My Discovery Four Months Later
Working on this research into Sañjaya every day since my initial discovery has brought a wealth of information about him and his method, which I have decided to share in this blog rather than write a book. The main reason for doing it that way, making it more public and accessible at first, is because the story has multiple dimensions to it, and the scholarly focus on Sañjaya has been mostly as a philosopher of minor importance at the time of the Buddha, who supposedly left no recoverable teaching. But that is simply not true. He left a recoverable teaching. It is just that no one was able to figure out how to bring it back to life after having been mummified and buried for 2500 years. In the past four months, I have at least accomplished that rare feat of bringing a dead philosophy into a living form.
Only a few people have noted what a remarkable accomplishment that is, mostly because they are skeptical about there being anything of value in Sañjaya. I understand that position, for if you just accept King Ajatasattu’s verdict of Sañjaya as being the most stupid, most befuddled teacher of all because he keeps elaborating and complicating his ideas, then there is nothing to learn from him.
When it comes to understanding a philosophy that underpins a spiritual practice, you have to do the practice it teaches. Buddhism is a perfect example of this. You can study the philosophy in the abstract, but it is not until you take it into your life that it holds together, that its tasks for self development become concrete, real methods. Sañjaya’s “practice” was never searched for, so it has seemed like he taught a purely abstract form of skepticism meant only for debate, which is how his method has been interpreted. Nothing could be further from the truth. His method was designed for inner exploration, not debate. When applied to how we close down our inner explorations and come to premature conclusions, it can tell us exactly where we stop and why. Then it becomes easy to see the conclusion we came to, not take it up as final, and start the exploration afresh. This is something we mostly do in recollection, which is also one reason (of many) why Sañjaya’s method is a perfect fit for Recollective Awareness Meditation.
It will take many months to publish what I have discovered about Sañjaya and his method in this blog. But it may take years for the work of studying his method to bear its greatest fruit – the knowledge of what it can actually do for psychological, intellectual, and spiritual development.
At first, I thought that Sañjaya was not interested in awakening and liberation. There is no place for goals, paths, and claims in his method. But that may be because his method has no need of such. It also does not have room for Absolute Truth, True Being, Essence, Buddha Nature or anything universal or transcendent. There is no way to convert it into a teaching of already being enlightened. That eliminates the two main directions of Buddhist practices – the gradual and the sudden (already awakened).
My working premise is rather simple: use his method and see what happens. Although, with one caveat. It has to be combined with a Recollective Awareness Meditation practice. I believe for some people, that has been the case without them knowing it. I can see where Sañjaya’s method has been used in someone’s meditation practice, for, I have discovered how to apply his method to my own reading of narratives in meditation journals. Sañjaya’s method, when applied to reading meditation journals, is more exact and effective than my original model that started this whole thing moving four months ago.
I hope you can stay interested in this project for the time it will take me to write about it in full. There will be several posts that will show you how this method appears in your meditation sittings and how to detect it in your journals. It will show when you have taken up a view, unwittingly. And, more importantly, what taking up that view has led to in your life and how to examine the validity and value of that way of thinking.