Post #165: 10,000 (Crossing the Line)

21 Dec. 2024

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. So does a journey to the fridge and back.”

—Adapted from the Tao Te Ching, ch. 64

     False modesty is no more truthful or virtuous than bragging or self-righteousness, and what holds in ordinary life should apply to the spiritual realm just the same. If completing a marathon is cause for legitimate self-congratulation, or competing honorably in an Ironman competition, or losing ten kilos for that matter, then why should there be anything wrong with patting oneself on the back upon arrival at 10,000 hours on the mat, when it takes so much more time and effort, and when it is, by most accounts, an even more salubrious and beneficial activity to engage in—beneficial, it is said, not just to the meditator but to everyone who crosses paths with him or her?

     Purists scoff at such counting on the mat, of course. Perhaps this is a good time to reiterate, then, that I am no purist on the Path, but a pragmatist, though I have gone through the usual gung-ho phases along the way, probably like everyone who has persisted this far (#2). If tracking your hours helps you to do them every day, or as nearly as you can manage, then why would it be any less appropriate than keeping track of your spending, your calories, your hours at the gym, or anything else that requires self-discipline? Why should such tools be regarded as anything other than expressions of the right kind of intention, if the goal be considered reasonable, or even commendable?

     At the same time, it’s certainly no occasion for bluster, this crossing of the line. Far from thinking that now you have truly arrived, it makes you realize just how long and demanding the Path really is. The Buddhists describe the mass of our mental knots and impurities by comparing it to a mountain range that can only be worn down by wiping at it with a handkerchief, one swipe at a time. Considering how daunting the task really is, perhaps we should be amazed to see that progress can be made at all, rather than allowing ourselves to get discouraged when mastery, let alone full liberation, turns out to be not so much a goal to arrive at in this life as a vision of mountain peaks glittering like diamonds in the sun at the horizon…

     The vaunted 10,000 hours that have been getting bandied about in various contexts in recent years should not be taken too literally. The Greeks had a word for this number: they called it a myriad, and to them it was not necessarily an exact mathematical figure, but more often a general expression for a very great number—roughly the biggest host they could imagine fielding or facing amongst themselves. (Thus the march of the “Ten Thousand” that Xenophon brought out of Persia; the Persians themselves, especially those of the near-mythical old days under Xerxes, were another matter). The Pali 500, likewise too often taken literally, falls into a similar conceptual category (see my conclusion to #12).

     It so happens that I started keeping tabs not from the very outset of my meditative journey (because initially I too fell under the spell of thinking that it would be somehow unserious and unworthy to do so). I came to realize fairly early on, however, that keeping track of my sittings in a diary-like ledger helped me to maintain my daily practice against the quotidian pressures besetting it on all sides. These records are not precise enough for me to pinpoint the exact moment when I crossed the line, but they still leave me with a pretty good idea. As with a birthday, marking the occasion does not mean that I am so very different today from what I was like yesterday (I am in fact only a day older, not a year, as we pretend). Still, as all those cycles around the sun add up, so do the accumulated changes, and the milestones along the way, if they are not fetishized unduly, can be useful markers for how far we have come in life, without any pretense that such changes are always and in every respect for the better.

     The Path is not meant to be a racecourse, and what is true of amateur marathons applies all the more here: the important thing is participating and getting to the end, if possible, not speed or style, even if there are degrees of accomplishment in all things, among meditators no less than among runners. I don’t much care to be considered ahead of anyone in this domain; it has nothing to do with why I practice. It’s no distinction, just an interesting observation to me, that in my case it took exactly 19 years to cover the distance, counting from the day I started my first Vipassana retreat until yesterday. Monks who devote themselves to the task more or less full-time can do the same, and more, in perhaps a handful years—one of the justifications for monastic life. At perfectly steady regulation speed, two hours a day without fail and one ten-day retreat a year, it would take a dozen years.

     I was never particularly monkish about my practice, nor so very steady, only quite persistent in my stumbling along.* And from that vantage point, the perspective of the straggler, I cannot help noticing, in a spirit of amused satisfaction, that at one hour every day, without fail (no small commitment for a householder liable to all kinds of distractions), it would take much longer than I did, namely almost thirty years! Be that as it may, fast or slow, steady or not, stumbling or striding, the main thing is to keeping going. Any line we draw is just for encouragement: like the rainbow at whose end we are supposed to find a treasure, we need to give ourselves direction and encouragement in a long and demanding journey. The promised prize, such as it is, will not be found collected at one determinate spot, in a golden chest; it is dispersed along the way, like tiny gems glistening in the grass beside the Path, to be picked up and marveled at in the course of traveling towards the magic-promising arch. Then we put them back, smile, and walk on.

     Consider the equator: likewise imagined, not inscribed anywhere upon the waves or land, this thinnest of belts around our globe is nonetheless far from arbitrary—and quite a momentous concern for sailors who are, by tradition, “baptized” into their calling when they “cross the Line” for the first time. Granted, the ceremony today may be a mere shadow of what it once was (when the baptismal “medicine” was washed down not with “lots of ice water,” as the guidelines by the Norwegian Maritime Authority specify today, but with more fiery waters altogether**). Nor would it have been an optional rite of passage in the old days, which one could choose to sit out without being compelled to participate, as the Norwegians insist it must now be. Still, however watered down the current protocol, the Norsemen must be allowed to know a thing or two about seafaring, and I imagine that they can still put on a memorable show on ships with novice seamen making their crossing for the first time.

     In a light-hearted post suggested by my arrival within five hundred hours of the red line, in late September last year (#66), I proposed, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, a logarithmic scale for thinking about one’s hours on the mat, and I likened getting to the fabled 10,000 hours to earning a black belt in a martial art. “Earning” is altogether the wrong word to use with respect to meditation, obviously, and before anyone hears what I never said—that I have declared myself a meditation master—let me repeat how I understand a first-notch black belt: it does not make one an expert at all, but a beginner again among masters, which is a very different thing. That there are such accomplished practitioners, in meditation as around any other human activity, is beyond doubt; that I am not one of them, equally so.

     Why then tell us about your silly hour-counting at all, you may say? What do we care about your blasted 10,000 hours? Good point. There is no reason why you should care; better if you don’t, so long as you think of it in terms of getting ahead. If it can be described as an accomplishment of any kind, then only because it takes so much persistence to get there; and if my example is good for anything, then only because it shows what can be done, over time, even by a straggler. If I can do it, then you can too, as I’ve said before. Just take note of the fact that an everyman on the mat can pull through—not to any crucial destination, but to an encouraging milestone. If I am glad to pass that marker, it is precisely because it never would have occurred to me that I ever could get so far. If a fortune-teller had told me, on my thirtieth birthday say, that I would one day clock ten thousand hours on the mat, I would have laughed it off as plainly absurd.

     Now that the joke has become a reality, let me finish by reporting that when I “crossed the Line” nothing the least bit spectacular occurred. I was not smeared with noxious substances, dunked into frigid salt water to the point of near-drowning, forced to guzzle down pitchers of booze, or otherwise assaulted by spirits, malevolent or benign, either mentally or physically. Nobody appeared before my mind’s eye to question me on my journey, to praise or scold me, or to ask what had taken me so long (or perhaps why I was in such a rush given the time-scales in question). Nobody thought fit to give me a certificate or a medal, of any metal whatsoever, and no revelation of any kind came to me. Time was not kept, so far as I know, by anyone except me; the route I had taken was not questioned, nor the distance covered either corroborated or called into doubt. Least of all was there any talk of it having been, at any time, a contest or a race. I simply arrived at the red line, crossed it, and continued on the Path that lay ahead, as indefinite in length as before, as if nothing special had happened. It was and continues to be a nice feeling to have come this far, that is all; pride would be misplaced, but some quiet satisfaction and gratitude are surely in order.

*Aiming to be consistent in your practice, that is to say, setting yourself a definite daily goal and putting yourself on a meditation schedule that you then stick to resolutely, is certainly very helpful; it is habit-forming and should help you to stay the distance. On the other hand, it may come with a temptation to belittle more realistic goals, thus to overreach, thereby weakening and undermining the more natural daily practice that you might otherwise have established.

     Doing twenty minutes every morning, right after getting up, or at night, just before going to bed, or even both, is a beautiful way to get established in the practice. It takes some determination, certainly, but the degree of exertion required is manageable enough for anyone who is serious about meditating daily. Alas, the treacherous thought may arise that a twenty-minute practice, while comfortable enough to be sustainable, is perhaps not sufficiently serious. Spiritual ambition may raise its head with the calculation that at such a paltry pace, even if one were to add a retreat every year (quite essential), it would take fifty years to get to the vaunted 10,000!

     Let me therefore include an emphatic disclaimer: nobody ever said, least of all I, that you or anyone else needs to cross that line! I never aimed for it myself; thinking of my journey that way would only have discouraged me, as I had trouble enough keeping up my practice at all. Where I might end up never concerned me much; I would find out when I got there, I thought. And anyway I was never under any illusions that there was any “there” in the first place. You keep walking; leave the rest to the Dhamma.

**See their noticeably soft-spoken instruction manual on “The Ceremony of Crossing the Line—An Old Seafaring Tradition” (they trace it back to at least the 1520s). I am not one to wish the old days back: in the past, perhaps more often than not, the ceremony was evidently an occasion for blatant hazing and shameless sadism, in keeping with the darker aspects of naval tradition that Winston Churchill allegedly summarized and derided as “rum, sodomy, and the lash” in 1913 (#149). (For some thoughts on the U.S. Navy, which “has had its share of these traditions,” the Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute include an interesting reflection on the subject by Everette Travis Ervin (vol. 130/7/1,217, July 2004).)

PS: Readers who are inclined to feel daunted by the ten thousand should remember that this pool gets filled one tiny drop at a time, by steadiness, not Herculean labors (at least not usually). There are meditators who get introduced to the technique, hit the ground running, and never lose their pace (meaning at least an hour in the morning and at night) for the rest of their lives. (I mean householders; for monks it is a different story, since they are supposed to make the practice the center of their lives—and they do so, on orthodox terms at least, not because they are looking for a particularly formidable challenge, to oblige anyone or sacrifice themselves, but because it is supposed to make their lives easier as well as better.)

Dhamma heroes exist, but they are rare, and I have never been able to practice with quite such iron discipline. To my own amazement, my overall daily average, once I committed to the Path after my second ten-day Vipassana course with Goenkaji (eighteen years ago), does come to 90 minutes, but that figure conceals much variation. On silent retreats, where I’ve spent about a full year in total (never more than thirty days at a stretch, and mostly ten), a solid day means about ten hours of more or less concentrated meditation for me (not that I always reach the target even there). In daily life, I have sometimes managed to keep up the recommended two-hour regime, but being able to do so has been far more the exception than the rule for me.

There was a gung-ho period of almost three years early on, true, but otherwise more of an unpredictable day-by-day smorgasbord, where sometimes I would “only” manage twenty minutes a day. (No shame in that: twenty minutes is also good—better than ten, which is better than five, which infinitely better than none!) Sooner or later, however, the longer sittings have always come back again, thank Buddha, and after getting serious within my means, I have only very rarely missed both sittings in a day—not more than once or twice a year since I began practicing in earnest. And that is how it should be, I would say: keep walking whatever you do, but proceed at a natural pace that doesn’t feel too forced, whatever it may turn out to be in terms of minutes on the mat, given your temperament and the ever-fluctuating conditions of your life (a crucial consideration in the Dhamma). Don’t look to others with either envy or undue awe, but take what they are doing as inspiration, keep your eyes to yourself, and go on…