A Comparison of Theravada and Zen Buddhist Meditational Methods and Goals

Author(s): Winston L. King

Source: History of Religions, Vol. 9, No. 4 (May, 1970), pp. 304-315
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Winston L. King

A COMPARISON
OF
AND
THERAVADA
ZEN BUDDHIST
MEDITATIONAL
METHODS
AND
GOALS

A proposed comparison of Theravada and Zen meditation immediately suggests striking contrast, even radical dissimilarity.
And how could it be otherwise, with some 2,000 years of TheravadaMahayana divergencies here encapsulated and with special
Southeast Asian and Sino-Japanese essences added?
Taking Rinzai as our Zen model, we note the following contrasts
even at first glance: Zen calls for sudden enlightenment (satori),
truth received in its instantaneous wholeness, whereas Theravada
elaborates a complex array of stages on the way to, and factors of,
enlightenment. Satori seems possible to all men now because every
man has within him the true Buddha nature crying out for full
realization. So also there are numerous individuals now living who
are certified both outwardly (by a roshi) and inwardly (by their
own awareness) as having achieved Zen satori. But in Theravada
countries arahatship is a most precious and very rare jewel
nowadays.l By way of further contrast, Zen speaks "positively"
1 In Theravada the tradition is strong that one does not speak of his own
spiritual attainments. To claim spiritual states greater than one has was sufficient
cause for expulsion from the Sangha. See I. B. Horner, Book of the Discipline
Sacred Books of the Buddhists, vol. 10 (London: Luzac & Co., 1949), 1:159. See
also E. J. Thomas, The History of Buddhist Thought (New York: Barnes & Noble,
1967), pp. 16, 17.
304

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History of Religions
of achieving a unitary consciousness in satori. That is, no longer
do "I" "hear" the "bell" in subject-object dichotomy, but there
remains only "bell-sounding event." But Theravada speaks in the
main "negatively" of a final consummatory realization of the
three signata (change, impersonality, and suffering) within oneself. Last, the Zen roshi's shouting-beating coercion of his disciple,
either into satori or out of meditation training altogether, seems to
be almost totally absent from Theravada.
But we should not therefore conclude that these easy, obvious
contrasts tell the whole truth, for both Zen and Theravada adhere
to the Buddhist (i.e., enlightenment) tradition and both are directly
oriented toward the first-personal, existential realization of enlightenment through meditation. It will therefore be the purpose
of this paper to examine some salient features of the contrasts and
likenesses here present and to evaluate them properly. My basic
assumption is that the two types of meditation are fundamentally
similar in function and experience, although certain features of
technique, mode of expression, and emotional flavor vary with
their respective cultural contexts.
I
First to be disposed of is the supposed "meditation for monks
only" and the Mahayana "Buddhahood for all" contrast. Whatever
it may have been in the past, it is at present much less substantial
than this wording would suggest. Large-scale meditation practice
and its fruitage are now being extended to laymen in Theravada
countries; thus, implicitly, arahatship is again fully open to
laymen.2 Conversely, in Zen-ostensibly the religion of "Buddhahood for all"-the physical locus of most meditational practice is
the monastery. It is conducted by monks, mostly for monks; and
in actuality only a few of them attain to satori.3
Second, that there is a difference in training styles between the
Zen roshi and the Theravada guru cannot be denied. The first
appears to be direct, rough, even brutal, and the second, to be
2 See Winston L. King, In the Hope
of Nibbana (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court
Publishing Co., 1964), pp. 22 ff. I say "implicitly" because those rumored to be
arahats are always monks and "again" because some laymen are reported to have
become arahats in the Pali tradition, but for centuries only the monk's way of life
was thought of as capable of embodying the search for arahatship in Theravada
countries.
3 See D. T. Suzuki, The
Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk (New Hyde Park,
N.Y.: University Books, 1959), pp. 114-15 et passim. So also Shibayama Roshi,
abbot of Nanzenji Monastery in Kyoto, expressively noted, by holding thumb and
first finger about half an inch apart, that only a few achieve genuine satori.
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Comparison of Theravadaand Zen Buddhist Meditation

indirect and gently persuasive. But this difference, I believe, has
to do more with cultural mode than with functional reality. For in
both traditions the pupil shows to the meditation master the
highest possible forms of respect known to his society, and as long
as he remains under a master's tutelage, whether in Kyoto or
Rangoon, the hard discipline goes on and the master's word is
absolute law. One can only say that the Indian-Southeast Asian
forms of respect and control are more intimately personal and
unstructured, "softer" in their feeling and tone, than the SinoJapanese variety, which-in its contemporary meditation-hall
form, at least-is more organizedly impersonal and which is quite
consonant with the strongly authoritarian context of Japanese
family life and the superior-inferior modes of showing respect.
Indeed, the semimilitaristic subordination of the individual to the
monastery routine and to its master is the quintessence of this
aspect of Japanese social life. And it is in this context, I believe,
that the markedly explosive quality of some satori experiences is
to be understood. For, when the meditating pupil realizes his own
satori beyond any doubt, his newfound sense of individuality and
of being his own man and his own independent spiritual authority
is overwhelming. It results in giving back to the master and his
system, so to speak, as good as one has been getting.4 But when
these dramatic contrasts of style have been duly noted, it should
be added that the functions of roshi and guru are identical: to
bring the meditator-pupil to the fullness of the master's experience
as soon as possible. Each, in his own cultural way, is deeply
solicitous of the pupil's advance and welfare; even the Zen roshi
heartily and gladly welcomes a pupil's satori.5
More important is the contrast between the Zen "positive"
unity-of-self-and-nature quality of satoric awareness and the
Theravada "negative" emphasis upon no-self and impermanence
as the essence of the highest realization. Indeed, with regard to
traditional Pali-Canon Theravada, one may well speak of the
meditator's deliberate self-alienation from the sense life in all its
4 Dr. Akihisa Kondo, a Tokyo psychoanalyst who worked and studied with
Karen Homey and considered himself a disciple of D. T. Suzuki, said in conversation that most Japanese, reared in the compacted, few-roomed family
atmosphere, have a group-unit awareness rather than a highly individualized selfawareness. This latter, when developed through psychoanalysis, sometimes becomes outrageous and arrogant and needs, in turn, to be brought down to size and
mutuality of feeling. Surely there is a partial parallel to Zen satori awareness.
5 See Winston L. King, A Thousand Lives Away (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1964), pp. 202 ff.; Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series
(New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 254; Philip Kapleau, The Three Pillars of Zen
(Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1965), chap. 5.
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History of Religions
forms. One's body (we are told) is a wound open to samsaric infections, and the sense life is a source of great spiritual danger.
That a pleasant awareness of natural surroundings did sometimes
creep into the meditative consciousness is evidenced in the Therngatha and Theragatha;6 and contemporary Southeast Asians live
fully as much or more in the consciousness of nature than the
Japanese. Yet, for orthodox Theravada, one must say that nature
as such is related to primarily through extra-Buddhist channels
and is not viewed as a direct or desired product of meditational
experience.7 Coomaraswamy's comment about the Pali-Canon
forest-dwelling meditator is generally appropriate to Theravada:
"The love of lonely places is most often for their very loneliness.
. . . More truly in accord with the monastic will to entire aloofness
is the coldness of the monk Citta Gutta, of whom the Visshudhi
Magga relates that he dwelt for sixty years in a painted cave,
before which there grew a beautiful rose chestnut; yet not only had
he never observed the paintings on the roof of the cave, but he
only knew when the tree flowered every year, through seeing the
fallen pollen and petals on the ground."8 To this one must add the
emphasis upon detachment from self-in-the-midst-of-life which
breathes all through the Pali Canon and is continued in modern
meditational manuals. According to the Digha Nikaya, the main
purpose of meditation is to strengthen one's mindfulness (i.e.,
detached, alert awareness) of whatever he does: "And moreover,
bhikkhus, a brother, when he is walking, is aware of it thus:-'I
walk'; or when he is standing, or sitting, or lying down, he is aware
of it. However he is disposing of the body, he is aware thereof....
In going, standing, sitting, sleeping, watching, talking, or keeping
And he abides independent,
silence, he knows what he is doing....
after
in
the
world
whatever."9
A contemporary
grasping
nothing
meditation manual sets forth still more vividly this motif of the
desired "inner distance from things, men and from ourselves":
"In the course of practice, one will come to view the postures of
6 Psalms
of the Brethren, trans. Mrs. C. A. F. Rhys Davids, Psalms of the Early
Buddhists, vol. 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), sts. 113, 115, 887, 1062;
Psalms of the Sisters, trans. Mrs. C. A. F. Rhys Davids, Psalms of the Early
Buddhists, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), sts. 24, 366 ff.
7 It is significant that the Burmese Buddhist's "religious" and efficacious contact with nature is through the extracurricular nat or nature spirit. See King, A
Thousand Lives Away, pp. 50 ff., 60-61, 65-66.
8 A. Coomaraswamy, Buddha and the
Gospel of Buddhism (New Hyde Park,
N.Y.: University Books, 1964), pp. 169, 170.
9 "MahF Satipatthana Suttanta,"
Dialogues of the Buddha, trans. T. W. Rhys
Davids and C. A. F. Rhys Davids, Sacred Books of the Buddhists, vol. 3 (London:
Luzac & Co., 1966), pt. 2, p. 329.
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Comparison of Theravadaand Zen Buddhist Meditation

his own body just as one unconcernedly views the automatic
movements of a life-sized puppet. The play of the puppet's limbs
will evoke a feeling of complete estrangement, and even a slight
amusement like that of an onlooker at a marionette show. By
looking at the postures with such a detached objectivity, the
habitual identification with the body will begin to dissolve."10 This
may be sharply contrasted with the positive-unitive theme in Zen
by quoting a single passage from Zen: "When the mountains are
seen as not standing against me, when they are dissolved into the
oneness of things, they are not mountains, they cease to exist as
objects of Nature. But [on the other hand] when they are seen as
standing against me, as separate from me ... they are not mountains either. The mountains are really mountains when they are
assimilated into my being and I am absorbed in them."11
How then shall we understand this difference between the
Theravada "estrangement" from nature and the Zen mountain-inme and I-in-mountain awareness? Zen has obviously been deeply
influenced by Chinese Taoist and Japanese Shinto naturistic
mystical aestheticism, whereas Theravada embodies a modified
further
Hindu ascetic-monastic conceptual tradition-though
and
tolerance
modified in practice by Southeast Asian
gradualism.
Yet be it noted that both, as Buddhist, consider ordinary selfhood
and its modes of awareness to be empty of reality (anattd, or
sunyatd); and both specifically aim at the total destruction of our
illusion of separate individuality. In its Sino-Japanese context
Zen positively and "cosmotheistically"12 emphasizes a unifying
absolutist awareness and thus dissolves separative individualism,
while Theravada, working within its traditional terminology of
sense-world rejection, speaks in the main negatively of the destruction of belief in the reality of things, selves, and all conceptual
entities as its experiential goal. But by this very destruction of
such beliefs Theravada also seeks to destroy the separativeness
that is inherent in ordinary self-consciousness and to dwell
"benevolent in mind, compassionate for the welfare of all creatures
and beings." 13
10 Nyanaponika (Thera), The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (London: Rider
& Co., 1962), pp. 43, 64.
11 D. T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, ed. William Barrett (New York: Doubleday,
Inc., 1956), p. 240.
12 Heinrich Dumoulin, Ostliche Meditation und christliche Mystik (Freiburg:
Alber Verlag, 1966), p. 64.
13 Middle Length Sayings, trans. I. B. Horer (London: Luzac & Co., 1959),
3:181.
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History of Religions
Thus, in the end, "negative" Theravada also seeks to join the
individual in nonindividualistic and compassionate "unity" with
all other beings. For us, then, it remains only to judge which of
these modes of realizing unity might be existentially the more
efficacious for the majority of mankind.
II
But three genuinely major comparative problems remain.
A.

SUDDEN

VERSUS

GRADUAL

ENLIGHTENMENT

Let it be said at once that Zen "suddenness" cannot be set simply

and diametrically over against Theravada "gradualness." Zen
itself was early involved in its own internal disputes over sudden
and gradual enlightenment, as the Platform Sutra of the Sixth
Patriarch bears witness.14 And in one sense contemporary Soto
and Rinzai Zen may be considered to be "gradualist" and "sudden," respectively, since the former encourages meditational
sitting without any expectation of suddenly enlightening experiences, while the latter takes them for granted. There is a further
complication in the necessity of the roshi's external authentication
of the meditator's experience of satori, whereas the arahats in Pdli
scripture accounts knew absolutely for themselves when they had
arrived.
But quite dogmatically we may say: When enlightenment comes,
either in Zen or Theravada, it is always sudden.15 In support of
this it may be observed that Gotama took a vow not to leave the
bodhi tree until he achieved enlightenment, and that in the third
watch of a specific night he saw reality "as it truly is." If not
lightning-instantaneous, his enlightenment can thus be pinpointed
within a very few hours at most. So too do the similar vows and
specific experiences related in the Therigatha and Theragathal6
suggest experiential suddenness. And there is in the Theravada
tradition the story of an acrobat who received his enlightenment while juggling.17 Indeed, definiteness of attainment is very
14 This Sutra
portrays Hui-Neng, the unlettered apostle of sudden enlightenment, as the correct and successful opponent of Shen-hsiu, the representative of
the gradualists, in the seventh century A.D.
15 This point was made repeatedly by Walpola Rahula at the Buddhism Seminar, Carleton College, August, 1968.
16 Psalms of the Sisters [Therigatha], sts. 27, 30, 37-47, 67-71, 72-76, 77 ff.,
120-21, 433, et passim; Psalms of the Brethren [Theragatha], sts. 104,222-24,311314, 408-10, 436, 510-517.
17
According to Rahula. Cf. this statement by Nyanaponika (Thera) in The
Power of Mindfulness, Wheel Publication no. 121/122 (Kandy: Buddhist Publi309

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Comparison of Theravadaand Zen Buddhist Meditation

explicitly present within the classic Theravada tradition; and
definiteness inherently implies at least some degree of suddenness.
With regard to Zen satori, we may note that it appears more
sudden only by virtue of emphasis upon the final moment itself,
for in Zen, too, are present both preparation for and consequent
development of satori. As noted, the roshi may refuse to acknowledge lesser experiences as genuine satori and slightingly refer to
them as kensho. He relentlessly pushes the meditator on to a
deeper experience. Indeed, the philosophy of some is that the
harder the master and the longer withheld his certification of
satori, the greater and deeper is that satori.18 Now, is not this
"gradualism" by whatever name? Further, there are those who are
sparing of the use of the term "satori" itself, or speak of having
had several satoris; or, with the late Mrs. Sasaki, they suggest that
while the first satori is a unique turning point, it needs to be
"extended" or "deepened" or "further developed": "The practice
of Zen is just like making a fine sword .... For this reason the
more satoris you have attained the more you must experience, the
clearer your understanding becomes the more you must study."19
To repeat: "suddenness" or "gradualness" of enlightenment then
appears to depend primarily upon emphasis and/or point of
specification. One may choose to emphasize the prior preparation
(or subsequent development) and call it "gradual"; or one may
stress the experiential breakthrough and call it "sudden." But
in both Theravada and Zen there are development and pinpointed
breakthrough.
Why then the differing stress? After the early Buddhist days of
indicated by the "thouexperiential spontaneity-scripturally
sands" reported to have become arahats-monastic scholasticism
took over. Indulging in the Indian penchant for classification and
analysis, this scholasticism detailed all of the steps and factors
leading to enlightenment, confined meditational possibility largely
to the monastery, and this both slowed down and rarified successful
cation Society, 1968), p. 47: "Many instances are recorded of monks where the
flash of intuitive penetration did not strike them when they were engaged in the
meditative practice of insight proper, but on quite different occasions: when
stumbling, when seeing a forest fire, a fata-morgana, a lump of froth in a river, etc."
18 This was Ruth Fuller Sasaki's
opinion.
19 Issha Miura and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Zen Dust (Kyoto: First Zen Institute of
America in Japan, 1966), pp. 58-59. Mrs. Sasaki liked to use the analogy of one's
having got to a mountaintop suddenly (by the first satori) but needing further (by
continued koan study and meditation) to look upon the way by which he had
arrived, somewhat mysteriously, in order to understand it better.
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History of Religions
meditation.20 However, with Nagarjuna, even Indian Buddhism
had already arrived at the conviction that Nirvana (the goal or
meditation) is implicit in present reality (sahmsra) and is not to be
found at the far end of a long journey. This, coupled with the
Sino-Japanese impatience with metaphysical speculation and a
fundamental reliance upon intuitional apprehension of existential
truth, resulted in an attempt to bypass all methodological elaboration and gradualness and get to the experiential heart of the
matter at once.21 And, interestingly enough, some observers see in
contemporary South Asian meditation a similar impatience with
the classical, tradition-encrusted, category-ridden, and monasteryimprisoned Theravada meditational process. Writes Nyanaponika
(Thera) about the new Burman method of body-self mindfulness:
"At that time [early twentieth century] a Burman monk, U
Narada by name, bent on actual realization of the teachings he had
learnt, was eagerly searching for a system offering direct access to
the Highest Goal without encumberment by accessories .... The
results he achieved in his own practice convinced him that he had
found what he was searching for; a clear-cut and effective method
of training the mind for highest realization." 22 The urgency of
rapid attainment, and presumably sudden breakthrough, is the
more striking in the high-intensity rough-breathing (or sunlun)
method of meditation and suggests that contemporary Theravada
may be approximating Zen in its emphases upon a more vigorous
method and possibly faster results.
B.

THERAVADA

EQUIVALENTS

OF ZEN KOAN

USE

On the face of it Rinzai Zen is unique in its use of the koan-but

only on the face of it. For, going directly to the heart of the
matter in good Zen fashion: What is the function of the koan?
This nonconceptual, nonintellectualizable item is made the sole
content of the meditator's intellectual-emotional diet for weeks,
with only his own sweat and agony and the roshi's comments, noncomments, and blows to season it. His total existence is centered
around "solving" the koan, whether in actual zazen or in working,
walking, eating, or sleeping. It becomes his "thing"; he becomes a
mass of existential concern wrapped around the koan, so that it is
like a red-hot ball of iron that he has swallowed and now is unable
20 But most meditation masters
today would agree with the comment of a contemporary Burmese that some meditators pass through all these steps in a short
time.
21 See Suzuki, Zen
Buddhism, pp. 48-58.
22 The Heart
of Buddhist Meditation, pp. 85, 86.

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Comparison of Theravada and Zen Buddhist Meditation

to regurgitate, evacuate, or digest. Around this center gather the
totality of one's basic anxieties, not so much in the nature of
intellectual questionings and doubts as in the experienced Angst of
a human being on the brink of the abysslike threat of nonsignificance and nonbeing. Oneself becomes the koan question to be
answered, as Thomas Merton puts it;23 and "solution" must be an
existential breakthrough into a new mode of awareness and life
orientation-following the death anguish of the old conventional
selfhood.
What serves this function in Theravada meditation? The attentive mindfulness focused on breath, body processes, thoughts, and
emotions. This may begin with breath mindfulness, directed
toward breath motion at nostril or in the abdomen. This breath
movement or breath sensation must occupy the totality of consciousness (just like the Zen koan), or it cannot be effective.
Beginning here with his own "external" body, the meditator seeks
to perfect the power of one-pointedness of mind (or attention),
which subsequently can be focused anywhere at will.24 When his
one-pointedness of mind becomes sufficiently developed, he then
shifts to that deeper sort of meditation known as vipassand. Here
the aim is to go beyond mere one-pointed mindfulness to a fully
existential realization of anicca-anatta-dukkha (impermanenceemptiness-suffering) in one's own body-mind totality, a totality
which includes especially the inner man of thought and emotion.
The sunlun intensification of this method prescribes a forced pace
of regular intervals of heavy and sustained breathing throughout
longish periods (even up to twenty-four hours), and thereby hopes
to produce such a vivid sense of existence as inherent suffering,
now intensified within one's own body, that the meditator actually
experiences death feelings or personality-dissolution feelings. He
literally feels himself to be standing on the edge of an abyss of
nonbeing. Here is a firsthand report from a Burmese meditator:
One day while I was practicing at home, I felt my body was dashing away
at a terrific speed toward something, but I did not know what. Like a runaway car crashing against a rocky hill, I thought I would be smashed to
pieces. A great fear seized me and I jerked myself away from that sensation.
Once I was free from the clutches of the terrible sensation I realized that I
had missed a great experience. I should have faced that terrible sensation
without fear, with mindfulness as my only stay....
Why had I turned back? The reason was quite simple. I did not want to
be free from what is Suffering; for the end of suffering means the end of life.
23 "The Zen Koan," Lugano Review 1 (1966):126.
24 King, A Thousand Lives Away, appendix.

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History of Religions
Life and suffering cannot be separated....
I realized that my clinging
desire for life had made me turn back from the bound of freedom.25

What have we here? Without any unduly strained interpretation, this experience appears to be functionally and emotionally
equivalent to the Great Death threat to ordinary selfhood in Zen.
Here in the body-mind mindfulness practice, one is his own koan
in which are encountered in existential depth and first-personal
reality all of the tensions of life-death existence, of being and nonbeing, of inner and outer identity, and of existence as both determined and free.
C. THERAVADA

EQUIVALENTS

OF SATORI

I come last to the most dubious part of my enterprise: the attempt

to equate one type of inner experience with another. Perhaps
making such comparisons is intrinsically fruitless; for, as Walpola
Rahula has rightly suggested26 the language in which satori and
enlightenment are respectively reported is usually culturally and
traditionally stereotyped and tells us little or nothing about the
true inner quality of the experience itself. For example, what does
it mean experientially to say with the Theravadin:
I win, I win the Triple Lore!
The Buddha's will is done.27

Or with the Zen-satoried individual to say that now mountains

are mountains, trees are trees, and rivers are rivers again? One
may wish to say flatly that all such experiences are ineffable in
essence; hence, to deal with their reported content is but to
analyze the respective cultural and traditional contexts.
There is, besides this, the contemporary Theravada reluctance
to speak at all of one's own attainments, especially in any comparative manner. One may suspect a degenerate-age psychology
which seeks to cover up its own embarrassment at its paucity of
arahatship with appropriate scriptural warnings against pride.
But, in any case, to his meditation master one must report inner
happenings; and the master definitely has some sense of where the
meditator is along the way.28 Further, the classic Theravada
25 Khin Myo Chit, "Buddhist
Pilgrim's Progress," Guardian Magazine (Rangoon) (February 1963), p. 17.
26 Buddhism Seminar, Carleton
August 1968.
27 Psalms of the Sisters, st. 30, College,
p. 28.
28 Upon reading the result of E.
H. Shattock's meditation reported in his An
Experiment in Mindfulness (London: Rider, 1958), U Ba Khin of the Rangoon
International Meditation Center forcefully indicated that it was a very meager
attainment in his view.
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Comparison of Theravada and Zen Buddhist Meditation

tradition clearly categorizes the various stages of attainment on
the long road to Nirvana as sotdpanna (stream-enterer), sakddegamin (once-returner), andgdmin (nonreturner), and arahat (enlightenment-attainer). So too are the various accompanying
meditational states carefully analyzed and graded.29 Thus, our
comparison may seem to be one of asteroids with asterisks. But,
since Theravada categorized-and-final enlightenment and Zen
noncategorized-but-supreme satori both profess to be true
Buddhist enlightenment, they invite comparison nonetheless.
Let me therefore venture a highly tentative comparative
evaluation: First satori can be equated with the stream-enterer
(sotapanna) experience in the Theravada tradition. This equivalence
I shall try to support, not so much by an analysis of what is said in
stereotyped format about the attainments, but by analysis of
function and place of the experiences within the respective
meditational progressions.
For Zen the first satori is unique. It is an initial breakthrough in
which the conventional mode of subject-object awareness is permanently transcended. As with a picture puzzle once solved, so
life awareness, once satoried, can never be the same again-even
though one may later deepen the initial experience. So also the
sotdpanna or stream-enterer stage is the Theravada breakthrough.
For, once one enters the stream of salvation, he exists in a new
dimension; he is an ariya; he cannot lapse into less than human
(i.e., less than Nirvana-possible) states of existence and has at
most only seven rebirths before his final Nirvana. He now lives in
an enduring awareness of the great liberating truth of things as
they truly are and of his own anattahood. And the three higher
stages of attainment, including arahatship, are actually but the
refinement and perfection of sotapannahood. A few quotations
from the late great Ledi Sayadaw will make my point here:
When a person attains Sotapattimagga (the Path of Stream-winning),
micchdditthi (Wrong Understanding) and vicikicha (Sceptical Doubt) that
accompany him come to an end. All of his accumulated old unwholesome
kammas and those unwholesome actions that have been performed by him
. . . become ineffective.
From the moment they [sotdpannas] attain the Path of Stream-winning
. . they have thus attained sa-upddi-sesa-nibbdna (the Full Extinction of
Defilements with the Groups of Existence still remaining) . . . the inherent
qualities of the Holy Ones [ariyas] ever exist in them and they become
stronger and stronger in succeeding existences. The Sa-upddi-sesa-nibbana

29 King, A Thousand Lives Away, pp. 106 ff., 222-23.

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History of Religions
attained by Sotipannas is never destroyed and so it is eternal. The state of
the Unoriginated, Uncreated is ... enjoyed by Sotapdnnas.30

Structurally and functionally, therefore, satori and sotapannahood are both definitive breakthroughs into the realm of enlightenment. Both are unique for the experiencer, and both are permanent. But Theravada, with its view of Nirvana as the great goal of
the chronological end of samsara, conceives its final attainment as
now only a very few lives away; and Zen, with its Mahayanist
"Samsara is Nirvana" background, conceives the final attainment in
terms of successive this-life, here-now deepenings of satori. But these
differences are cultural dressing rather than experiential essence.
Finally we may ask: Is there any evidence of satorilike experience at the sotdpanna level which comes through, stereotyped
formulas notwithstanding? Though it must be taken for granted
that one knows when he has attained this level (at least with the
help of a meditation master), Theravada scriptures and tradition
have little to say directly about the experiential quality of the
attainment of sotapannahood. Perhaps the reasons for this near
silence are the obsessive Theravada magnification of the final perfection of arahatship at the expense of all lesser stages, the scholastic elaboration of those stages, and the de facto confinement of
direct Nirvana seeking to monastic life. Yet once, according to
Theravada scriptures, arahatship was very common or almost the
rule for monks. Could it have been rather sotapannahood that was
meant? But, regardless, when meditation masters today speak of
"the attainment of Nirvanic peace"as the goal of meditation and
hold it out as possible even for laymen, I suggest that their intent
(spoken or not) is thereby to indicate sotapannahood. And perhaps
the report of the final, victorious passing of our Burmese meditator
through the jaws of the deathlike experience can be considered an
account of the attainment of sotapannahood.
One night I lay ... practicing mindfulness of the bodily sensations....
My whole body began to vibrate as if an electric shock was running through
me....
The vibrations became more and more violent....
Soon it seemed
that mindfulness and sensations had met in a death struggle in which fear
caused by the thought, "What shall become of me?" had no place. When
two things, namely the sensation and mindfulness existed, there was no place
for I. The illusion of I was broken....
I did not know how long this went
on. The next thing I knew I was sitting cross-legs, my whole body wide open
like the boundless sky, with nothing to hang on, nothing to cling to....
There was nothing but peace in my heart.31
30

Mahathera Ledi Sayadaw,

The Manuals of Buddhism (Rangoon: Union

Buddha Sasana Council, 1965), pp. 157-59. It is to be observed that the Ledi
Sayadaw here uses sa-upddi-sesa-nibbana(Nirvana in this life) of all four of the
ariya stages and not only (as is more usual) with regard to arahats only.
31 Khin Myo Chit, p. 19.

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