ABSTRACT
The Buddha’s adaptation of the old yogic techniques and ideology can be seen in the dialogues with the Brahmins Upasīva, Udaya and Posāla. These dialogues tell us that not only did the Buddha consider that the state of ‘nothingness’ was not liberating but also that it was no longer to be thought of as a state of ‘enstasy’. Instead, the Buddha taught that it was a meditative state to be retained in the practice of mindful awareness, day and night, for lengthy periods of time. Liberation is achieved through this state of meditation, and results from understanding something about the meditative experience, namely, that it owes its origin to joy or pleasure (nandī). What the Buddha means by this is obscure: exactly what liberating insight was considered to be and how it came about are not made clear in the dialogue with Posāla (Sn 1115). At least we can say that liberation, according
to the Buddha, was not simply a meditative experience but an insight into meditative experience. The Buddha taught that meditation must be accompanied by a careful attention to the basis of one’s experience-the sensations caused by internal and external objects-and eventually an insight into the nature of this meditative experience. The idea that liberation requires a cognitive act of insight went against the grain of Brahminic meditation, where it was thought that the yogin must be without any mental activity at all, ‘like a log of wood’.1 The idea of liberation in life is just as strange for the Brahminic yogin, for whom liberation was thought to be the realization at death of the nondual meditative state anticipated in life. Indeed, old Brahminic metaphors for the liberation at death of the yogic adept (‘becoming cool’ and ‘going out’) were reinvested with a new meaning by the Buddha; their point of reference became the sage who is liberated in life.
