Chapter 7: Vipassana and Vajrayana Insights in Western Buddhist Experience

234 Chapter 7: Vipassana and Vajrayana Insights in Western Buddhist Experience 1 Introduction This thesis set out to examine, at two Western Buddhist Centres, the nature of engagement in religious activity, of experience, and of religious change for the participants. Throughout I have accepted Berger and Luckman’s view of a shared reality as one that is maintained by a group consensus, which is expressed by articulation of the reality and the embodiment of that in collective and private discourse and practice.528 Given the differences between the two Buddhist centres in the nature of discourse and practice the thesis must explore two shared realities within the same universe of discourse. Despite the organizational differences in the propagation of religious belief and activity promoted by the two centres, however, consistencies in orientation to Buddhist engagement are exhibited by the practitioners within each centre. This concluding chapter outlines both the nature of those elements found to be central to Buddhist engagement in the Vipassana and Vajrayana forms explored here, and the differences in their manifestation. 2 The Nature of Engagement and Commitment All of the students, practitioners, and adherents were active participants in their own process. There was no evidence to support the view of the convert as passive who absorbed information without question, assumed by earlier conversion research.529 Participants in the activities of both centres allowed themselves time for exploration, testing and validation of the perspective for themselves. This validation did not result in a ‘change to one’s sense of root reality’530 in an absolute sense, but more in the sense of changing orientation so as to investigate, understand and participate in a lived reality: the sense of immediate reality that they engaged with, involving the effects of their thought and action on others. The Buddhist perspective is utilized by participants to frame their outlooks on the world of human experience and influence, encompassing both the social and natural worlds. Practitioners do not generally concern themselves with questions that derive from the third person scientific perspective, such as the origins and function of the universe. In this sense they avail themselves of Buddhist first-person discourse. 528 Berger, P, and Luckmann, T. The Social Construction of Reality: a Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Doubleday & Company, 1966. 529 Rambo, L. Understanding Religious Conversion, Yale University Press, 1993, p59. 530 Travisano, R. “Alternation and Conversion as Qualitatively Different Transformations”, in Social Psychology Through Symbolic Interaction, pp594-606, Xerox College Publishing, 1970; Heirich, M. “Change of Heart: A Test of Some Widely Held Theories about Religious Conversion”, in American Journal of Sociology 83 [3], pp653-80, University of Chicago, 1977. Chapter 7 235 The Buddhist perspective can be seen to frame this world of experience and interaction in a way that is meaningful and ethically satisfying to participants. The Buddhist doctrines are seen to act as cognitive frameworks for the reordering of experience and meaning by participants, and come to be accepted as such after the process of religious experimentation by which the claims of the new meaning-system are experientially validated against their inner understandings and convictions, which themselves become clearer through experimental participation in religious activity. It must be stressed that learning and self-transformation still continue after commitment. Commitment is the end-point of socialization only insofar as the newly-accepted universe of discourse or meaning-system becomes an individual’s primary frame of reference for organizing their view of reality. From the perspective of the participant, the path to commitment is seen as a process of engagement and familiarization with the material, interwoven with its testing through application to the understanding of lived experience. After a time, the decision to commit is based on the recognition that one’s acquired knowledge of the beliefs, values, and goals of the new religious reality frames personal experience in a manner that renders it more meaningful. The new frame of reference is validated for the individual when they recognize that the application of its principles through practice has brought about self-transformation, and when they come to appreciate that changes have taken place in their habitual thinking in relation to the world. Once this condition is reached, participants either realize that they already feel committed to, or decide to commit to the Buddhist path. Both types of response were expressed by practitioners of both Buddhist outlooks. Participants’ apprehension and appreciation of a point of doctrine which they satisfactorily applied to the negotiation of their own lives did not automatically result in a private or formal commitment to the tradition. Some would recognize the changes described above as having occurred for them, but at the time of interview, would have decided that they were not ready to commit. Here we see two possible responses to a decision-point: belief-commitment or on-going experimental participation. Both can be seen as responses to a point of evaluation and decision-making. In this sense the decision to keep exploring as a response may be seen as keeping one’s options open. For many of both perspectives there were several decision points concerning their Buddhist involvement. The first was on hearing, for the first time, a teaching or set of teachings which elicited an immediate response and decision to be open to the tradition’s view. This initiated a period of exploration where the student began assimilating more of the Buddhist framework and appreciating the meaning of its whole by understanding the relationships between its parts. This point is highlighted for the Vipassana practitioners in Chapter 3, which demonstrated how they came to appreciate the interrelationships between doctrine, practice, and experiential effects, both in articulating states of awareness and in the transformative results of working with them. It is through learning to interpret these internal states according to Buddhist frameworks that orient them in the practice, that an Chapter 7 236 appreciation of the frameworks that orient them in the interpretation of reality more generally is derived. The two types of framework are outlined in Chapter 3, Section 2.3. The process leading to arrival at this appreciation by the Vajrayana practitioners is outlined in Chapter 4, which explored the way in which they began to appreciate the consistency of meaning throughout the teachings after attending different teachings and courses of teachings, and hearing the same doctrines and doctrinal perspectives explained in slightly different ways and contexts. Their way of evaluating the wisdom of the teachings did not involve the intense engagement with their own mental states as it does for the Vipassana practitioners, but does involve reflection on the same areas of life experience and its dilemmas. Both methods lead to an appreciation of the common problems of humanity: the suffering caused by craving and attachment. Another feature of the nature of commitment itself, where applicable, is that practitioners felt ready to commit to Buddhism formally while being aware that they had much learning and self-transformation still to undergo. In this sense the socialization process is seen as permanently continuing and open-ended.531 The point of commitment occurs when students feel that they understand enough of the meaning-system, that enough of its import has been validated in their experience for them to take it in as their own. The reason for avoidance of the term internalization is because the process and its decision of commitment do not appear to result in a radical makeover, but instead provide the individual with intimate knowledge of and faith in a frame of reference, and a ground of being from which to act. For this reason, the terms comprehension and validation were deemed to be more appropriate. The stages of socialization and commitment were derived from the process of acquisition and acceptance of the religious material evident in the data collected from participants by interview. The first stage, apprehension and engagement, corresponds to the process of hearing and responding to teachings, and the decision to learn and understand more of the system of knowledge and practice, as outlined in Chapters 2 and 4. The second stage, comprehension, is a natural consequence of the learning that takes place through religious involvement. This is held to occur when a student begins to organize apprehended elements of doctrine into a comprehended framework of understanding. Comprehension is also aided by the attempt to apply doctrine in the application of practical techniques to lived experience. This was the subject of Chapters 3 and 5. By examining the nature and results of private practice, what is selected by practitioners from their acquired stock of knowledge and applied privately can be determined. 531 Paloutzian, R. Invitation to the Psychology of Religion, Allyn and Bacon, 1996. Chapter 7 237 3 The Role of Doctrine in Socialization Both forms of Buddhism recognize a textual source as their basis of religious authority. The scriptural basis for Vipassana practice at BMIMC is the Satipatthana Sutta from the Majjhima and Digha Nikayas, and the Pali Canon.532 In the FPMT scriptural

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