Samatha or Vipassana? The Suttas Say Both

Whether one should give priority to developing samatha (serenity) or vipassana (insight) is one of the evergreen disputes in Buddhist circles. It is an old argument, and it is still argued today, usually with a good deal of confidence on both sides.

Views on this run along a spectrum. What I want to discuss here are the two positions at the edges of that spectrum, both of them one-sided. The first says that striving for the jhanas is a waste of effort: it takes a long time, it is not clear one ever gets there, they are not necessary for awakening anyway, and the pursuit of them may even be dangerous, since one can become attached to the pleasure of samadhi. The second says that developing vipassana is not even necessarily a formal meditation practice — that what one does on the cushion is develop samadhi, and that the insight then arises on its own, or follows from reflecting on the experience afterwards, or is developed only through reflection in daily life rather than through formal practice.

Let us see what the suttas say. My understanding, to state it up front, is that systematically developing samatha and systematically developing vipassana are both essential on the path to Nibbana. That is why I call the two views above one-sided: each one sidelines a significant part of the practice.

What the Suttas Mean by Samatha and Vipassana

AN 4.94 is the key sutta for this whole topic. It mentions two sets of questions:

How, friend, should the mind be steadied? How should the mind be composed? How should the mind be unified? How should the mind be concentrated?

How, friend, should conditioned phenomena be seen? How should conditioned phenomena be explored? How should conditioned phenomena be discerned by insight?

The first set of questions refers to cultivating samatha. The second set refers to cultivating vipassana. One is about the mind becoming serene; the other is about gaining insight into how conditioned phenomena really are. Already from these questions, these are two different things, achieved by two different kinds of work.

The First One-Sided View: That Striving for the Jhanas Is Misplaced Effort

In MN 66 the Buddha speaks about the pleasure of the jhanas in the following way:

This is called the bliss of renunciation, the bliss of seclusion, the bliss of peace, the bliss of enlightenment. I say of this kind of pleasure that it should be pursued, that it should be developed, that it should be cultivated, that it should not be feared.

It is hard to put it more plainly than that. This is the Buddha's own verdict on whether the jhanas are dangerous territory. (It goes without saying that this concerns the jhanas as the Buddha taught them. Not every state that gets called a jhana today is one, and to those states his assurance plainly does not apply.)

The same sutta also says that the jhanas should be abandoned. But look at what that abandoning means in context. Each jhana is surmounted in order to enter the next one, all the way up to the cessation of perception and feeling (nirodha samapatti). The suttas never say the jhanas should be abandoned in the sense of being ignored and not practiced. When they say abandon, they mean go to the higher one.

Then there is the obvious structural point. The four jhanas are the definition of right concentration, the eighth factor of the Noble Eightfold Path. To suggest that striving for the jhanas is misplaced effort is to suggest that striving for the fulfillment of the Noble Eightfold Path is misplaced effort. Such a view simply has no support in the suttas.

More generally, there is no sutta in which the jhanas themselves are spoken of negatively. Not one. They are an inherent part of the path to Nibbana. Of course they are impermanent, ultimately unsatisfactory, and non-self, like everything else conditioned, and of course they are not to be clung to. But that is a different claim from "do not bother developing them."

Here the raft simile of MN 22 sometimes gets brought in, and overstretched. In the simile, a man on a journey comes to a wide stretch of water. The near shore is dangerous and the far shore is safe, but there is no boat and no bridge. So he collects grass, sticks, branches, and leaves, binds them into a raft, and works his way across with his hands and feet. Having arrived safely, he does not hoist the raft onto his head and carry it around with him — he leaves it and goes on his way. The Dhamma (which includes the jhanas), the Buddha says, is like that raft: it is for crossing over, not for holding on to.

A part of the point of the simile is that the raft is used to cross over — not that it is put aside while you are still on this side of the river, or still crossing it. In the name of letting go of everything, practitioners sometimes end up letting go of the key aspects of the Dhamma itself, and giving up on the jhanas is one example of that. Samatha and vipassana are both parts of the raft — one should make use of them to cross over to the safety of Nibbana.

The Second One-Sided View: That Developing Vipassana Is Not Sustained Formal Meditation

This view is probably naturally attractive to anyone whose samadhi is good, or who simply enjoys the samatha style of practice: you sit, you settle, you dwell in samadhi bliss, and the vipassana side of the path, which is not always so delightful, is shrunk to reflecting on the experience after the samadhi practice and to a way of looking at things in daily life, rather than something you actually cultivate on the cushion for extended periods. I flirted with this view myself for a while. My teacher steered me away from it, and I am grateful for that.

Here is why I let it go. This first argument is reasoning rather than a sutta citation — but I think it holds. Everyone in this discussion agrees that seeing conditioned phenomena as impermanent (anicca), suffering (dukkha), non-self (anatta), and dependently arisen is the right way of seeing — that this is what "seeing things as they really are" refers to. And once we have accepted that seeing phenomena in this way is the right way of looking at things, it follows that applying it systematically in formal meditation must be more effective in countering the distortions of perception, thought, and views (seeing permanence in the impermanent, happiness in suffering, and a self in non-self; see AN 4.49) than doing it without such focus and depth. Formal meditation is the same investigation of conditioned phenomena, only more sustained, undistracted, and carried out by a settled mind in the sitting meditation posture, potentially with good samadhi. Therefore, it must be a useful practice, and vipassana should be cultivated both in formal meditation and in less formal ways.

AN 4.94, quoted earlier, settles it. The sutta describes four kinds of persons, including one who has attained internal serenity of mind but not the higher wisdom of insight into phenomena, and another who has the insight but not the serenity. Each of them is told to find someone who has the quality they are missing and to ask that person how to develop it, so that in the end they possess both. Three things follow at once, and each of them is a problem for the second one-sided view. First, serenity and insight can come apart — otherwise the sutta could not describe a person who has one and lacks the other. So one single mode of practice does not necessarily produce both. Second, insight is acquired as its own item — the person who has serenity but lacks insight is not told to deepen that serenity until insight follows, but to go and obtain insight by targeting it directly. Third, insight is acquired through instruction, from someone who has it. And what one person teaches another, who then goes away and does it, is a mode of practice one can be trained in, rather than a byproduct of something else.

The rest of the Sutta Pitaka fills this in. AN 4.170 describes four ways in which the path to Nibbana is completed: one develops insight preceded by serenity, or serenity preceded by insight, or the two yoked together, or else by a fourth route in which a restless mind eventually settles into concentration. The order varies, but in the first three samatha and vipassana are named as two things that have to be developed. AN 10.56 lists ten perceptions to be developed and cultivated — including the perception of impermanence, of suffering, and of non-self — clearly a systematic, deliberate development of insight into the three characteristics. The fourth tetrad of the sixteen ways of practicing anapanasati, as they are given in MN 118 — contemplating impermanence, fading away, cessation, and relinquishment — amounts to formal vipassana meditation, given as instruction, within a sitting practice (the same sutta has the practitioner go off to a secluded place and sit down before any of the sixteen begin).

And beyond any particular passage, the seeing of things as impermanent, suffering, and non-self runs through the whole Sutta Pitaka — taught, demonstrated, prescribed. It comes up again and again, about the aggregates, the sense bases, and everything else conditioned. That all pertains to developing insight — seeing things as they really are. Whether you do it rather informally off the cushion or cultivate it systematically in a formal sitting is only a difference in the focus and depth you bring to it. Both modes are legitimate ways to develop wisdom; neglecting the formal one is a missed opportunity to go deeper and do it more effectively.

Two Modes of Practice, Two Results

So both trainings are necessary. They simply have different functions and lead to different results. AN 2.31 puts it most clearly: developed samatha has a developed mind as its result (the mind here refers to samadhi — the jhanas, for example, are called "the higher mind"), and developed vipassana has developed wisdom as its result. That is the division of labor.

AN 10.1 shows how the two results relate to each other. Samadhi has knowledge and vision of things as they really are as its purpose and benefit. Samadhi (at the level of jhana, or higher), which is the result of samatha training (AN 2.31), is the condition in which liberating insight (the wisdom faculty) can arise — the vision of things as they really are that leads on to disenchantment, dispassion, and liberation. But samadhi is a necessary condition for the liberating insight, not a sufficient one (otherwise Alara Kalama and Rama would have awakened before the Buddha), and AN 4.94 already showed us what a person with serenity and without insight should do.

This is also why, when the suttas speak of full liberation (arahantship), a person is liberated by wisdom, not by samadhi. Wisdom is what eventually liberates. But the samadhi of the jhanas is what makes that liberating wisdom possible in the first place.

Finally, SN 43.2 asks what the path to the unconditioned — that is, to Nibbana — actually is. The answer is samatha and vipassana. Not just one or the other, but both.

One Goal, Two Instruments

MN 29 makes the point that the holy life has only one goal, and that goal is Nibbana. Everything else in the training is instrumental to it. (This is worth mentioning, because "the path is the goal" has become a popular idea in some circles. It is not the sutta position. For the Buddha, the path is the path and the goal is the goal.) Samatha and vipassana are both instruments of the same single aim, both necessary, and each doing something the other cannot do: samatha practice brings the mind to stillness and depth that investigation alone will never produce, and vipassana practice brings the seeing that no amount of concentration will produce by itself.

On the samatha side, the necessity is clear. Without samatha and jhana there is no right concentration, and without right concentration the Noble Eightfold Path is not fulfilled — and an unfulfilled path can hardly be enough for Nibbana. The suttas say this from the other direction as well. AN 3.86 grades the noble persons by how far they have taken the three trainings of virtue, concentration, and wisdom: the stream-enterer and the once-returner have fulfilled virtue completely but concentration and wisdom only in part, the non-returner has fulfilled virtue and concentration completely and wisdom in part, and the arahant has fulfilled all three.

Notice that this cuts both ways. The lower two attainments do not require concentration fulfilled (jhana). But the higher two attainments do. When you hear me say that jhana is necessary, I mean for the higher attainments, not for the lower ones. However, not necessary is not the same as not helpful. Everything said above about what samadhi does still applies: it is the condition in which things are seen clearly; it is the fertile ground for wisdom. So the conclusion is a double one. While it is possible to reach the first two attainments without the jhanas, it is also much more likely with them.

What This Means in Practice

None of this means that time in meditation should necessarily be split fifty-fifty between developing samatha and vipassana. In fact, the suttas lean toward samatha: the formal meditation practice they depict most prominently and most frequently is the jhanas. Most practitioners will have a favorite among the two modes of practice and will spend more time there, which is natural and fine. The point this essay tries to make is that systematically cultivating both is the approach most in line with the suttas, and the most effective way to Nibbana.

Practically, the samatha part means heading toward the jhanas in meditation, and the vipassana part means seeing things as they really are — impermanent, unsatisfactory, and non-self — both in sitting meditation and outside of it. And if you have one of the two but not the other, AN 4.94's advice is to go and learn the one you are missing.

Sources:

Anguttara Nikaya (AN): The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha, Bhikkhu Bodhi, Wisdom Publications, 2012

Majjhima Nikaya (MN): The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, Bhikkhu Bodhi, Wisdom Publications, 2009

Samyutta Nikaya (SN): The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, Bhikkhu Bodhi, Wisdom Publications, 2000

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