Without Śamatha, No Contemplative Practice

Contemplative practice (vipaśyanā-caryā) without meditative concentration (śamatha) is merely scattered contemplation—the mind is distracted and disordered, often consisting of emotional thoughts and intellectual interpretations, with very little wisdom arising. Almost all sentient beings can engage in such scattered thinking, so it is nothing remarkable. What is most valuable and most difficult to achieve is contemplation during meditative concentration, contemplation after attaining concentration—this is far from easy. Genuine contemplative practice in the true sense of the term requires a period of cultivation before it can be developed.

Yet some people actually advocate that one can engage in contemplative practice without cultivating meditative concentration or stillness. What kind of contemplative practice would that be? What directly perceived states could it observe, and what directly perceived conclusions could it draw? Anyone can engage in such so-called contemplative practice, but it is of no benefit for realizing the Dharma, gaining wisdom, or attaining liberation—such contemplation cannot give rise to the wisdom of contemplative practice or the wisdom of observation. Nowadays the Buddha-Dharma has proliferated to the point of being bewildering: wrapped up in heaps of clever words and ingenious phrases, spoken with dazzling eloquence, yet lacking any substantive content of actual cultivation and realization, leaving people nothing to rely on for practicing and realizing step by step, in a down-to-earth manner. Sentient beings, lacking wisdom, are often beguiled by those flowery rhetorics without awakening to it themselves.