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    StructureOfCessation King1977

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    This document summarizes the Theravada Buddhist meditative state of cessation. It explains that cessation involves using jhanic concentration meditation and vipassana insight meditation together. Through progressively deeper states of concentration, the meditator experiences feeling and perception being extinguished for up to seven days, realizing nibbana in this life. Both concentration and insight meditation aim for transcendent states, and together can produce the climactic experience of cessation, with insight maintaining the understanding of impermanence throughout.

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    StructureOfCessation King1977

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    wiemingang
    71 views1 page
    This document summarizes the Theravada Buddhist meditative state of cessation. It explains that cessation involves using jhanic concentration meditation and vipassana insight meditation together. Through progressively deeper states of concentration, the meditator experiences feeling and perception being extinguished for up to seven days, realizing nibbana in this life. Both concentration and insight meditation aim for transcendent states, and together can produce the climactic experience of cessation, with insight maintaining the understanding of impermanence throughout.

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    StructureOfCessation_King1977

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    This document summarizes the Theravada Buddhist meditative state of cessation. It explains that cessation involves using jhanic concentration meditation and vipassana insight meditation together. Through progressively deeper states of concentration, the meditator experiences feeling and perception being extinguished for up to seven days, realizing nibbana in this life. Both concentration and insight meditation aim for transcendent states, and together can produce the climactic experience of cessation, with insight maintaining the understanding of impermanence throughout.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    71 views1 page

    StructureOfCessation King1977

    Uploaded by

    wiemingang
    This document summarizes the Theravada Buddhist meditative state of cessation. It explains that cessation involves using jhanic concentration meditation and vipassana insight meditation together. Through progressively deeper states of concentration, the meditator experiences feeling and perception being extinguished for up to seven days, realizing nibbana in this life. Both concentration and insight meditation aim for transcendent states, and together can produce the climactic experience of cessation, with insight maintaining the understanding of impermanence throughout.

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    JAAR, XLV/2 Supplement (June, 1977), K7O7-7250

    The Structure and Dynamics


    of the Attainment of Cessation
    in Theravada Meditation
    Winston L. King

    ABSTRACT

    Downloaded from http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Iowa Libraries/Serials Acquisitions on June 23, 2015
    The attainment of cessation {nirodha-samapatti) is the highest meditational state
    possible in Theravada Buddhism. Those in this state are to all appearances dead, for it
    is the extinction of all feeling and perception, continuing for as long as seven days. It is
    seen as the actual realization of Nibbana in this life.
    The basic technique of this achievement is yogic. The meditator proceeds through
    four jhanic states, each one of deeper concentration than the previous one, and then on
    through four "formless meditations" by an increasing subtilization of the object of
    meditation and a correlate weakening of the sense of individuality. The eighth level has
    "neither perception nor non-perception" as its object and is "semi-conscious." All these
    states are transic in nature, i.e , locked into speechless, conceptionless, irresponsive
    concentration on one object. Cessation is the consummation of this process.
    Yet there is another absolutely necessary component: vipassana, or insight
    meditation. Only those who have pursued this route to its perfection, and are at the
    same time jhanic adepts, can attain to cessation. Now vipassana is the sine qua non of
    enlightenment; it is the fully existentialized comprehension that all existent entities,
    including the self, are impermanent, empty of true reality and instinct with suffering
    (and rebirth). It can form a separate, non-jhanic, Buddhist style of meditation in its
    own right. But it may also be used in conjunction with the jhanic mode to produce
    cessation.
    How then can and do these two disparate, seemingly antagonistic disciplines
    together produce the attainment of cessation? The methodology is as follows: Fully
    intending cessation the meditator enters the first jhana and then successively goes up
    the transic ladder to neither perception nor non-perception, whence he vaults on into
    cessation But after each emergence from jhanic trance, he "reviews" it in vipassanic
    terms, "This too is impermanent, empty, instinct with pain."
    What are the implications? (1) Obviously the two techniques are interacting at
    every stage but with vispassana dominating the consciousness. (2) Both seek states
    which are transcendent of ordinary subject-object consciousness: The jhanic "peaceful
    abidings" overcome all "materiality"; vipassana brings Path-awareness in which
    Nibbana itself is directly apprehended. (3) Both inevitably tend toward a climactic
    experience; the jhanic-yogic progresses toward a non-dual awareness; the vipassanic
    toward a "going-out" into the "Unconditioned." Hence a fully "unconscious" state of
    transic nature and achieved by yogic means ifseen as nibbanic realization constitutes a
    joint climax.
    To this the jhanic-yogic strand contributes techniques and gives depth, stability
    and transic quality, vipassana contributes the all-pervasive conviction (pre- and post-
    cessation) of cessation's identity with Nibbana.

    Winston L King is a professor emeritus of Vanderbilt University, teaching in 1977


    at Oberhn College. He will be studying in Japan 1977-79. He was a Ford Foundation
    project advisor in Burma for two years, Fulbright lecturer in Japan and has published
    several books and articles on Theravada and Japanese Buddhism.

    226

    •Please see pages 287-88 for full-text ordering instructions.

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