineages make reference consistently to concepts like the spiritual path, literally using the word for 'road' or 'path' in the source languages. In some modern western usage¹, this is expressed variously as just "the path" or also "one's path," "my path," etc., also "the x way," and other variations.

Even where it's not reified as a metonym for "spiritual practice," still quite a few lineages use metaphors of roads, often with a destination, to represent the development and trajectory of a spiritual practitioner. Some traditions also tend to reify the spiritual path as a sacralized object of its own.

Among other variations, paths are often understood as some combination of a. a relatively discrete sequence of developments or attainments, and b. a diffuse collection of virtues and practices which are developed. The latter tends to be the perspective of non-awakening lineages, but sometimes of awakening lineages as well.

In the former "discrete sequence" category, these understand the major milestones in advanced mystical practice in terms of crystalline insights or stages, usually with each being a direct dependency of the next. (Though IIRC some have a slim tree structure, rather than just a sequence.) Others, from what it seems to me, rely on an implicit model of the dependencies for spiritual development, but are softer, mushier, or more ineffable in their presentation; nonetheless, many reports from this category rhyme with the former.

Others are yet less systematic and may not track dependencies much at all. These often understand spiritual development as a basically progressive augmentation of devotion, piety, and spiritual purity, but in some rarer cases they just refuse the notion of a path of practice which can be controlled or predicted at all. (Again in these last cases I suspect that a teacher or advanced practitioner is sensitive to the causal factors of awakening in such a lineage, even if they refuse any predictable model.)

In general, all of these still rely on practices of cultivation and discipline, and even the most "discrete sequence"-type schools generally teach a long path of the development of faith, virtue, and usually concentration or energy, leading up to spiritual insight.

Many lineages will specifically stress the development of both faith and ethics as a hard dependency for advanced spiritual development. Even traditional mystical lineages which aren't quite oriented towards awakening seem to have equivalent requirements, so eg. a member of a broader religious community would have to be visibly very serious about piety before being initiated into a mystical order. Sometimes these requirements look more like "moral uprightness," but allow for a relatively ordinary lay life, whereas many schools, even for lay practitioners, insist on fairly intense practices of renunciation, and see these as basically fundamental to spiritual progress. Some schools, of course, see awakening as only possible to achieve as a monastic, or their tradition's equivalent role.²

Saliently, "western post-traditional contemplative spirituality"³ largely does without the development of either. Nonetheless at least some of us seem to get by without them, and there's certainly quite a few such practitioners who seem to get to advanced stages of insight according to some traditional models.

I'll note here that there's some discourse about scandals in eg. contemporary eastern lineages transplanted into the west—it seems likely to me that this can be attributed substantially to just some background rate of sexual abuse and abuse of power in many contexts, and especially in religious ones. Still, it's sometimes claimed this is a result of lopsidedness in western spiritual culture, or just western culture more broadly. I'll also note here that IIRC in the Pali canon, there's reference to the possibility of "wrong insight" or "wrong awakening" specifically due to inadequate development of virtue.

So again, most traditional paths, explicitly or implicitly, contain a combination of a. stages of cultivation, b. a discrete sequence of insights, and often c. relatively discrete stages of energetic or spiritual development.

With each of these, but moreso b. and especially c., it's understood that the transitioning events are largely out of the control of a practitioner or their teacher, with some complicated process process of learning and insight which may crystallize suddenly. See below re insight, and after that about these abrupt shifts.

Sometimes stages or transitions can be profoundly disturbing or painful, one sometimes encounters language like "dying the great death," or depictions of certain stages of awakening as ripping out one's entire existential grounding. Note that disturbances are also often reported over long stretches, or intermittently, over a single "stage," etc. Saliently here also, in some cases profound disturbance due to exogenous circumstances can be a boon to spiritual development, eg. some reports of people achieving awakening while imprisoned or being tortured.

Some schools (and really these are the ones I take most seriously) are clear about two related points: 1. that there exist many false starts and provisional or incomplete awakenings, and the path is long and windy; 2. that temporary, fragile views are not true awakening.

Re 1.: in these schools it's taught that overwhelmingly, a student's initial apprehension of a practice, teaching, theme, or inquiry will be wrong or confused, and that in fact most of the work of meditation consists of being bewildered or exasperated by the teacher's instructions, or the difficulties in their application in practice. Many schools which don't have this quality strongly, still understand practice not to be a smooth trajectory upward, but that it often has intense swings up and down, including having to go back and relearn basics, etc. (In many cases this isn't explicitly taught, but is ambiently known in the practice culture.)

(In a much gentler form, the practice system which I'll discuss in the next chapter is sort of windy-bewilderment maximalist, which is interesting to compare here.)

Re 2.: Most traditional schools which teach awakening are pretty insistent that awakening is among other things distinguished by being irrevocable, as in, that it is a truth which cannot be unseen, and does not roll back. In these traditions, a relatively immature student might try to reify a temporary or fragile state which looks kind of like awakening, but teachers are careful to track if it's the genuine article, in part by this criterion. That said, some lineages allow for lower awakenings that are described as "glimpses", though these are usually regarded to result in a kind of irrevocable spiritual inclination from then on.

Some traditions also discuss wrong awakening, usually less in the sense of "fragile," but more often in the sense of "incomplete" or "a dead end," though also sometimes as "an apparent gnosis, under a metaphysics which the tradition rejects." In particular, there's meant to be a variety of kinds of apparent insight, which are not the final goal of practice in that tradition, and which do not lead to it.

Training regimes

There's some difficulty here in trying to make generalizations across diverse traditions, or trying to evoke what all a given tradition involves in so little space. Besides that, I personally have mainly practiced in one specific community, and my sense of the details of other traditions are often scrounged from anecdotes or inferred from reports and traditional texts. So, this section is looser and more opinionated, I'm trying here to get at my sense of the meat-and-potatoes of contemplative practice, and how that relates to awakening.

Most mystical lineages place either monastic or reclusive⁴ practice as central in the spiritual path. Even those lineages open to laypeople (or those in cultures with no such concept) very often use periods of intensive practice, and often seclusion. Distinctly, all of these rely on a practice container,⁵ meaning a context and shape of living which constructs and supports a pattern of spiritual practice. Most often practice is understood as overwhelmingly shaped by the container, and sometimes the container is seen as part and parcel of practice.

There's some features which show up surprisingly often⁶ in traditional kinds of practice containers, both long term monastic and short term:

• Celibacy, or at least temporary abstention from sex and masturbation
• Chanting and repeated recitation of texts
• Sleep deprivation, and especially rising very early
• Extended periods without speaking
• Demanding relationships with an abbot or teacher
• Various restrictions on behavior, most often restricting access to ordinary entertainments, but sometimes extensive and somewhat arbitrary systems of rules, regimented schedules, etc.

Again, even lay lineages very often use periods of intensive spiritual practice, as well as using many of these sorts of features while maintaining normal responsibilities to one's household, etc.

Some modern western practitioners try to shoehorn practice into a normal lay life with an hour of meditation in the morning, anecdotally this seems to very seldom get very far on its own, and is very commonly augmented with periods of "retreats,"⁷ whether alone or organized with a community. ("Retreat" unfortunately evokes something like "spa day," in western meditator circles this always means "moderate length period of intensive discipline and practice.") That said, the most accomplished western teachers usually have had substantial periods, often cumulatively years, of monastic or pseudo-monastic practice.

This is substantially just about the time investment and focus needed to get results, but in traditional contexts it's often conceived of as removing oneself from unwholesome or spiritually disruptive parts of the broader world.

Beyond just reclusion and renunciation, asceticism is a distinctly common feature of mystical lineages, in varying intensity. Less extreme examples include long fasts or secondarily sleep deprivation. Among more severe kinds of asceticism, very common features are putting the body in intense discomfort, we of course have the phrase "wearing a hair shirt" in English in reference to such a practice by Christian monastics historically, but purposefully causing pain and discomfort for spiritual purposes is attested in traditions all over the world. Of specific interest here is a distinct fetish on the part of a variety of eastern mystical lineages for transcending pain associated with sitting still for long periods, anywhere from an hour up to 24 hours straight, in the extremes.⁸

Many traditional lineages, though not all, use regimented schedules, often with the entire waking day scheduled hour by hour. Many traditions with looser or no schedules still teach that monks should be diligent, resolute, and specifically continuous in their practice throughout the day.⁹

In practice many traditions soften these kinds of expectations over centuries, or it seems they're mostly aspirational, or achieved by only the most devout. Reports from western lay teachers who claim attainments (usually construed in the schemas of Eastern traditions, though note not just Buddhism) often include periods in their lives of very intense and disciplined practice, along with periods of laxity. Note that "disciplined" often doesn't include all of the strictures of full monastic discipline, which also actually varies a fair bit, but nonetheless. Occasionally, some teachers describe mostly being lax and spacious in their practice, and this affording transformative effects.

Insight, openings, and awakening

In Buddhism especially, awakening is very often precipitated by what's known in modern terminology as insight. More broadly, there's a wide swath of reports from mystical and contemplative schools of distinct shifts in experience and behavior, both abrupt and progressive. (See below re the last point.) Many of these are conceived of as awakenings, or as intermediate stages towards awakening, but many are also seen as important developments but separate from awakening, or are in lineages which do not teach awakening or have no comparable concept.

Insight, by that name, is most often characterized by discrete shifts in perception or relationship to experience. Often these are experienced as newly understanding or seeing some feature or structure of reality or experience, hence the name.¹⁰

[sometimes insight is progressive, or at least the effects claimed by reports which use the term insight are sometimes also reported as blooming slowly over months or years.] [again, see more below]

Specific practices

See also all of the practices I discussed in the sections on meditation and features of spiritual practices, as well as, maybe secondarily, the contours described in the sections on metabolism and releases and openings.

[so again, practices of discipline, cultivation, and devotion]

Gradualism and suddenism

Misc

Footnotes

1. With antecedents in, of course, Daoism, but also by way of Chinese Buddhism. ↩

2. Many many traditions have the pattern of "a special role for spiritual devotees/adepts, with a variety of restrictions which everyone else is not subject to," in reference to monastic traditions, in English, "everyone else" is usually "laypeople." This distinction has been constructed in basically arbitrary ways in different cultures, eg. there's quite a lot of overlap between the structure of "monk" and that of "shaman" in many cultures, so I'm including that here as well.
   
   (Some traditions, eg. Orthodox Christianity and IIRC Catholicism also, also have priestly ordination separate from monastic ordination, for example.) ↩

3. Boy do I wish I had a shorter name for this cluster. ↩

4. The fancy Greek term here is eremitic, which is a nice trailhead into Orthodox Christian monasticism. ↩

5. I believe, a very modern term. ↩

6. This is neither here nor there, but I continue to be confused if the "poverty, chastity, robes" thing is a real convergent evolution, vs. just one or two original innovations that became really popular. I'm almost certain that the South Asian version of this is independent from the Christian one, but I can't tell of neo-taoists were already doing this when Buddhism got to East Asia, and it seems like "poverty and robes" happened in Islam in a few places, and Islam is sort of consciously never-monastic, which... something? Again I feel overindexed on """world religions""" here, mostly just noting that I'm confused.
   
   (But also, something about convergent evolution for shamanism having some stuff in common with the cross-cultural pattern of monasticism, but the latter being more like, "a community, institution, and a monastic discipline." ... again, confused here.) ↩

7. I encountered a claim somewhere that this pattern was specifically an innovation IIRC in Burmese vipassana, as an attempt to construct some form of lay practice which would be legible to Protestant colonial authorities. (I thought this was from Chapman here but it appears not. I'm still pretty sure I read this, I just can't find the source. In any case in the Pali canon there's no reference to anything like short practice periods, so eg. there's the vassa but that's three months, and was never meant for laypeople, etc.)
   
   I tried to look into this once and I couldn't figure out if sesshin in Japanese Zen is modern as well. I feel like I've never seen reference to it in indigenous sources before the 20th century.
   
   (Japanese Buddhism in general seems to have been heavily burdened and distorted by some attempt of the Japanese state to cowtow to the West during the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th century. The monasteries, which at that point were the largest landholders in the country due to a millenium of grants from patrons, were stripped of their properties, Buddhism was banned for 20 years, and when it was unbanned, IIRC, monastic orders were ~required? to reorganize so that monks would marry and become temple priests after a period of training, rather than keeping vows of celibacy.) ↩

8. I wasn't sure if I wanted this in the main body of the text, not that it matters much: there's some Hindu lineages that have traditions of elect devotees undergoing amputation without anesthesia, or other acts of extreme pain for the sake of discipline and devotion. ↩

9. So obviously I'm thinking of a bunch of Buddhist schools here, but I also have in mind Hesychasm in Orthodox Christianity, and I have a vague sense of mystics in western Christianity having this sort of schtick also. ↩

10. Note the term is used in a mostly separate sense in the context of "insight meditation," see the footnote on vipassana in this section. ↩