The Eightfold Path, Part 8: Right Concentration

Today we come to the end of our exploration of the Buddha’s Eightfold Path. Last time, we looked at right mindfulness and discussed both mindfulness in the world and specific meditation practices that help cultivate it. Today we’ll complete the puzzle with its eighth and final piece, often called in English ‘right concentration’. As usual, we’ll start by looking at how the idea is interpreted within Buddhism before trying to figure out how it fits, or doesn’t, within Christianity.

Right Concentration in Buddhism

Among introductory Buddhist texts, this is the element of the path about which I’ve seen the most diversity of description. It can range from knowing the most skillful way to direct our attention to limit our feelings of dissatisfaction or suffering (i.e., right concentration as reframing), to the concentration required to make progress in meditative state training, to the ultimate results of such training. It seems however, that it’s a case where the original Pali word, samadhi, inherently contains all of these ideas, so the ‘problem’ is more one of the limitations of English translations than it is a confusion about the topic. And because the concept is complex, it’s natural that different Buddhist schools or traditions have emphasized one aspect of it over others.

The Buddha himself offered the following description:

The Buddha says: ‘When you monks unify your minds, the mind is in samadhi. Since the mind is in samadhi, you know the characteristics of the creation and destruction of the various phenomena in the world […] When you gain samadhi, the mind is not scattered, just as those who protect themselves from floods guard the levee.’

Even in this description we see several ideas at play: 1. unified consciousness; 2. clarity of understanding; 3. singlemindedness that prevents stray thoughts and feelings from flooding the mind.

All three of these aspects of right concentration tie in with what Integral thought calls ‘state training’, in which the goal sacred practice is to attain different states of awareness that broaden our understanding of the world, while simultaneously disconnecting from our thoughts, ideas, opinions, emotions, and feelings. The expectation, however, is that one can bring the expanded awareness and insight gained in the altered state back into the ‘real world’.

Yet the concentration one must apply to attain such states is itself beneficial in that ‘real world’. As Mark Epstein writes about this:

But concentration needs to be understood in the context of the entire path if it is not to become a distraction in itself. Concentration is “right” when it connects with the other branches of the whole. It is “right” when it demonstrates the feasibility of training the mind, when it supports the investigation of impermanence, when it erodes selfish preoccupation, and when it reveals the benefits of surrender. It is not “right” when it is seen as an end in itself and when it is used to avoid painful truths. One can hide out in the peaceful states that meditative concentration makes possible, but in the context of the eightfold path, this is considered a mistake.

With all this in mind, samadhi is clearly a complex idea that I won’t be able to adequately introduce here. But I think what’s important for our purposes today is this threefold nature: Right concentration involves cultivating the ability to focus of one’s attention on a single thing, a focus that is required in meditation if one is to make progress in settling one’s thoughts, but also beneficial ‘off the mat’ in providing the perspective that can bring the various aspects of our life into alignment and reduce our suffering. And the same time, it also refers to the ultimate result of such efforts. In other words, it’s like the wedding planning, the wedding, and the marriage rolled into a single concept.

Christian Response

Because samadhi is a complex idea that arose in a very different philosophical and religious system from Christianity, we’ll need to address its various aspects separately here.

Samadhi as Singlemindedness

The most obvious thing that comes to mind here is an old Christian saying “Let your eye be single.” It’s derived from an older (and more literal) translation of Matthew 6.22. The text itself reads: “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is single, your whole body will be full of light.” There are a lot of ways he could have described healthy vision, but a clue to why he chose this one, using the word haplous ‘in a single layer, simple’, could be found in the context of the saying. For he’s in the middle of a section of his teaching all about on our attention:

• on charity, prayer and fasting being for God’s eye’s only and not for public display (6.1-18)
• on spiritual versus earthly treasures (6.19-21)
• on the healthy, ‘single’ eye (6.22-23)
• on the inability to serve two masters (6.24)
• against anxiety and on the need to focus on what is directly before us (6.25-34)

So the teaching about the healthy, ‘single’ eye, is found in the middle of teachings against divided loyalties and motivations. We need to be single-mindedly and simply focused on God, without concern for distractions such as public opinion, our possessions, or wealth.

Similarly, there’s the passage in Hebrews that was long my favourite Scripture verse:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12.1-2)

Again it’s a call to cast off distractions and obstacles and simply run the course.

Samadhi as Concentration

Last time we looked at two different Christian traditions of meditative prayer, the Jesus Prayer of Byzantine Christianity and contemporary Western Christianity’s contemplative or centering prayer. Both involve the mindful intention to return to the words of the prayer whenever we notice our thoughts straying. But that noticing and the effort required to pull the thoughts back in requires concentration and discipline. This is a found in instructional manuals both ancient and modern.

Samadhi as Non-Dual State

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s the final and most extreme understanding of samadhi, a state of consciousness in which we no longer notice the divisions between ‘us’ and ‘not us’, that the Christian tradition has had the most to say. The dominant theological understanding of salvation in early Christianity (which remains canonical in Eastern Christianity to this day) was theosis, literally ‘divinization,’ the process of being fully united to God. This bold language is grounded in biblical precedents such as 2 Peter 1.4, which urges believers to “become sharers of the divine nature,” and John 10.34 (quoting Psalm 82.6), in which Jesus says “I say you are gods.” We might also think of the many texts in the New Testament which speak of the Christian’s unity with Jesus (e.g., Philippians 2-3; John 14.12 Ephesians 5.1; Romans 8.29, 2 Corinthians 3.18, and 1 John 3.2). While, as it developed, theosis was primarily understood to be the end state for the faithful, it was also consistently understood that, through mystical experiences and meditative prayer, one could receive a foretaste of it in this life. By all accounts, ancient and modern, this foretaste refers to a state experience that strongly resembles the samadhi spoken of by Buddhists.

For more information, see my post on first-person (i.e., non-dual) experiences of God from my Knowing God series.

Conclusions

It’s always hard to draw conclusions about complex topics. But for our purposes, it’s safe to say that those Christian traditions that emphasize meditative prayer speak of unitive experiences that resemble those encountered by meditators of all traditions, including Buddhism. These state-training practices require a single-minded dedication and concentration of efforts while ‘on the mat’ that spill over into daily life.