The Vipassana Retreat, poradniki, podręczniki i zakazane e-booki
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The Vipassana Retreat
Ven. Pannyavaro
e
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E-mail: bdea@buddhanet.net
Web site: www.buddhanet.net
Buddha Dharma Education Association Inc.
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Contents
About the Vipassana Retreat
........................................................................ 1
Basic Instructions for Vipassana Meditation
..................................... 4
The Retreat Interview
.................................................................................... 11
Day 1: Orientation to the Practice
........................................................ 13
Day 2: The Path of Purification
................................................................ 18
Day 3: Investigating the Reality of the Body
................................ 26
Day 4: Full Attention to Daily Activities
......................................... 32
Day 5: Paying Attention to Feelings
...................................................... 38
Day 6: How to Handle Thinking & Pain
............................................... 43
Day 7: Wise Attention at the Sense-Spheres
................................... 48
Day 8: Combining Loving-kindness with Vipassana
....................... 56
Day 9: Difficulties Facing Meditators & Their Solutions
....... 62
Day 10: Continuing the Practice at Home
........................................ 69
About the teacher:
............................................................................................ 73
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About the Vipassana Retreat
While it can be done to some extent in everyday life, realis-
tically for the practice to deepen it needs to be done intensively
in a supportive retreat situation. Vipassana meditation is devel-
opmental, so to realise its ultimate benefit it has to be sustained
with appropriate intensity under supportive conditions such as
the Seven Types of Suitability:
• Place or Dwelling— well-furnished and supported centre or
monastery, secluded and quiet, easily accessible, few insects,
basic requirements of food, clothes and medicine.
• Location— not too far or close to town.
• Food— a balanced diet, healthy, digestible and nourishing,
taken in moderate amounts.
• People— other meditators as companions, considerate with
good attitude and practice.
• Teacher (kalyana-mitta)— learned and respected teacher
who speaks and listens well.
• Noble Silence— other than informative Dhamma talks and
interviews with the teacher.
• Weather— not too hot or cold, i.e. a temperate climate.
Vipassana retreat centres specialising in the needs of vipassana
practitioners have evolved around the world to cater for these
requirements and conditions, usually to the exclusion of any
worldly, religious or study activities.
1
V
ipassana meditation
requires long-term commitment.
The intensive Vipassana retreat centre catering for lay people
is a quite recent trend in Buddhism. Originating in Myanmar
(Burma) after the Second World War when the Burmese Prime
Minister U Nu, a keen meditator, invited the late Venerable
Mahasi Sayadaw to teach in a meditation centre he set up in
Yangon (Rangoon), the Mahasi Sasana Yeiktha. This was the
beginning of the modern revival of Vipassana meditation, which
originated in Myanmar and soon spread to other Theravada
Buddhist countries in Asia and then later to retreat centres in
the West.
A worldwide insight meditation culture has now evolved
which caters for lay meditators who are not necessarily Bud-
dhists, often with lay teachers, supported by senior monastic
teachers in the lineage. This style of practice, while demanding,
has proved to be popular as vipassana techniques can be system-
atically taught, and now there exists a pool of knowledge and
experience with a variety of trained teachers from many differ-
ent countries.
An introductory retreat usually lasts two or three days, while
the intensive retreats can run for ten, sixteen, thirty days or even
up to three months. They are conducted in noble silence, which
includes no talking, no communication through body language,
no listening to music, no reading or writing except for brief
notes recording the meditation experience. There are however,
opportunities to discuss the practice with the teacher through
individual interviews or group discussions.
A typical retreat day begins between 4 and 6am and usu-
ally ends around 10 or 11pm, with a rest period in the middle
of the day after lunch. The whole day is spent practising sitting
and walking meditation, cultivating continuous attention to the
changing nature of the moment-to-moment experience. The
retreat teacher gives evening talks to inspire and explain the
2
practice, providing a time for questions and answers, as well as
conducting personal interviews usually every second day.
An intensive Vipassana meditation retreat is a serious under-
taking, which requires effort and self-discipline. A retreat is not
a chance to escape the pressures of daily life, nor a time out in
which to do one’s own thing. Rather it is an opportunity to cul-
tivate the Buddha’s way of liberation through the practice of
ethics (sila), meditation (samadhi), and insight (panna). Walk-
ing this path, we can learn to abandon actions of body, speech
and mind that bring suffering to ourselves and those around us,
and cultivate actions that bring happiness and harmony to our-
selves and those around us.
Above all, the Vipassana retreat requires that the medita-
tor leaves aside mundane preoccupations and commit him or
herself to the practice that can realise Ultimate Reality. The
late Mahasi Sayadaw gave this advice, “If you sincerely desire to
develop contemplation and attain insight in your present life, you
must give up worldly thoughts and actions during training”.
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