S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 3 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 1 7 3 9 Swami Veda Bharati ple desire was easy to be fulfilled. Everyone tried to get up and rush to the blackboard, and one of them managed to erase a part of the line. The emperor said: “No, no, do shorten the line but do not touch it!” Well, that was indeed a puzzle. Nobody could solve the problem. The emperor finally beckoned Virbal, to come “make my line shorter without touching it”. Virbal quietly got up, took the chalk or whatever, and drew a longer parallel line, like in the figure below: the emperor’s line Virbal’s line “Your line is shorter, your majesty,” he declared. In this there is no competition with another’s line. Only that one goes deep within oneself, and without looking at somebody else’s accomplishment, applies one’s total ability to the task at hand. If one is fully restrained, in possession of one’s senses and emotions, acts constructively in all humility, learns from the wise, there can be no doubt in his or her “success without competing”. We can say much more about the topic but that will make a whole book. Here, we can come to the question about the right system of meditation for accomplishing such a personal self that can successfully guide itself on the path suggested above. There are many systems of meditation. Which one should one choose? We propose and teach the Himalayan system. None of the authentic traditions of meditation are excluded from the Himalayan system. All of the other major systems are parts that fit in the right spaces in the jigsaw puzzle of the Himalayan system. For example, Vipassanā system teaches to concentrate on the breath flow and body awareness, to start with, but does not use a mantra for a focus. The Transcendental Meditation (TM) uses only the mantra and not the breath awareness. Zen has a certain way of dealing with random thoughts. In the Himalayan system, we use all of these, and more, to make the complete picture. Someone trained in this tradition has been taught as to the right place for each technique and where it fits in the larger frame. One of its major strengths of the Himalayan system is that a well-trained teacher is familiar with many other systems of meditation. Starting from the basic steps a teacher may lead a student on a specialized path as needed according to the individual needs. For example, a person needing emotional strength will be advised to concentrate on the cardiac center, whereas an intellectually inclined person may focus on the center between the eyebrows. It can be safely stated that most the meditation systems are derived from this system. They may be called specialized paths within the single comprehensive system. For example, it is well known that the famous Shao Lin monastery was established as a midway stopping point for the Indian monks travelling on the silk road when they were bringing the meditation tradition to China. The earliest word for meditation from the Vedic times (approx. 2000 BC) is dhyāna. The Buddha pronounced this Sanskrit language word in his Pali language as jhāna. Travelling to China, it became known as Ch’an. The Chinese teachers taught the system to the Koreans who pronounced it as Son. The Chinese and the Korean teachers brought it to the Japanese who pronounced it as Zen. All of the elements of the Zen school, as also of the Vipassanā or TM are known to the Himalayan dhyāna school but not vice versa. Who is the founder of the Himalayan system of meditation, historically we cannot say. However, there have been many great names in the last four thousand or more years. These names will not interest an average beginner in the West, so, no need to list these here. Suffice it to give one illustration of this system’s antiquity and of the long line of spiritual experience. The modern western scholars surmise that the ancient text, Brhadaranyaka Upanishad is dated around 14th century BC. This text gives the names of sixty-nine generations of teachers up to that time as to who taught whom. The lineage has continued unbroken to this day. Whatever specialized developments have taken place in the tradition in all of these centuries has been given different names and then they further developed their lore and pedagogy independently. But the main stream continues and nurtures and nourishes the schools, as well as each newly arisen civilization according to its need. It teaches in the language and terminology of any current century, and its contemporary civilization. Its universality makes it so resilient. To give an example, let us take the most ancient method of breath awareness in the Himalayan dhyāna tradition; it is the basic method in the Tibetan (Mahayana Buddhist) meditation, in the Chinese Ch’an, Japanese Zen, inVipassanā as taught in the Theravāda Buddhist meditation system in Southeast Asian countries. It is the Zikr of the Sufis, and the most important component of the Christian meditative tradition of hesychia, or the practice of stillness and prayer of the heart. As we have said above, the teachers of the tradition have gathered enormous experience and expertise in the past forty or more centuries, and are able to guide people of all religions, of all civilizations, and of all meditative traditions. If one has been practicing meditation under a different guide
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