Comparing Forest Masters’ Techniques and Implications for International Meditators

Comparing Forest Masters’ Techniques and Implications for International Meditators


Comparing the styles of two prominent Thai Vipassana monks.

January 5, 2010 by wanderingdhamma
Ajahn Chah and Luangda Mahabua are two of the most well-known teachers of the forest tradition for Thais and English-speakers alike. They both come from the lineage of

Ajahn Man and yet their styles and teachings differ enough to affect lay international meditators who come to their monasteries.

In a recording of a Dhamma Talk on 27/9/09, Ajahn Martin of Wat Pa Baan That says that Mahabua focuses on formal practice. At this wat it is recommended that one does the small tasks needed to keep the monastery functioning quickly and quietly. After this is done one returns to formal practice. This formal practice consists of much walking meditation on one’s individual jongrom path, practicing sitting meditation, and being mindful when doing everything else. Because of this stress on formal meditation practice, Luangda Mahabua’s monastery does not have communal activities such as daily chanting....

Ajahn Chah, in contrast, wanted to develop community in his monasteries and found this was especially important for his Western disciples. Ajahn Pasanno (Co-Abbot of Abhayagiri Monastery), who I spoke with at Wat Pah Nanachat, has also stated that Ajahn Chah felt that face to face communication was very important. The Western sangha continues this through their World Abbots Meeting held every two years...

Ajahn Chah also stresses meditation and mindfulness in daily life, rather than formal practice, in contrast to Mahabua. My previous post about the ‘style’ of Ajahn Chah describes his chiding of those who think that meditation can only happen on a cushion or on the walking path. For Chah every aspect of monastic life was to be a part of one’s practice......


These emphases in each master’s teachings and the way each has established their monasteries affects the experiences of international meditators. Because of Mahabua’s focus on formal practice, a retreat for foreigners at Wat Pah Baan That consists of much solitary meditation in one’s kuti. There are no group activities to attend and no chores assigned except to clean inside and the surrounding areas of one’s kuti. Because Mahabua’s teaching style includes this battle against the kilesas and the defiled citta, the dhamma talks in English by Ajahn Martin contain these same ideas. Meditators are taught about these concepts and how they relate to one’s daily practice.

For Ajahn Chah’s monasteries, however, this tradition of communal activities and mindfulness in daily life, certainly continue at Wat Pah Nanachat. Foreign meditators participate in group chanting, before-meal ceremonies, meditation, question and answer sessions, as well as assist with assigned chores. These organized chores and other activities are part of the meditation practice, as Chah intended. As well, since Chah did not have a meditation ‘method’ but more of a ‘style,’ this is not a formal meditation retreat as one would receive at Wat Pa Baan That. There is no monk assigned to teach the foreigners and there isn’t a predominance of the goal to reach the pure citta that is so prevalent in Mahabua’s and Ajahn Martin’s teachings.

Thus the personalities, backgrounds, and styles of each forest meditation master affect how meditation instruction is presented to lay foreign meditators. The styles of Mahabua and Chah affect the setup of each monastery, the amount of instruction received, the hours available for formal practice and other activities, and one’s integration into daily life at the monastery.

The main point: the meditative styles of two teachers from closely related (or the same?) lineages appear to be radically different (are they?).

Desire influences visual perception

Desire influences visual perception

Mind hacks links this experiment showing that motivation affects our perceptual judgments (specifically, thirsty people see a water bottle as being physically closer to them than do satiated, non-thirsty people) to an earlier generation of experiments carried out by Bruner and Goodman and others in the late 1940s and 1950s called the "New Look."

The main point: motivation and affect can have an impact on basic perceptual judgments, probably also effecting changes in primary sensory cortices. Seeing, hearing and touching are completely intertwined with wanting and feeling. My question: can changing the processes underlying seeing, hearing, touching through practices like meditation and tai chi lead to upstream clinically relevant changes in our awareness of motivation and of emotion?

Duck Rabbit ... How Anticipatory Structures in Science Shape Scientists' Perception

Ian Hacking Holborg Prize Symposium. Professor Dagfinn Fossedall speaks about Hacking's ideas about social construction of science. Husserl, Frege, Wittgenstein. Duck Rabbit and the Gestalt of Science (in relation to Husserl). Our experience is shaped and contrained by pre-existing, anticipatory patterns.

This Image Is Not Moving § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

This Image Is Not Moving § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

An interesting description of perceptual illusions

Finding disease mutations in a sea of noise

Why massive DNA sequencing in search of cancer-related mutations is unlikely to improve cancer treatment in the real world anytime soon (from the Genetic Future blog)

Finding disease mutations in a sea of noise

Review of Jones et al. (2009). Exomic Sequencing Identifies PALB2 as a Pancreatic Cancer Susceptibility Gene. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1171202

"A paper published online today in Science illustrates both the potential and the challenges of using large-scale DNA sequencing to identify rare genetic variants underlying disease risk.....

First, the good news: as you might have guessed from the fact that the study is published in Science, the authors did in fact find the likely disease-susceptibility mutation. They were able to distinguish this mutation from the many other variants in the patient's exome (more on those in a second) by a particular quirk of cancer susceptibility variants: they are often found in only a single copy (along with a healthy version of the gene) in normal tissue from a patient, whereas in cancer cells from the same patient the normal copy is disrupted.

Now, the bad news: the researchers also found a whole stack of red herrings. In total, the authors looked at sequence from 20,661 genes, and identified 15,461 genetic variants not found in the reference human genome. Of these, 7,721 changed the sequence of the encoded protein, 64 resulted in abnormal stop codons, 108 were predicted to alter RNA splicing of the gene, and 250 were small deletions or insertions (115 of which would be predicted to dramatically alter the encoded protein through a frameshift). The stop codons, splicing mutations and frameshift insertion/deletions, and many of the protein sequence-altering variants, would all have to be regarded as plausible candidates for a disease-causing mutation.

Although it would probably be possible to exclude many of these variants using other sources of information (e.g. functional information about the genes, presence in healthy controls, patterns of evolutionary conservation), this is an enormous number of potential disease-causing variants to filter. The success of the authors in identifying PALB2 as the disease-causing gene relied heavily on the "one bad copy in normal tissue, two bad copies in cancer" rule, but most other severe diseases do not provide such convenient sign-posts.

The sheer scale of the noise variation in the human genome has only really become apparent in the last two years, following the publication of the Watson and Venter genomes. Both of these genomes contained a huge number of variants that could easily be interpreted as disease-causing, often with no clear way of distinguishing the villains from the innocent bystanders.

As such, researchers hunting for disease-causing mutations using genome-scale data will find their traditional problem is now turned on its head: instead of being unable to find plausible mutations, they will be faced with far too many possible candidates.

That problem will only get worse as we move from exome sequences - which at least comprise segments of protein-coding DNA for which we mostly understand the basic biological rules - to the vast, swampy, uncharted morass of non-coding DNA that makes up the other 98% of our genomes. It's clear from recent genome-wide association studies that the majority of disease risk variants are lurking in these regions, but we're currently almost entirely unable to filter out the functional disruptors from the millions of other polymorphisms littering non-coding DNA.

So the message from this paper is mixed. On the one hand, this is a genuine triumph for brute-force genomics, a case where generating staggering amounts of sequence data produced results with very clear clinical relevance. On the other hand, filtering out the true disease mutation from the background noise owed a hefty amount to the special properties of tumour suppressor genes, and more than a little luck; this approach will not be so easy in all cancer patients, and certainly not in patients suffering from other genetic diseases.

There's a dire warning here, as the age of clinical genomics approaches with blinding speed: if we want to be able to convert masses of sequence data into useful clinical information we need to get much better at assigning function to new sequence variants, and we need to learn how to do it fast. "

"I suffer from a motor neuron disorder, in my case a variant of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS): Lou Gehrig's disease. Motor neuron disorders are far from rare: Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, and a variety of lesser diseases all come under that heading. What is distinctive about ALS—the least common of this family of neuro-muscular illnesses—is firstly that there is no loss of sensation (a mixed blessing) and secondly that there is no pain. In contrast to almost every other serious or deadly disease, one is thus left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic progress of one's own deterioration."

Moving, troubling, matter-of-fact description by Tony Judt in the NYR of his experiences trapped inside a body with ALS.

"The question that the plants have asked me is this: Are you willing to give up ego, hierarchy, power, dignity, self-importance, moral superiority? Are you willing to give up control, to hand yourself over to the process? Are you willing to see the world as miraculous and filled with spirits?

I think the plants love us. I have no idea why. We certainly have done nothing -- at least recently -- to deserve it. I think that they want us to be human beings again."

From "Soul, Spirit and Right Relationship: A Conversation with Steve Beyer"

link