The Relationship Between Contemplative Practice (Vipaśyanā-caryā) and the Elimination of Afflictions

No matter what dharma you are engaged in contemplative practice (vipaśyanā-caryā) upon, if you wish to realize it, you must connect your contemplative practice into an unbroken continuum. How can the practice be connected into an unbroken continuum? It means extending the skill cultivated in the stillness of sitting meditation into bodily activity, extending it throughout all twelve periods of the day and night, with every thought and every moment uninterrupted. Pay attention and observe: after you rise from the seat, can you still practice contemplation with awareness? While walking, standing, sitting, and lying down, can you always practice contemplation with awareness? When you are about to fall asleep, can you still practice contemplation with awareness? And even after falling asleep, can you continue practicing contemplation with awareness in your dreams? While doing all kinds of things, can you always practice contemplation with awareness? If you observe that your contemplative practice is intermittent, with your mental attention frequently flowing into worldly dharmas, then you must constantly remind yourself to turn your attention back to contemplation; whenever it breaks off, resume it, and try your best to make the practice continuous.

If, while walking, standing, sitting, and lying down, all of your mental attention is on contemplative practice and on your own material body, or if most of your mental attention, the main portion of it, is on contemplative practice and on your own material body, then such meditative concentration is quite good. If at all times you can maintain awareness and right mindfulness, the practice is connected into an unbroken continuum, and with such meditative concentration you have fulfilled preparatory concentration/threshold concentration (anāgamya-samādhi), which is sufficient for the elimination of self-view (ahaṃkāra-mamakāra-parityāga). When the practice of contemplation and awareness has become an unbroken continuum, with every thought and every moment resting on your own material body, you will no longer commit transgressions in mind, and will no longer create evil karma in mind. At that point the mind becomes purified and afflictions grow faint. This is why meditative concentration can effectively subdue and eliminate afflictions.

Before seeing the path, one must have fulfilled preparatory concentration. When preparatory concentration is fulfilled, the coarse five-grade afflictions of the desire realm are eliminated, and at that point one can become a candidate for the first fruit, no longer far from stream-enterer (Srotaāpanna; Pali Sotāpanna). If preparatory concentration is not yet fulfilled, or if there is no preparatory concentration at all, then do not even think about eliminating self-view and realizing the first fruit. The claim that one can realize the fruits without meditative concentration is mere conceptual proliferation (prapañca); it cannot become reality.