Chanting can lead to buddhahood?
Then CDs DVDs MP3 players and other media playing
devices are buddhas already
Sorry for my madness
Depends on how one practice. Usually chanting practiced by the
majority is only a form of concentration exercise or samatha
practice. Chanting is a practice found in all religious traditions,
not only Buddhism, which shows that it is effective otherwise why
so many people practice it, even outside Buddhism? But still this
kind of practice can at most lead to samadhi/absorption but not
enlightenment. In Buddhism, we say that samatha/concentration
practices alone do not lead to enlightenment.
There are many levels of 念佛. If people recite by lips but not by
heart, and one's mind wander everywhere while chanting, then is
also pretty useless, 念破嘴皮不见弥陀. Even if one recites single mindedly,
there are also many levels. The highest level of 念佛 is described as
itself the contemplation on the nature of reality:
《佛藏经》：“舍利弗。云何名为念佛。见无所有名为念佛舍利弗。诸佛无量不可思议不可称量。以是义故。见无所有名为念佛。实名无分别。诸
佛无分别。以是故言。念无分别即是念佛。复次见诸法实相名为见佛。何等名为诸法实相。所谓诸法毕竟空无所有。以是毕竟空无所有法念佛。复次如是法中。乃至
小念尚不可得。是名念佛。舍利弗。是念佛法断语言道过出诸念。不可得念是名念佛。舍利弗。一切诸念皆寂灭相。随顺是法。此则名为修习念佛。不可以色念佛。
何以故。念色取相贪味为识。无形无色无缘无性。是名念佛。是故当知。无有分别无取无舍。是真念佛。”
Anyway what is vital, regardless of meditation technique, is
'Awareness'. 'Awareness' is key without which there can be no
insight.
As my Master, Ven Shen Kai said:
问：
请示师傅，要怎样修治散乱的心？
答：
要修散乱的心，就要修不散乱。现在你们把眼睛闭上，手合掌，师傅现在就教你们修。这个时候你心里面什么都不想，散乱心就没有了。（数分钟）
好，现在眼睛睁开，师傅教你们的就是修禅定。你把这个杂乱妄想的心收回来，置心一处，无事不办，把这个心定在不动的地方，不动就是定，定了以后，智慧也就会生出来了。
但是修禅定最要紧的是要有觉，有很多人学佛修行，念佛参禅一辈子，他没有智慧，原因就是没有觉。所以我们把这个心定在一处以后，我们还要有一种觉观，觉
照。觉就是你这个心不动，有一微尘飞过你都知道，那么这个定就差不多了。
谈到觉，假使你不但觉了自己的心，他方世界开了一朵花，都好像在你的手里边一样，看得清清楚楚，那么你就成佛了。
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Venerable Gunaratana:
http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe1-4.html
(Excerpts)
Within the Judeo-Christian tradition we find two overlapping
practices called prayer and contemplation. Prayer is a direct
address to some spiritual entity. Contemplation in a prolonged
period of conscious thought about some specific topic, usually a
religious ideal or scriptural passage. From the standpoint of
mental culture, both of these activities are exercises in
concentration. The normal deluge of conscious thought is
restricted, and the mind is brought to one conscious area of
operation. The results are those you find in any concentrative
practice: deep calm, a physiological slowing of the metabolism and
a sense of peace and well-being.
Out of the Hindu tradition comes Yogic meditation, which is also
purely concentrative. The traditional basic exercises consist of
focusing the mind on a single object a stone, a candle flame, a
syllable or whatever, and not allowing it to wander. Having
acquired the basic skill, the Yogi proceeds to expand his practice
by taking on more complex objects of meditation chants, colorful
religious images, energy channels in the body and so forth. Still,
no matter how complex the object of meditation, the meditation
itself remains purely an exercise in concentration.
Within the Buddhist tradition, concentration is also highly valued.
But a new element is added and more highly stressed. That element
is awareness. All Buddhist meditation aims at the development of
awareness, using concentration as a tool. The
Buddhist tradition is very wide, however, and there are several
diverse routes to this goal. Zen meditation uses two separate
tacks. The first is the direct plunge into awareness by sheer force
of will. You sit down and you just sit, meaning that you toss out
of your mind everything except pure awareness of sitting. This
sounds very simple. It is not. A brief trial will demonstrate just
how difficult it really is. The second Zen approach used in the
Rinzai school is that of tricking the mind out of conscious thought
and into pure awareness. This is done by giving the student an
unsolvable riddle which he must solve anyway, and by placing him in
a horrendous training situation. Since he cannot flee from the pain
of the situation, he must flee into a pure experience of the
moment. There is nowhere else to go. Zen is tough. It is effective
for many people, but it is really tough.
Another stratagem, Tantric Buddhism, is nearly the reverse.
Conscious thought, at least the way we usually do it, is the
manifestation of ego, the you that you usually think that you are.
Conscious thought is tightly connected with self-concept. The
self-concept or ego is nothing more than a set of reactions and
mental images which are artificially pasted to the flowing process
of pure awareness. Tantra seeks to obtain pure awareness by
destroying this ego image. This is accomplished by a process of
visualization. The student is given a particular religious image to
meditate upon, for example, one of the deities from the Tantric
pantheon. He does this in so thorough a fashion that he becomes
that entity. He takes off his own identity and puts on another.
This takes a while, as you might imagine, but it works. During the
process, he is able to watch the way that the ego is constructed
and put in place. He comes to recognize the arbitrary nature of all
egos, including his own, and he escapes from bondage to the ego. He
is left in a state where he may have an ego if he so chooses,
either his own or whichever other he might wish, or he can do
without one. Result: pure awareness. Tantra is not exactly a game
of patty cake either.
Vipassana is the oldest of Buddhist meditation practices. The
method comes directly from the Sitipatthana Sutta, a discourse
attributed to Buddha himself. Vipassana is a direct and gradual
cultivation of mindfulness or awareness. It proceeds piece by piece
over a period of years. The student's attention is carefully
directed to an intense examination of certain aspects of his own
existence. The meditator is trained to notice more and more of his
own flowing life experience. Vipassana is a gentle technique. But
it also is very , very thorough. It is an ancient and codified
system of sensitivity training, a set of exercises dedicated to
becoming more and more receptive to your own life experience. It is
attentive listening, total seeing and careful testing. We learn to
smell acutely, to touch fully and really pay attention to what we
feel. We learn to listen to our own thoughts without being caught
up in them.
The object of Vipassana practice is to learn to pay attention. We
think we are doing this already, but that is an illusion. It comes
from the fact that we are paying so little attention to the ongoing
surge of our own life experiences that we might just as well be
asleep. We are simply not paying enough attention to notice that we
are not paying attention. It is another Catch-22.
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Transcript
of the Lankavatara Sutra Sharing by Thusness
Thusness: Ok. I think when we
view consciousness, we have to understand that there are a few
things. We cannot keep on thinking about the objective world first.
We must see how consciousness reacts. That is if we react very
intensely, strongly towards symbols, then whatever reactions will
go back deep into your consciousness. This is one thing. My
perspective is that when you chant, you are not dealing with our
luminous clarity. We're dealing with propensities deep in your
consciousness. Insight meditation itself deals directly with this
clarity. That is the luminous clarity. But if we were to continue
to chant, you are actually focusing more on the deeper layers of
consciousness that deals with propensities and the power of
concentration. Do you see what I mean? It's not so much of the
luminosity. However, the chanting itself, when it takes strength,
it creates a kind of momentum. A momentum that synchronises not
only with your sub-conscious or the deeper layers of your
consciousness, but also your conscious level. This means it can
sync the two layers into one. This syncing the two into one clears
your mind, clears your thoughts. And then at this time, you ask who
you are, that is, not letting the momentum take place, but just
feel and sense... then you ask what is it. At that moment, you
might see your reality. But your mind must be able to settle down
first. But you must know there is a difference between working at
the concentration level, dealing with the karmic propensities and
creating new momentums, and practicing insight meditation that
touch directly the clarity and the luminous nature, are two
different things. You see what I mean or not?
Participant 1: Yeah I think so.
This means that I still need to do insight meditation?
Thusness: Yes you have to do insight
meditation. Even if you attain calmness you still have to do
insight meditation. You must feel the awareness... You must sense
it everywhere... That is very important for
liberation. Now when we talk about awareness, we
don't call it Self or we don't call it Mind. Why people call it
Awareness is because they do not want to call it Self, because
there is no Self. The reason they said Awareness, is because
Awareness is not an entity. It is not a thing. It is just a point
of luminous clarity. It is just clarity. But because we are so
accustomed to thinking things in terms of object and subject, we
always take Awareness as something. It must be somewhere inside,
residing somewhere. Even if it is not residing inside the body it
must be somewhere, someplace. This is the problem, you see. So when
you say that lets be aware. We always think of how? How to be
aware? When we say where is awareness, they always look for a
place, they always look for a something. This is how the mind
react, this is what I call a momentum. They always behave this way.
They do not know how to say Just do nothing. Everything is
expressing itself by clarity. They always want to react, you see
what I mean?