How to Engage in Contemplative Practice and Deliberation

When engaging in contemplative practice (vipaśyanā-caryā) on the five aggregates (pañcaskandha), if you have deep meditative concentration (samādhi), your contemplation will be deep and subtle, able to penetrate ever deeper into the meaning of the Dharma, thereby unraveling the mysteries of the Dharma layer by layer. When contemplating and reflecting, you must go slowly, finely, and deeply, comparing against your own bodily, verbal, and mental actions in the present moment, investigating and gathering evidence within the widest possible range to prove that the five aggregates are not the self. You must investigate why this aspect is not the self, why that aspect is not the self, trying to find evidence one by one, asking "why" for each, and resolving each of these questions of "why." You must contemplate deeply and subtly. If there is only a formal, intellectual understanding without truly landing in the mind, then all theoretical knowledge is hollow and cannot resolve the fundamental problems or the practical ones.

How does one contemplate and reflect? For example, in contemplating that the physical body is not the self—"not the self" is a conclusion, but it is the Buddha's conclusion, not ours. Therefore this conclusion has nothing to do with us. Only after contemplative practice, when we ourselves have genuinely and truly arrived at this conclusion, does the conclusion become our own—the crystallization of our own wisdom—and only then does it have the liberating benefit and power of merit. The Buddha's conclusion is merely a starting point, serving as a reference for developing our own wisdom. We can follow this conclusion and contemplate backward: why is the physical body not the self? Because the physical body is empty; why is the physical body empty? Because the physical body is suffering; why is the physical body suffering? This is the entry point of our initial contemplative practice, requiring us to slowly reflect and search for all kinds of supporting evidence.

Finally, we arrive at the conclusion that the physical body is truly not the self, and this eliminates the identity view (ātma-dṛṣṭi) and the view of self. After contemplative practice, the fruit each person attains is not necessarily the same, because the degree to which the identity view is eliminated differs—there is a certain range of variation, depending on what degree is realized and what degree is cultivated and accomplished. Even attaining the first fruit, stream-enterer (Srotaāpanna; Pali Sotāpanna), is divided into different degrees, and the degree of benefit and transformation of body and mind also differs. For example, children all enter the first grade, yet their level of learning within the same class is not the same. Attaining the fruit is like graduating, so at graduation each person's level is also different, and some graduate early and some late. Each practitioner's level of realizing the Dharma differs because the scope, angle, and depth of their investigation differ, their power of reflection differs, and the depth and force of their evidence also differ; consequently, the wisdom they obtain differs. With different wisdom, the degree of change in their conduct also differs. The deeper and subtler the reflection, the better the power of meditative concentration; the better the power of concentration, the deeper and subtler the reflection; and thus the deeper and more ultimate the degree of realization, and the more thorough the transformation of one's mental conduct.