I have seen samadhi being translated as unification of mind. How does that actually work, what gets unified? Is it merely unification with experience and consciousness (vedanā, viññāṇa)?
Because as far as I understand it, unification with saṅkhāra would be counterproductive to samadhi - you want the opposite - when the mind moves, you don’t want everything to be moved by it as well - if anger arises, you don’t want to be moved by it, you want to be separated from it. Perhaps you’d unify with some of its causes, but not with its outputs (its wants).
My motivation for asking is that I find unification of mind a very appealing thing to do, but it’s not straightforward for me to understand what it entails and what it doesn’t. It’s a tempting way to meditate, but then I ask myself “should I be unifying with this thing?”, with no clear answer.
Another thing that motivates me is that it seems promising to improve my understanding of the concept of samadhi. I thought that samadhi is just a lack of sankharas? If you make connections in your mind - you notice new cause-effect relationships, you integrate your intellectual understanding of the dhamma more deeply - shouldn’t that be panya? I thought that samadhi is just stillness - lack of disruption, lack of automatic reaction to stimuli.
MN44 defines samadhi as cittassa ekaggatā. And it also says that the spectrum of immersion contains Right effort, right mindfulness, and right immersion.
Right effort, right mindfulness, and right immersion: these things are included in the spectrum of immersion.
…
Unification of heart (cittassa ekaggatā) is immersion. The four kinds of mindfulness meditation are the bases for immersion (samādhinimittā). The four right efforts are the prerequisites for immersion (samādhiparikkhārā).
The cultivation, development, and making much of these very same things is the development of immersion. (samādhibhāvanā)
MN117 defines sammāsamādhi as unification with the seven factors.
And what is noble right immersion with its vital conditions (saupanisaṁ) and its prerequisites(saparikkhāraṁ)?
They are: right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, and right mindfulness. Unification of heart with these seven factors as prerequisites is what is called noble right immersion ‘with its vital conditions’ and also ‘with its prerequisites’.
In MN119 it seems to me ajjhattam and cittaṁ get unified.
As they meditate like this—diligent, keen, and resolute—memories and thoughts tied to domestic life are given up.
Tesaṁ pahānā ajjhattameva cittaṁ santiṭṭhati sannisīdati ekodi hoti samādhiyati.
Their heart becomes stilled internally; it settles, unifies, and becomes immersed in samādhi.
That’s how a mendicant develops mindfulness of the body.
samādhi
Immersion; the practice of centering the mind in a single sensation or preoccupation, usually to the point of jhāna.
saṅkhāra
Condition, conditioned phenomena, choice, intention, cause—the forces and factors that fashion things (physical or mental), the process of fashioning, and the fashioned things that result. Saṅkhāra can refer to anything formed or created by conditions, or, more specifically, (as one of the five khandhas) thought-formations within the mind.
samadhi is the culmination of the Noble Eightfold Path, one of the Seven Factors of Awakening, one of the Four Satipatthanas, one of the Five Powers and Five Right Efforts.
sankhara is one of the Five Agreggates of Clinging.
samadhi is to be cultivated, sankhara is to be abandoned.
I think unification of mind does not refer to minduniting with something, but more like mind functions as a unity. The mental factor work together, united. For example; mindfulness and wisdom work together to arrive at Nibbana.
For example, suppose you are in doubt about what is path and not path. Or, you are in doubt about what is your personal goal or aim in life. Then there is no unification of mind/heart. It is like the heart is unsure. It is not wholeheartedly, for example, aiming at Nibbana.
I think it is not that bad to think about this unification of mind as a wholehearted committment to walk the Path to end suffering.
Without this wholehearted committment it will, i think, not be easy to achieve the goal.
This teaching I read recently from Ajahn Pannavaddho comes to mind. It doesn’t deal with OP’s questions directly, but does represent a wise approach to this “genre” of questions. I love the simile—definitely a tendency I see in myself.
When we look at the Buddhist Canon, especially the more recent texts like the Visuddhimagga, we find numerous references to the Abidhamma. The Abidhamma is written in a kind of shorthand, shorthand for the entire teaching. But how many people actually understand its true meaning. Many people who try to practice the Abidhamma, especially Westerners, tend to learn all the texts by heart and work out intellectually how all the factors fit together, until finally they have an Abidhamma chart that looks like a huge football coupon. From that, they gain the belief that they understand Dhamma. But it’s not the Dhamma in charts that needs to be understood, it’s the Dhamma in one’s own heart that must to be seen.
The Buddha taught that one should build a raft of Dhamma for crossing the stream of samsāra — not an ocean liner. I suspect that, in many cases, people are trying to build an ocean liner for crossing the stream. It’s the influence of the kilesas that pushes people to work to find out all these details, instead actually getting down to the primary task of crossing the stream.
The Buddha and his disciples, whose teachings make up the basis of these texts, found these truths out by experience. They taught by experience. Because they had realized the truth, what they taught was absolutely valid. People are now trying to reverse the process, by taking what’s taught in the Abidhamma texts and turning it back into experience. They don’t understand how much has been left out. The Abidhamma presents a concise, skeletal teaching, and the skeleton must be fleshed out by the individual meditator until it arises fresh and spontaneous within the mind. Otherwise, people become deluded very easily. For that reason, I feel that, as a teaching, the Abidhamma is not very suitable.
The proper way is to construct the raft as best you can to begin with and then set out across the stream, improvising and improving your raft as you struggle to make the crossing. It’s not a matter of going through a set of procedures, progressing methodically from one step to the next; but it’s more like using your own ingenuity to scramble across by taking advantage of whatever means you can devise. In other words, you have to take the basic teaching, the raft, and find your own way by overcoming each obstacle when you come to it. If you try to get everything into place first — if you try to build the perfect raft — then you will simply waste a lot of time preparing and never reach the water. So develop samādhi and wisdom as best you can, and then constantly put them to use, constantly strive to sharpen them, using your experiences in meditation as a whetstone. And always be searching for the way across, the way out of samsāra. As long as you are truly searching for the way, and remain within the bounds of Dhamma, you will always keep on the right track.
I can see how that is a good thing to aspire for, but why is it a synonym for samadhi? (If someone asked me about this one week ago, I would have said that this is somewhat similar to panya, though I’d be very uncertain about that; it would not even occur to me that it might be samadhi.)
am7 - your post was interesting and I’ll probably keep looking at these suttas in the following days, but so far I have not been able to see how to relate that to my experience. For the first sutta I didn’t really get the point, the second seems interesting and I’ll want to read it in the future, and the third seems to be directly answering my question, but I don’t know what ajjhattam means, and the dictionary definition wasn’t really precise at all.
From what I have seen over the years, samadhi is usually the opposite of distraction or scattered thought. The purpose of samadhi is to enable the development of wisdom, which is difficult if a person is always distracted from what they are aiming to do. To give an ordinary example, it’s like a writer who has the goal of writing a novel. It will take a year, or at least several months, to do. If they sit down to write and have difficulty, they might go do something else or open their web browser and surf the web. Anything but what they are aiming to do, which is write a novel. Right? It’s very easy to spend most of the day doing something else if you don’t have some authority figure standing over you with their arms crossed and tapping their foot. A unified mind is when the writer is fully engaged with writing until they are exhausted and aren’t pulled away constantly by distractions.
Another example, I suppose it the way we can sometimes multitask to the point that we don’t actually get anything done. That’s a case of being too scattered, our minds moving from one thing to the next constantly. More is accomplished if we stick to one task long enough to finish it or at least make decent progress if it’s a long term goal.
Wow, cool analogy . Similar to a ‘flow’ state, where you loose track of time and you’re so engaged in a particular activity.
Like a flow state, but amped up by a factor of (at least) a 100+. Your awareness gathers inwards, and you’re completely at ease and so content, probably the most content you’ve ever been. And you come out of it and there’s a kind of ‘whoa, what was that?’ reaction. And you feel nice and ‘light’ afterwards. I would say from my limited experience, the telling factors are:
your attention/awareness gathers in one ‘spot’ (as opposed to what you said, distracted and scattered)
Wow, this makes a lot of sense! Thank you! My question is very satisfactorily answered.
My takeaway is that in hindsight, samadhi isn’t just any stillness, or at least sama samadhi isn’t. (I’m not very interested in studying wrong samadhi right now). Having good samadhi would not mean that when I set my mind on watching TV, then I will watch it for a very long time, unmoved by the four worldly winds, or by my bodily needs; the samadhi I know and love is specifically in the direction of right spiritual practice.
I will cross this off from my personal list of “open questions”.
The point in the first sutta is that it tells that the cultivation of samādhi (samādhibhāvanā) is accomplished by repeatedly practicing the four kinds of mindfulness meditation and four right efforts.
. Similar to a ‘flow’ state, where you loose track of time and you’re so engaged in a particular activity.