Written for the AQA syllabus by Upeksacitta (Robert Ellis), member of the Western Buddhist Order and a former Head of RS.
Right Concentration
Right concentration consists in one-pointedness or focus of mind on a particular object. It is clearly needed for right effort - you can’t make an effort at something without concentrating on it – and also for all the other limbs of the Eightfold Path. This is suggested by the Pali Canon (Majjhima Nikaya 117):
And what, monks, is noble right concentration with its supports and requisite conditions? Any singleness of mind equipped with these seven factors - right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, and right mindfulness - is called noble right concentration with its supports and requisite conditions.
Concentration is a necessary condition for any practice of ethics, because you need to remain constantly aware of the moral change you have decided upon in order to put it into effect and avoid being swept away by other feelings in different circumstances. It’s also required for any kind of wisdom, because you can only break through illusions and come to terms with reality by concentrating on the alternative view you have discovered and recalling it at times when your old habitual view comes back.
Concentration and mindfulness
Concentration relates closely to the final limb, mindfulness. Both are different forms of awareness, but of the two concentration is more deliberate and narrow, mindfulness broader, more spontaneous and more open and receptive. A good example to illustrate the difference would be an exam: in an exam you are likely to be very concentrated, because you are forced to be (or at least strongly influenced) by the conditions and the thought of the bad consequences of failing if you don’t concentrate. But you are not likely to be very mindful: you won’t be very aware of the different sensations of your body, or different feelings, or of other people. Indeed, you are likely to be so concentrated that you exclude awareness of things going on around you. During an exam invigilators or other candidates can have minor crises and many candidates completely fail to notice.
But the ideal in Buddhist practice is to combine concentration and mindfulness and balance the two. There may be times when you need to exclude other things to focus on one thing, but generally you need to be open to the whole breadth of things that you may need to become aware of, not simply focussed single-mindedly on one thing. Thus there are many people in the world who have developed remarkable powers of concentration (think of surgeons performing complex and delicate operations, or concert pianists remembering a whole concerto), but these are not necessarily following right concentration as a limb of the Eightfold Path, for this must link with the other limbs.
Practices to develop concentration
There are some meditation practices which focus primarily on concentration. The kasina practice used in the Theravada, for example, is almost entirely just a concentration exercise. In this practice the meditator looks at a coloured disc and then recreates clearly in the mind’s eye. Some other forms of samatha meditation combine the cultivation of concentration with that of mindfulness, positive emotion and other skilful qualities of mind. An example of such a broader practice would be the mindfulness of breathing: here the meditator concentrates on the breath, but not in the kind of narrow way one would concentrate in an exam: instead the meditator will often move between a narrow focus of awareness (on the breath) and a broad one (on the whole state of the body and mind).
Concentration and integration
At a higher level 'Right Concentration' (which translates the Pali samma-samadhi) means much more than concentration in the everyday sense. Everyday concentration can only be sustained for a relatively short time, because it involves the suppression of other interests, feelings and desires which will break out again after a while. Longer term and fuller concentration can only be gained by integrating these other interests, desires and feelings. This means that unhelpful desires need to be tamed and brought into harmony with the others in the long term, so that our feelings about things become consistent over longer periods of time.
A higher level of concentration, then, means, not just ability to concentrate fully at one time, but greater consistency over time. This kind of consistency, again, is greatly assisted by mindfulness, and the higher the level of concentration, the more interdependent it becomes with mindfulness.
Task:
Work out your own examples of the following aspects of right concentration:
- Concentration without mindfulness
- A higher level of concentration (Samadhi)
- A practice to cultivate higher levels of concentration
- A difference in emphasis between different types of Buddhism in cultivating concentration