Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Insight meditation… was designed to follow the example and patterns of the life of the Buddha by attempting to recognize how reality is structured apart from the meditator’s desires about it, and it proceeds, like the Buddha, through questioning and testing ideas in relation to real experience. The sutras articulating insight meditation techniques instruct the practitioner to “produce the thought that…” or to “view things in this way….” Contemplative meditation directs the mind to contemplate the world in ways that would slowly alter its basic orientation. Meditative thinking was taken to be a rigorous practice, not one that is brought to fruition without deep concentration and enormous energy. One Mahayana sutra has the Buddha instruct his disciple, Subhuti, that the goal of enlightened wisdom is impossible to attain if one “is unpracticed, … dull-witted, … not eager to learn, or unwilling to ask questions.” The kind of radical transformation of human consciousness imagined in Buddhist enlightenment would require a highly sophisticated practice of contemplative thinking (vipassana) in conjunction with an equally developed exercise of calm nonthinking (samatha).’ (The Six Perfections)