My Discovery Moment

I had just arrived in Dharamshala, India. It was mid-February 2026, and my intention was to spend a couple of months in relative solitude to write my third book on meditation. I had already written a few chapters while I was in Kathmandu, and in South India before that. What I needed most was to develop a theoretical model for examining narratives from my students’ meditation journals, for I have thousands of authentic meditation journals, collected over the past 25 years. The first version of this model had a simple, elegant form, and I was hopeful that it would help others understand what goes on in an completely open meditation practice. It divided narratives into two categories: teaching narratives and personal narratives. It showed how both forms of narratives have as their starting point, the ineffable, which we attempt to put into words. As we put our inner experiences into language, we create ideas about those experiences from our descriptions of them, sometimes substituting our interpretation of an experience for the description of it. If we then believe that our “ideas” say something true about the world, then we effortlessly move into view formation. In order to clearly and honestly examine our inner experiences, particularly in meditation, we need to not make a claim about them. I was searching for a teaching of the Buddha’s that said just that. I knew it existed in the Pali Canon. I was sure I had read it somewhere. In fact, I knew exactly where to look — the earliest strata of the Collected Discourses of the Buddha.

Then I remembered that over twenty years I ago I had done research for my Buddhist historical short story, “After the Parinibbana.” In that fictional story, I abbreviated parts of the “Fruits of Recluse-ship Discourse,” and then I presented a compacted version of each of the six non-Buddhist teachers found in that Sutta. I recalled writing for Sañjaya Belaṭṭhiputta: “I do not say it is so,” “I do not say it is like that,” “I do not say that it is otherwise,” “I do not say it is not so,” and “I do not say it is not not so.” That was the method I was looking for! It mapped onto my model of looking at narratives as from meditative experiences as “descriptions” and not as “claims.”

My interest was piqued. I had to go back to the Pali passages, re-examine the section on Sañjaya in the “Fruits of Recluse-ship” Sutta. But, more importantly, I also had to truly understand Sañjaya’s method and put my investigation where it mattered most, in my meditation experience. So, I contemplated these statements from several angles, frequently going back to the Pali, trying out alternative translations, thinking about these five statements day and night, trying to get from the flat two-dimensional words to the expanded experiential meaning of them.

As I sat with Sañjaya’s method, I knew that I had seen it in operation in poems that I loved and admired from the “Book of Eights” within the Sutta Nipata. I took a fresh look at some of the stanzas that I remembered, and there it was, right in plain sight. I could not believe what I was seeing. It was a realization that was just waiting to happen.