Post #66: Meditation “Belts”

28 Sep. 2023

“One thousand days of training to forge, ten thousand days of training to refine. Be mindful of this.”

—Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings (Water Scroll)

As I have just now crossed the little line that puts me within the last 500 hours of the vaunted 10,000, let me get something out of the way—just in case crossing the big line might bring me the meditative maturity that has so far been eluding me. Not that I expect any great changes; but loss of interest in such silly trifles as counting my hours on the mat could, conceivably, be one of them. Since a little time remains before my estimated arrival, however, it is not too late to have a happy meditation childhood; so here goes what I have been pondering in the spirit of my younger years, when I practiced a couple of martial arts, though never getting further than a green belt in any of them…

What I’ve been thinking about is a kind of logarithmic scale (like the well-known seismological one) in which the numbers increase tenfold with every level. (A level 8 earthquake hits ten times harder than a level 7, and a level 9 is ten time worse still—imagine!) Applying the scheme, light-heartedly, to hours on the mat, we might get something like this:

(1) For the very first ten hours, the toe-dipping period for the true beginners, a white belt.

(2) That first introduction accomplished, up to a hundred hours—”Vipassana kindergarten,” as S.N. Goenka calls it in his discourses—a yellow belt.

(3) Upon graduation—a single completed 10-day Vipassana course will get you there, or else a 20-minute daily practice kept up for a year—an orange belt that gradually shades into green (think moss growing) on the long trek to a thousand hours.

(4) In recognition of a thousand hours clocked (no mean milestone, this), let’s award a blue belt that once again slowly transforms itself into mud-splattered brown during the great pilgrimage to ten thousand hours.

(5) At long last, with ten thousand hours finally under the belt, so to speak, let’s not withhold the coveted black belt any longer, though it must come with a sobering reminder, namely that the black belts are again divided into ten more grades (called Dans, no relation to the author). Aw shucks. Naïvely imagining that one had finally arrived within reach of teacher’s level (never mind mastery), one finds oneself returned to the ranks of the novices! Beginner’s mind bites you in the ass every time you look the other way. Such are the ironies of seeking out paths of this kind. So with a sigh, perhaps, along with the undaunted spirit of Sisyphus, let’s tentatively assign another notch for every further ten thousand hours.

I say tentatively for a reason. Allow me to reassure the reader that I am, for all my faults, not quite so foolish as to imagine that a spiritual practice could ever be a mechanical matter of hours clocked. Duh. Attitude and aptitude must come into it, obviously, as well as disposition and predisposition, external conditions and internal karmic circumstances, all flowing together in inextricably complex webs. Just as it is quite possible to play the violin for ten thousand hours and still be tone-deaf and out of tune, so presumably there must be meditation duffers who remain hopeless cases no matter how valiantly they persist.

Whether I qualify as one of these pitiable cases, I dare not say; but it doesn’t matter much. I am not staking a claim for myself here, only laying out what one would normally expect to be the case. Not all black belts in the martial arts are champions either; some of them have just paid their dues and persevered for the requisite amount of time. They may not shine especially, but their determination does make a difference, in the manner of the tortoise. They are not the masters who keep adding stripe after stripe to their belts, the certified heroes of the Dhamma; but they do earn their wings in the end, even if they must keep digitigrading with heavy shells on their backs and little hope that their slight aerial accoutrements are going to lift them off the ground any time soon.

What do you think? Does my little diversion perhaps strike you as just another exercise in folly and vanity, the petty ego donning meditator’s robes to vaunt itself before the mirror and make itself ridiculous before others? I can see why you might get that impression, but I beg to differ. I grant that in such matters it is generally best not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. The wise man, as the Tao reminds us, does the right thing without any ado; he accomplishes his tasks, big or small, without setting any store by them or dwelling on anything unduly. Alas, how ridiculously short I fall of this noble standard, and don’t I know it—as someone who sets store by almost everything and hardly ever succeeds or fails without a great deal of dwelling on it.

That much admitted without ado, however, I recall being reassured once by a kindly and very senior Vipassana teacher that it is not against the Dhamma to recall your own meritorious deeds sometimes, or even to pat yourself on the back a little when you need encouragement. The Path is very long and can seem terribly arduous at times; in such hours of need, we cannot do without a few such human, all-too human contrivances, even if they may look rather feeble and unworthy to the purist and the Dhamma hero. Not being either, I’ve been finding it quite grueling at times to persist through all these thousands of often endless-seeming hours; on the whole it’s been more grinding than glorious for me, though it’s not as if there is always sand in the engine, the compensations are great, and the green pastures along the way very beautiful and edifying. And so I see nothing very wrong with dwelling a little on how far I’ve come—this not to boast, but to express my gratitude and amazement that it’s been possible for me to cover such an unexpected distance, and to take heart, at the same time, from the thought that if I could do it, then others might do so as well, even when they bring as little natural aptitude to the task as I did and do.

I am under no illusions about how high I have (or rather have not) risen; I make no pretenses to distinction, let alone mastery of any kind. But yeah, after all these years of struggle, I reckon I shall be able to wear that entry-level black belt without embarrassment once I cross the equator, with a feeling that I have earned it, not by great strength or any special qualities as a meditator so much as by a certain dogged determination, with traces of desperation perhaps—all by the grace of the Buddhas, of course, and with much help, guidance, and support from so many teachers, volunteers, and fellow meditators over the years. A bit of unassuming pride in having lasted so long does not look too sinful or conceited to me, and anyway, the black belt, if and when I get there, will surely be a call to humility, as I’ve said, reminding me, above all else, that I stand on the lowest rung and will remain there, while the real masters are cut from different cloth altogether and bear marks of a completely different kind.

(So let this one go out to all those Vipassana brothers and sisters, high and low, who have shared parts of the journey with me.)

PS: Whatever the sense or nonsense of counting to a hundred thousand hours (and I am claiming no much better excuse for it than personal whimsy), there can surely be no point in going further. You do the math: to arrive at six figures would require five hours of sitting every single day for 55 years. Such things have been done, and more; but I know my place, and whereof one cannot speak adequately, thereof one must remain silent. If I have not said too much already…