Five meditation books I read this year

And why they stayed with me.

Imagine you go on a meditation retreat without any background in meditation. The approach — to the jhanas — is pragmatic and entirely secular. Everything you’re taught is framed as a skill, a practice of the sort of psychotechnology you might encounter in therapy, or in yoga. Buddhism is never mentioned. There is no dogma. There is only a set of simple instructions.

You follow the practice, and because you are on retreat, you let go of any desire to understand it rationally, scientifically, or historically. And it works. Things happen, and then some: you have a few deeply profound, and moving, and cathartic experiences.

A week later, you leave the retreat and feel that — though you will have an extremely difficult time articulating exactly what or how — everything is different. The way you inhabit the world feels altered and new. You’ve seen, maybe not clearly, but surely, and for the first time, that the reality you took for granted as objective is a reality that you had partially constructed. It’s not like a mystical realization, really, although it can be if you left it. It’s more — for me at least — like realizing that experience is more like a multistable perception than something solid. You have a choice of what to focus on — you just have to see other angle first.

The challenge is that you lack any cultural or intellectual scaffolding for what you’ve experienced. And so you come home and search desperately for something that can help you integrate what you’ve learned.

It feels weird, but an obvious place to start is where jhana practice originates: in Buddhist scripture.¹ You learn, in fact, that the Buddha himself practiced and taught the jhanas as a path to enlightenment. The Satipatthana Sutra, which dates to ~20 BCE describes (albeit in anachronistic metaphor) your experience in jhana precisely.

Would it not seem acceptable to convert on the spot? Imagine: you read a >2000 year old text that described self-induced altered states that no one outside of a weird Bay Area circle has ever talked about but which map directly onto your experience? The Christian equivalent would be of witnessing a long-haired man walk across water and restore sight to the blind, and then going home to read the New Testament for the first time.

That I left my retreat feeling fundamentally changed wasn’t a possibility I’d entertained prior to it. I had not seriously considered that one week could offer something so profound as an alteration in how I experienced the world. But that some 2000 year old texts accurately described some of the things I was experiencing precipitated an ontological and intellectual shock that I’ve been trying to settle since.

So I fell back on my oldest habit: to read as much as I could. Except I had no idea, really, where to start. Any time I saw a book mentioned or referenced, I ordered it. These are most of the dharma(ish) books I’ve read in the past year.

Here are five that stuck with me the most.

Buddha, by Karen Armstrong

I grew up without religion. My reactions to it tend to be knee-jerk skeptical or dismissive. If I was going to dedicate any part of my life to teachings that supposedly originate with a man who lived some two and a half millennia ago, I wanted to know who he was. The challenge is that there isn’t any sort of central text in Buddhism. The Pali canon, the most complete collection of Buddhist texts, contains over 10,000 sutras. In Mahayana, the corpus is larger and more complex still. Many claim to relay the Buddha’s own words, and from this you can glimpse aspects of his life, but there exists nothing like a cohesive narrative of the Buddha’s life.

This book is a historian’s take, assembled from modern scholarship of the scriptures, triangulated with the record of contemporaneous religions (e.g. Jains) and everything else we knew historically of the time. We are (reasonably) confident that Siddhata Gotama did exist. But there is nothing in his life story we can affirm to be historically true. And so this book is something of the definitive legend — the stories that appear most frequently, or are most likely to be true based on what we know of other historical events.

This book could not have been easy to assemble. The scriptures are maddeningly diffuse. Armstrong’s accomplishment here is to pare down the interpretations, elaborations, and flourishes of scriptural texts into the core of Buddha’s story: an at first self-abnegating search for enlightenment through asceticism; his remembrance of the first jhana as a child and subsequent discovery of later jhanas, which were key to his own enlightenment; the teaching methods he developed (its possible the Buddha and Socrates were contemporaries, and though they would not have known each other, the methods they employ are sometimes strikingly similar²), and the community that arose around him in the years that followed.

Maybe the most interesting aspects of the history is the degree to which scriptures are aligned on the Buddha’s approach being that of the Pali term ehipassiko, or to come and see for yourself. The sangha that arose around Buddha did so not because of any proselytization, but because the Buddha welcomed people to simply try.

I have dabbled with reading sutras, but I find practice a far more valuable use of time. Still, I wanted to know something about what the tradition I was entering, and I highly recommend this books as a fast and comprehensive place to start — especially for my non-meditator friends. (I also alluded to this above, but it was a profound experience to go from zero meditation experience to fluency with jhanas 1-4 to reading about the centrality of jhana to the Buddha’s own teaching, all within ~a month. I’m sometimes surprised Buddhism has a few converts as it does. Where Christianity requires lifelong faith, Buddhism required — at least for me — one week of sitting quietly thinking happy thoughts.)

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, by Jack Kornfield

The ostensible focus of this book — the task of integrating some of the peak experiences of spiritual practice into the mundanity of our day-to-day lives — doesn’t fully capture the expansiveness of this book.

Jack Kornfield interviewed dozens of practitioners, each with decades of experience. He quotes them at length about the paths and stages of insight, the outcomes of practice, the stepping stones — and detours — along the way.

For me — I came into meditation without an understanding of where I was supposed to aim — it was extremely useful. What is the goal? Is there a goal? What does progress actually entail? How long does change take? Is it the same for everyone?

This isn’t an instruction manual. One way to think of it is as a sampling of what L.A. Paul calls “transformative experiences.” Her argument is that certain life experiences are both epistemically and personally transformative in ways that make it impossible to rationally decide whether to undertake them — using standard decision theory, you can’t actually know what values to assign. So-called awakening or enlightenment seems something like that too. I’ve been practicing for an hour a day, on average, since my retreat. And I was lucky that I had very early proof that meditation worked. Still, there is an element of faith. I have friends who have resisted psychedelics not out of fear of the experience but out of fear of the transformation: how can I know who I’ll become?

This book can’t answer that for anyone, individually. But I think it is one way to know how to update. And as a new practitioner, that update was useful for me.

I look forward to reading it again. I expect I could do so yearly and find something new in it every time.

In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying, by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Helen Tworkov

This book comes highly lauded by some of the most notable people in the dharma community. From the front cover alone:

“This book has the potential to change the reader’s life forever.” — George Saunders

“One of the most inspiring books I’ve ever read.” — Pema Chödrön

It has a 4.7 on Amazon. Everyone seems to love it. I felt…deeply conflicted by it?

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche was born into what is essentially Tibetan Buddhist royalty: his mother is a descendant of two Tibetan kings; his father is Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, under whom many Western teachers — including Loch Kelly and Sam Harris — studied.

As royalty, Mingyur Rinpoche grows up deeply sheltered, sequestered from the world and permitted to enter into it only under the eye of a guardians. He has the first genuine independent experience of his life at the age of 36, after he leaves farewell letter describing his intention to go on a traditional wandering meditation of four years.

It’s a moving book. It captures interiority with delicacy and precision. But it’s that that I find off-putting.

The book is co-written with Helen Tworkov, the founding editor of Tricycle Magazine. She’s studied with Mingyur Rinpoche since 2006, and as the editor of America’s only Buddhist magazine, makes sense as a co-writer (he asked her). And I think she did a wonderful job. It has vulnerable narrations of Mingyur Rinpoche’s confusion, for instance, at how the class system in India works, the stress and self-consciousness of navigating independently for the first time, the discomfort and demanded — at first — of a mendicant: asking for alms, begging for food, finding a place to sleep.

I’m stuck because I’m not sure where Mingyur Rinpoche stops and Tworkov begins. Mingyur Rinpoche is not fluent in English. He speaks it well enough to teach, but in a limited capacity. I haven’t found details on the translation of this book, but Tworkov did write about translating another of his books, Turning Confusion into Clarity:

During the retreat Mingyur Rinpoche asked for my help in putting together a chapbook on the foundational practices for his non-Tibetan students. This modest request became a 350-page book, Turning Confusion into Clarity: A Guide to the Foundation Practices of Tibetan Buddhism. My role as co-writer entailed translating Mingyur’s broken English and maintaining his animated explanations while restructuring the grammar of every sentence.

I imagine this book goes farther than mere restructuring. Translating teaching seems very different to me than translating internal experience. I struggle to articulate my own experience in the subtleties of meditation. My meditation log sometimes consists of hand-wavey descriptions and metaphors that I only recognize because I lived them.

The events of the book take place in the first few weeks of Mingyur Rinpoche’s first few weeks of a four-year meditation period, but they are described in sometimes hour-by-hour detail. Meditation is supposed to sharpen your memory, and Tworkov interviewed Mingyur Rinpoche in between 2016 and 2018 multiple times, but it is hard to think that so much of the detail is fully accurate. It does not, in other words, feel completely true.

I was also challenged by the subject of the last quarter of the book. Only a week or so after he has left on his wandering retreat, Mingyur Rinpoche gets sick. What began as a travel narrative turns gradually into a feverish meditation — literally — on his slow descent into severe enteric infection and confrontation of what it means to die.

Some sections are didactic, Mingyur Rinpoche’s ostensible reflections on traditional Tibetan teachings as he contemplates mortality:

We cannot attain unborn deathless reality until we accept death. The bardo texts describe this as mother and child union. The air element inside our bodies dissolves into space; space dissolves into itself; into spacious awareness. Individuated spaciousness is like the contents of an empty cup. Space exists within the cup but does not belong to the cup. When the cup breaks, the contained space joins the space that has no edges, that is not contained. In the bardo texts, the cup-space is called child luminosity and boundless space is called mother luminosity. At the time of dying, with now shadow of conceptual mind-left intact, child luminosity gravitates towards its mother, as if coming home, and mother can prevent this reunion.

At some point he fully admits of his own impending death and is paralyzed by indecision over what to do: seek help, or accept his fate with awareness.

By midday the indecision was driving me crazy. I knew that my family members, and the nuns and monks under my guidance, and friends around the world would miss me, and they would miss the benefits of my physical body. Yet I have trained in awareness and in bardo practices my entire life. I did not know that I would need them so early on. Nonetheless, I believe in my own experience, in the words of my father, and other teachers, that awareness is deathless, that it will never die, that I will never die.

He never does decide. Instead, he passes out as he gets up to go to fetch water and use the bathroom. He wakes up in a hospital on an IV drip, brought there by a stranger —who turned out to be wealthy novice practitioner — he had befriended earlier in the book.

I recognize that death contemplation and meditation play an essential role in some areas of Buddhism. And I can — with a large leap of faith — understand how Mingyur Rinpoche could choose to witness the process over acting on it. But it would not be the decision I would make.

So why was it nonetheless useful? It’s still a beautiful book. But beyond that, there’s clearly something here I don’t understand, and my reaction (of anger, disgust, confusion?) seems useful to witness. That people such as Saunders, Chödrön, and Jack Kornfield would fight it so insightful suggests to me that there is something there I have not grasped, some deeper lesson in what appears to me on the surface like obdurateness and ignorance. Sometimes books have useful lessons to impart. Sometimes they show you what you still have yet to understand.

Focused and Fearless by Shaila Catherine

The Experience of Samadhi by Richard Shankman

Practicing the Jhanas, by Stephen Snyder and Tina Rasmussen

Okay, three books, all on jhanas. Here’s why. There are only a handful of books specific to jhana practice. By far the most commonly read is Leigh Brasington’s Right Concentration, followed (I think) by David Johnson’s Path to Nibbana. These were the two books that were most useful to me in my practice, and I would recommend both over the three listed above.

But I think that the three cited here were all valuable as a way to expand and deepen my practice around its edges.

Focused and Fearless is an underratedly good manual. Brasington’s’s is somewhat more beginner friendly, but Catherine writes with a different energy: an archetypal wise woman to Brasington’s southern stoner elf.

Reading a variety of jhana books helps to triangulate the subtleties of experience in the practice. For example, Catherine says that first jhana can sometimes be so subtle that you may slip into unnoticed. This contradicts most every other teacher I’ve read. I remember finding it odd. Only months later, during a slump in my practice that felt very low resolution, I realized I found myself entering into jhana in a way similar to what Catherine describe. Some sits J1 feels like cannonballing into a pool. Others, you dip your toe into it, and slowly follow your toe down.

Practicing the Jhanas by Snyder and Rasmussen details the practice as taught by Pa Auk Sayadaw. There’s lots of “debate” in the “jhana community” about the proper depth of jhana practice — “real jhanas.”. This book teaches the unquestionable deep end. (In more ways than one; it takes iddhi, Buddhist psychic powers, as being if not real then at least not not real.)

I think there’s not as much discussion about jhanas as taught by Pa Auk. Where Jhourney is a jhana speed run, Snyder and Rasmussen describe the traditional progression. You don’t move from J1 to J2 until you’ve mastered the ability to stay in J1 for 3 hours, and then J2 for 3 hours, and so on. This is worth reading to better understand what is possible at the deeper end of practice.

The Experience of Samadhi is a strange book. The first half explains the jhanas as described in the Pali sutras. Actually, all of them do, but most tend to translate that in their own words. The descriptions here are so by the book that they read at times less like a guide than an academic paper. It is impersonal as to feel doctrinal. I had the experience of wondering whether Shankman had ever himself experienced jhana.

But the second half is brilliant — interviews on samadhi (concentration) practice and jhana with Jack Kornfield, Ajaan Thanissaro, Sharon Salzburg, and Pa Auk Sayadaw, among others. It’s useful to see the range of idiosyncratic beliefs here: on whether there is a distinction between mindfulness and concentration practice (Thanissaro says no, for instance), on where insights come in jhana practice (Ajahn Brahmavanso says while coming out of jhana, but not after), and in general on how much disagreement there is between teachers over a wide range of questions that the sutras leave up to interpretation.

Seeing that Frees

I started listening to Burbea’s retreat talks right after my Jhourney retreat. So it’s hard to say how much my impression of him is informed by the ecstasy of that first week back. I hear him speak and am immediately dropped into a place of calm and comfort. His voice is like a weighted blanket made manifest in an ASMR recording.

I knew that Burbea was highly regarded within dharma circles, and he seems to occupy a special place within Bay Area/tpot meditators. His retreat talks go a long way towards explaining why.

But it wasn’t until a few months of trying to break into Seeing That Frees that I felt like I really got it. Rob’s gift is that he was able to create something I think is genuinely new: not just an adaptation of Buddhist practice to a Western audience, but a fusion of Western thought — including some aspects of it, like certain corners of depth psychology, that sometimes arrived independently at Buddhist conclusions — with contemplative practice.

A core of the book is on the idea of dependent origination, which is central to most Buddhist schools: if this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist. This isn’t the hardest teaching to grasp, and I think it’s been expressed many times by many different people. See John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Burbea shows how you can make this insight your practice, and as such, open up space to see your life, your actions, your reality, as dependent on the way you look at them.

The book is dense, and a lot of it is practice-based. I couldn’t find a way into it until a month or two after I got home from my retreat — it felt too advanced for me. I’ve wanted to give it more time, and there is some sense in which I haven’t felt like I have sufficient space to give it the attention it seems to deserve. It deserves, I think, its own review.

I will also say this, though I don’t really know what to make of it, only that I think it is true: I find something about this book holy.

I don’t really know how to explain what space Burbea occupies in my head at the moment. I feel a deep sadness at his death from pancreatic cancer in 2021. I have cried multiple times — still working on the death thing — thinking about it as I listen to him. There is a sense in which discovering meditation three years after his passing feels to me akin to discovering music after the dissolution of the Beatles. Yes, the recordings are still there, but oh, to have felt his presence.

1. The Jhanas predate Buddha — he learned them from other people — but our earliest recordings of them are in Buddhist scripture.

2. The Axial age, from ~900-300BCE, in addition to the emergence of Buddhism, saw the developments of Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, Platonism, the writing of the Upanishads, and the compilation of much of the Hebrew bible. Incredible time to be alive.