Beyond Here & Now

In Quest of Awakened Consciousness

by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu

There’s an ironic tendency that has recurred throughout Buddhist history: Every now and then, meditation schools advocate the idea that the goal of Buddhist practice is to be fully aware of consciousness in the present moment. These schools base their proof on a fact of their meditation experience: They’ve encountered a pure level of non-judging, present-moment consciousness in the course of their practice, and they don’t see anything better or more real than that.

What’s ironic here is that this belief flies in the face of what the Buddha said clearly, again and again: Consciousness in the present moment is conditioned—fabricated (saṅkhata) in his terminology (SN 22:79)—whereas the goal of the practice is not (Iti 90). The knower in the present moment, he says, is dependently co-arisen (MN 38). In other words, it arises and ceases as its causes arise and cease. And as with all dependently co-arisen phenomena, it’s dependent on inconstant causes and conditions: the six external sense media (sights, sounds, aromas, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas) and the six internal sense media (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, intellect). To survive, it has to feed not only on contact at the senses, but also on intentions and acts of consciousness itself, which are inconstant as well (SN 12:63). Anything dependent on inconstant causes and conditions has to be inconstant, too (SN 35:93). Which is why the Buddha says that all consciousness—near or far, past, present, or future—comes under the consciousness aggregate and, as a result, should be seen as inconstant, stressful, and not-self (SN 22:59). So it can’t be the goal.

But here it’s important to note what the Buddha means by the word, “all.” From his perspective, it covers things only known through the six senses (SN 35:23). No “all” can properly be described beyond the range of those senses. However, there is a dimension beyond the six senses that can be—and should be—directly experienced (SN 35:117). That dimension corresponds to another type of consciousness that’s not known through the “all” (MN 49). In other words—unlike pure consciousness in the present moment—it’s not dependent on the six senses. Because this other consciousness lies outside the net cast by the phrase, “all consciousness,” it falls outside the consciousness aggregate. The Buddha calls it “consciousness without surface” (viññāṇaṁ anidassanaṁ), in the sense that it doesn’t “land” anywhere. This is apparently why “without surface” is also one of the epithets for nibbāna (SN 43), with this consciousness an attribute of the goal.

The goal, however, has other attributes as well. Some discourses state that it has none of the characteristics of time or space: no coming, going, or staying in place; no here, no there, no between-the-two. So it’s permanent. There’s no this world or any other world; no sun, moon, or stars, although no darkness appears (Ud 8:1; Ud 1:10). So consciousness without surface differs from the types of consciousness that fall under the consciousness aggregate in yet another way: It’s neither near nor far; neither past nor future. And because it’s outside of time, it’s not related to the present moment, either. It’s not associated with anything pertaining to this world or any other.

Some meditation schools equate their pure present-moment consciousness with consciousness without surface, but because consciousness without surface isn’t in the present and has no awareness of the world, the two can’t really be the same.

Still, there’s the question: If pure present-moment consciousness isn’t the goal, what does the Canon say about what that consciousness is?

One possible answer appears in AN 10:29, which mentions a consciousness-totality (viññāṇa-kasiṇam’eka)—“above, below, all-around, non-dual, immeasurable”—but it doesn’t say how this consciousness fits in the map of meditation practice. It simply notes that aberration and change appear in those who perceive it, so it’s not the goal.

A passage that does give a map of how pure consciousness can be experienced in meditation appears in MN 140. This discourse describes your meditative progress as you contemplate the various physical properties, or elements, one by one as they’re present within you: earth, water, fire, wind, and space. In each case, you contemplate the manifestations of the property within your body, seeing that they’re no different from the manifestations of the physical properties of the world outside. As you come to the conclusion, “This isn’t mine, this isn’t me, this is not my self,” you becomes disenchanted with each property and allow it to fade from the mind.

All that remains then is pure (parisuddhaṁ) consciousness. However, your meditation doesn’t stop there. With that consciousness, you step back from feelings of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain, seeing how they’re part of a causal process: arising when contact occurs, and falling away when the contact ceases. Watching these processes in this way gives rise to a sense of detachment from feelings, leaving just an even-minded sense of pure equanimity.

But even here there’s more to do. You realize that you could direct this equanimity to any of the topics of formless meditation: the infinitude of space, the infinitude of consciousness, nothingness, or neither perception nor non-perception. If you did that, your pure equanimity would last for a long, long time. But then you further realize that if you were to develop any of those themes, the resulting mind state would be fabricated and so eventually would have to fall apart. Dispassionate toward this prospect, you don’t fabricate for the sake of anything at all, whether for becoming or for non-becoming. With no fabrication, there’s no clinging. You’re totally unbound.

What this discourse shows is that there is a stage of pure consciousness that can come in the course of meditation, and that it can know things caused by sensory contact, viewing them with a sense of detached equanimity. Yet, because it’s fabricated, it’s still not the goal. Which means that when the Buddha calls it “pure,” he doesn’t mean that it’s totally pure of defilement, simply that it’s pure of the hindrances. To arrive at the undefiled consciousness of the goal, you’d have to see that pure consciousness—along with any state toward which it might be directed—is fabricated, and so develop dispassion toward it.

This would require a great deal of sensitivity to the act of fabrication, which explains why the Buddha’s discussions of right view place so much emphasis on action—how things happen, as opposed to what they are—inasmuch as fabrication is a subtle type of action. The training that starts with right view is aimed at getting you sensitive to the role that fabrication plays in shaping your experience.

Instead of focusing on the idea of a pure consciousness that exists on its own in the present moment, this training focuses on your present-moment actions in thought, word, and deed, in light of cause and effect: the actions that give rise to suffering and those that lead to its end. Instead of encouraging an attitude of non-judgment, the training encourages you to discern, from observation, how to judge which actions are skillful and which are not. Based on these observations, you try to avoid any actions that might be harmful. As this training progresses, you become more and more sensitive to levels of harm you’ve been causing that you wouldn’t have noticed before. Your sensitivity to cause and effect as it plays out in your actions becomes more refined.

In fact, the whole path to the end of suffering is an exercise in developing your powers of judgment and your sensitivity to the way your actions are shaping your experience. To begin with, the practice of right speech, right action, and right livelihood makes you more sensitive to the qualities of your intentions and the need to make your actions as harmless as possible—again, refining your sense of what counts as harm. Any motives for breaking the precepts that might present themselves as noble or compassionate, you begin to realize, aren’t really noble or compassionate at all.

You then apply this increased sensitivity to the practice of mindfulness and concentration. Here again, the Buddha frames these practices in terms of action and fabrication. The word “alert”—sampajāno—in the standard mindfulness formula directs your attention not only to the present moment, but more specifically to what you’re doing in the present moment (MN 10; SN 47:35). The instructions for mindfulness of breathing are framed in terms of bodily fabrication—the in-and-out breath—and mental fabrication: perceptions and feelings (MN 118). The instructions in right concentration show how levels of fabrication peel away as your concentration grows more solid: Verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation—peels away as you enter the second jhāna, bodily fabrication peels away as you enter the fourth, and mental fabrication peels away as you enter the cessation of perception and feeling (SN 36:11).

Starting with the fact of fabrications, discernment moves on to judge their value. It looks for their origination in the mind, tracks down their allure—why you’re addicted to them—and then compares the allure with their drawbacks until you can see that the drawbacks far outweigh the allure. That gives rise to a sense of dispassion, which allow you to escape from them (SN 22:5; SN 22:26). You even see that the perceptions used in arriving at this act of dispassion—the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not self—have to be regarded as actions so that you can judge their allure against their drawbacks when they’ve done their work, allowing you to escape from them, too, when you no longer need to hold on to them. That way, your release can be total and all-around (SN 48:4; AN 9:36).

All of these instructions are aimed at getting you to look for subtle layers of your own actions that you’d otherwise miss. To actually practice in line with these instructions, keeping their perspective in mind, makes you more and more observant of the actions you’ve been doing all along without your being aware of them.

This is how you’re trained to make the most of the Buddha’s teaching that you’re actually fabricating consciousness in the present moment: You use your heightened powers of discernment to look for how that’s true, and once you see that it is, you develop dispassion for it and so can be freed.

One of the results of this liberation is that you see how the path the Buddha formulated was more than right. It was just right, with nothing lacking and nothing in excess (DN 29). All aspects of the training in virtue, concentration, and discernment are needed to develop the sensitivity, the powers of judgment, and the dispassion needed to abandon all fabrications.

This point explains why the schools of meditation that aim only at a judgment-free present-moment awareness tend to view many parts of the path as unnecessary. Their goal doesn’t require the sensitivity demanded by the Buddha’s. To dwell with present-moment awareness requires little more than a blanket equanimity toward everything, good or bad, so there’s no need for exercising your judgment. In fact, judgment is one of the few things judged to be beyond the pale.

From this point of view, the Buddha’s teachings can be dismissed as “just words.” The precepts are seen, at best, as just a lovely container for the practice, allowing people to practice together in peace. Often the perceived danger with regard to the precepts is not that you’ll break them, but that you’ll grow attached to them. The practice of concentration seems like a deviation from the direct path of focusing on consciousness just as it is. In other words, the noble eightfold path, in the eyes of these schools, has too many folds.

Of course, the same observations apply to meditation schools that define unbinding as a state of total unconsciousness. The meditative state of non-perception requires concentration, but without much finesse. It’s possible to blank out simply by forcing the mind to drop everything that appears. This blanking out can happen even without your believing that you have any choice in the matter. This is a path that requires only one or two folds at most.

The fact that unbinding is a state of consciousness that’s unfabricated, unlike the fabricated pure consciousness of the present moment, explains why the path to the end of suffering has the factors it does, and why you need all of them. They train you to see exactly how you’re fabricating your present-moment experience, and how you can do it with less and less harm. Only then can you develop the dispassion toward all fabrications that’s needed to realize what happens when all possible fabrications—past, present, or future—are peeled away, step by step.

That’s how you can know the ultimate happiness of suffering’s end.