Paul Anthony:
So I’m wondering about all of this and how it relates to MCTB… The experience with the mantra as described above surely qualifies as a nimitta based on most descriptions, and was achieved very quickly and easily by a total beginner. Compared with this, I find anapanasati rather slow going, and I’m still not sure I’ve gone as far with it as I did with those first sessions of TM. . . . Maybe things like TM, candle-flame practice are easy for the beginner to grasp as you really can't go wrong. So what's the limitation?
As a person who began with a practice in meditation also using a mantra (kriya yoga as taught by Yogananda), and having practiced TM later on in my meditative career (to see what it was like in comparison to what I practiced up until then), and as a person who eventually returned to examine and practice the instruction and methods as they were originally taught by the Buddha (using the Pali discourses as a guide), my experience has been that the descriptions of the path to awakening as described by the latter of these three methodologies has had the most effective and enduring affect on my practice and realization.
To answer the question posed above (from my own obviously subjective experience), I would have to say that the limitation of TM is that it doesn't even begin to explore all the nooks and crannies of the mind necessary in order to bring about an enduring sense of contentment and peace (the cessation of
dukkha that the Buddha talked about in the discourses). It doesn't even begin to teach the amount of relinquishing, release, and letting go of phenomena in the detail that the Buddha talks about as being necessary for bringing about a realization of
nibbana and the cessation of dissatisfaction (
dukkha).
As a meditation technique, however, TM may have its usefulness for certain types of people who are more able to relate to the instruction given therein and thus able quickly to attain to a limited state (20 minutes) of absorption as it has been described by the Buddha. However, in the Buddha's methodology, this state (i.e. absorption) is used for the gathering of insight into phenomena, whereas in TM, this 20 minute experience seems to be the extent of TM's instruction. Somehow the TM practitioner is suppose to just
know after having arrived there. There's no mention of coming to terms with insight into phenomena, just a pleasant experience that ends up culminating, in Maharishi's words, in a "direct experience of the essential nature of the transcendental absolute Being," whatever that is supposed to mean.
In his book
The Science of Being and Art of Living, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi writes: "Being is not something that exists and can be brought from somewhere and lived. It is existence, the very life of everything. It is the all-pervading, omnipresent state of absolute consciousness. . . . In deep meditation, when the mind transcends the subtlest state of thinking, it arrives at the state of Being. It is the state of no experience because the whole field of relativity has been transcended. It is just the state of transcendence, the state of existence, pure consciousness,
is-ness,
am-ness."
The problem with Maharishi's description in the previous paragraph is that most people who experience this "Being" that he writes about don't end up "transcending the whole field of relativity" because they have not been taught the techniques that will enable them to do so. They've been taught how to induce a pleasant experience, but little else.
Paul Anthony:
For me, this was initially a very successful strategy. The difficulty was knowing where to take it next...
And this is the concern that I am referring to with regard to the limitation of TM practice overall. People aren't given instruction about "where to take this practice" after they have encountered a brief and fleeting experience of peace and bliss (or joy). Whereas in the Buddhadhamma, one is exhorted to see phenomena as "this is not mine, this I am not, this is not myself," in an effort to alleviate personal suffering and to begin seeing things as they really are in actuality. Within this methodology, the teaching on dependent co-arising (
paticca samuppada) plays a key role in assisting the aspirant to be able to arrive at the same realization of the true nature of phenomena as the Buddha.
Through the use of absorption (jhana), being implemented as a tool in mental cultivation, one is taught clear seeing or clear comprehension (
sampajanna) in order to end
dukkha through the gathering directly of knowledge of how things (phenomena)
really are, thus ending ignorance (or delusion) on the road to also ending greed and hatred. In the Buddhadhamma, there is a definite path that the aspirant is instructed to walk in order to bring about these self-transforming realizations about the interdependence of life, self, and existence. And all this extends from the initial teaching of the Four Noble Truths.