Vince Fakhoury Horn describes the insight meditation tradition as a chord in which concentration, mindfulness and heartfulness sound together, with concentration giving mindfulness its depth and heartfulness keeping the whole enterprise from turning dry and frightening.
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💬 Transcript
Vince Horn: Practically speaking, we’ve been focused on kind of three different forms of practice over our time together.
We started with concentration practice, which is related to the training in concentration. We talked about mindfulness practice, which is often associated with the training in wisdom. And then last week we started to get into the heartfulness-style practice, or metta practice as it’s known in the early Buddhist tradition. Or brahmavihāra practice, another term that’s used to describe some of the heart qualities that early Buddhism is really interested in cultivating, developing. And you could say for sure that you can get into concentration states with heartfulness.
And they also can be very helpful in terms of the first training of morality and ethics. They can come in very handy there, as in all the meditation practices.
I remember when I was on a two-month retreat with Emily at Spirit Rock, someone asked during one of the Q&As with Jack Kornfield, they said, “I’ve heard that metta practice, heartfulness practice, is a relative practice, that you can’t actually get to the absolute, the universal goal of emptiness through metta, that you have to do vipassanā. Is that true?” To which Jack responded something like, “If you can’t awaken through the heart, I don’t know how else you can do it.”
If you can’t awaken through love, what are we even talking about? And I thought that was a nice response, because it challenged that notion in the early Buddhist tradition — it does creep up, actually, a lot — that heartfulness is a relative practice. Well, maybe not. Maybe it could actually lead to ultimate wisdom. Or maybe it is an expression of ultimate wisdom. That’s my view.
So we’ve looked at these three forms of practice, all of which are, in the broader sense, meditation practice, but they all connect to these three trainings, and are useful and skillful things to do.
So I want to explore how these three come together. It’s something that I noticed as Emily and I started to come up with this framework of the different ways to meditate, to try to describe our own experience. I noticed that when I looked back at my training in the early Buddhist tradition, these three forms of practice were the ones that predominated. I didn’t really experience a tremendous amount of focus on inquiry practice in the early tradition. It does pop up from time to time. You do get an occasional question or occasional inquiry. You might find some Theravada teachers that have an interest in that, but it’s not predominant. Nor is the sort of awareness-style practice that you then find in a more mature form later in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, in Mahāmudrā, or in Zen and Shikantaza, or Dzogchen — these practices where you’re just being, there’s no technique, no form, just awareness. Again, you can find examples of it in early Buddhism for sure, but it just doesn’t seem to be emphasized in the same way. Likewise with embodiment practices, there’s just not a whole lot of emphasis on inhabiting or being in the body. More about mindfulness of the body — like the body’s an object that you’re being mindful of, rather than something that you’re learning to inhabit the mystery of. And so for me, these three — and likewise with the imaginal practice too — it’s these other styles of meditation that we’ve touched on that just don’t seem to be as predominant as concentration, mindfulness, and heartfulness. And so I started thinking of that. It’s, in a way, what makes the insight meditation tradition — which comes out of the early Buddhist tradition, is in a way like a modern lineage of that, which is also a little confusing, because it’s not completely that, because it’s also interfacing with all these other traditions and teachers and has incorporated elements from them. So in that sense it’s more like really a fourth-turning tradition. But nonetheless, if we take the emphasis to be on these three, then we have a kind of — you could imagine, from a musical perspective, thinking of this as like a chord.
If you’ve ever played a guitar, you know that you have a few different notes that you strum together at once. Those can, in certain circumstances, work together to form what’s called a chord. That chord is a harmony of different things that come together to form something more than the sum of their parts.
And this is in some ways how I think about traditions: that they’ve hit on these really interesting combinations of different ideas and practices to form something that’s very unique and seems to be pretty anti-fragile. It can continue delivering value and being useful over time for many people. So they hit on something deep here.
Likewise, if you think about food, I think this is another way it’s obvious. You think about cuisine, and you think about the kind of traditions of cuisine that emerge in different areas. Think about Thai cuisine or French cuisine or whatever type of cuisine you like. There are certain ingredients that are endemic to those areas where the cuisine developed. And over many hundreds, thousands of years, these ingredients were cultivated, combined, experimented with, until certain kinds of combinations, flavor combinations, start to emerge as being particularly powerful. Why is it that every Thai dish I learn how to cook, it all calls for curry and it calls for fish sauce? There’s certain things that you just tend to find. These ingredients end up working together in harmony, balancing each other, providing different elements. I think here too with the early Buddhist tradition, we’ve got these kind of ingredients, these basic meditation ingredients, that come together to form something more.
It’s like something that’s so good that we want to pass it on, and we don’t want to see it die, because it really works. And the insight chord — one thing I’ll point out about this is, if you look at each of these forms of practice, all of them can be seen from, and are often seen from, a gradual cultivation point of view. Like, we gradually cultivate our concentration and develop our concentration. We develop our mindfulness, cultivate mindfulness; we develop our heartfulness, we cultivate heartfulness.
All of these practices in the insight chord are really usually held in that way, that this is a gradual practice. This is something we’re gonna cultivate gradually over time, sometimes step by step or stage by stage. And so one of the unique things about the insight chord is that it’s a gradual progression. You could say it’s a progressive tradition, in that it’s interested in, focused on progress, on the progress of meditation, development, cultivation of these qualities.
Another thing to say about the insight chord, I think, is the non-duality of mind and heart. You could say there’s an emphasis on both mindfulness and heartfulness together. And if you look back at the term citta, the way that it’s often translated as “mind” in Western cultures, because we like minds so much — but often people will have to correct that translation, as actually it means something like mind and heart. It’s understood traditionally more broadly than that. And in the early Buddhist tradition — yeah, heart and mind — these ideas, these notions weren’t so different from each other. There wasn’t such a sharp and clean distinction drawn between them. So the citta is not something that we would think of as just existing up here in the head or being associated with the brain, but rather citta is something that is more inclusive than that.
The other thing I’d say about the insight chord is that concentration practice, because that’s part of the chord — when you are deepening your concentration practice, if you’re exploring jhānas, for instance, or cultivating really deep samādhi and stillness, that can then be brought back into the other notes, into mindfulness practice, into heartfulness practice.
And that’s, I think, a unique characteristic of this tradition that focuses on really concentrated mindfulness and concentrated heartfulness. It’s heavy-duty, industrial-strength mindfulness and heartfulness. There’s some deep kind of recognition about the value of concentration, or of samādhi, as a kind of preliminary or preparatory practice. That without cultivating that, we can have insights and we can cultivate these different qualities of heart, but in a way, the understanding is we’re doing it at a kind of shallow level. And so if you want to really go deep, concentration is the part of the chord that allows the depth factor to really shine through.
That’s why there’s such an emphasis in the early Buddhist tradition on monasticism, and in modern times on retreat practice. This emphasis on depth is present. It ties back to the whole thing of seeing it as a progressive tradition as well. If it’s progressive, then you want to make a lot of progress.
It’s like, okay, how do you make the most progress? Well, you get really concentrated and then do mindfulness practice and watch your whole universe get shredded? That’d be one way of saying it — have a cosmic experience of impermanence, in which there’s no doubt left in your mind that this is the way it is. And for me, these practices have worked really well together when I’ve gone too far down one path without checking in on the others.
I think early on in my practice I needed to do some heartfulness practice to even begin being able to have a stable attention. I needed to start by actually feeling some remorse and grief, and forgiving myself and others. That was, for me, the preparatory practice. I was doing that before I really started to be able to settle into deep stillness and feel safe enough to investigate reality and allow it to dissolve.
I think when people don’t have a sense of heart that’s available for them, these insights can be very scary and dry, and it’s often called dry insight. The dryness comes not just from not having enough concentration, but I think also from not having enough heart.
Where we start to see, “Oh yeah, this is the nature of reality — ah!” They’re like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, where it’s just, “Ah!” Freak out. But if you’re being held by love, you’ve got some love, some loving-kindness and compassion present, and then you’re like, “Oh yeah, everything’s changing.
It’s okay. Yeah, that’s true. And it’s okay.” There’s some sense of okayness, even if the okayness isn’t permanent. I notice the state of okayness is a state too. It’s nice that it’s present a lot of the time; I can fall back on that, and I can get a sense for, it’s okay.
Even if it’s not okay, that’s okay.
And here, the emphasis in the early Buddhist tradition on equanimity is really striking to me. This is, in so many ways, a type of experience: upekkhā, or equanimity. I like the translation that comes later from Thich Nhat Hanh — this is more of a second-turning translation — inclusion.
But the goal of being able to be okay with whatever comes seems to be one of the bigger goals of the tradition. Equanimity. You find it in so many of the different early Buddhist lists; it keeps popping up over and over again. So just from that standpoint, you’d say, “Wow, this thing is important.”
It’s the last stage of the progress of insight in the Visuddhimagga, the stage of equanimity. It’s part of the brahmavihāras. It’s one of the qualities that pervades the jhānas. It’s — you just find it over and over again. So I wanted to highlight that that’s, in some sense, what seems to be part of the goal of the early Buddhist tradition. One of the goals is the cultivation of this quality of equanimity, of being okay even when things are not okay.
So this is the insight chord. You have each of these notes you can draw on, and the claim here is that together these three enable the arising and deepening of insight.
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