Laurel Carrington recently posted ( http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/view_message/5692858#_19_message_5695901) briefly mentioning working with a chronic pain condition, and that the dharma-practice aspect of equanimity has been useful, at least to some extent.

Seems an eminently practical, or "pragmatic" concern. (Some here are younger than others, but all are destined to face this situation.)

Anyone have practical experience to share here -- what meditative practice techniques help with pain (or don't) ?

I would offer a linguistic distinction s/t used to help discussion in this area (heard/read from Stephen Levine):
pain = physical or bodily; as Stephen puts it: pain is the birthright of having a body; is virtually inevitable.
suffering = is "optional", the result of mental / emotional proliferation of pain (or of anything).

Emphasis mine.

I would completely agree. Honestly, I tried to use meditation as a pain reliever in my early years of mediation but found it to just frustrate me if it didn't do it well enough. Using meditation as a means to escape reality, i.e., not feel pain, doesn't sound like a good idea to me (in terms of pragmatic meditation).

I'd be more than open to trying any technique. On that note, I'm wondering if acheiving any of the lower Jhanas would help relieve pain...?

On retreat I would focus all my attention on my knee pain and it would dissolve....but I would not change positions so it would come back as I was causing myself damage and the message repeated with more intense pain which I would dissolve. Then I would finally move my knees straight and the message of you are hurting your body would stop.
The dissolving of the pain was an excellent exercise.
Hypnosis also has a good history of pain management
There is a post where Daniel talked about a certain sub jhana aspect that was very numbing and might be useful for anaesthesia
~D

Back when my main method was radical acceptance I did some strong endurance sitting where I would watch a clock and refuse to move for 20 minutes.  It taught me that a lot of pain is completely imaginary - even the physical sensations it's made up of.  I'd be willing to bet most people who have frequent headaches are probably experiencing this kind of pain. The pattern seemed to be that the imaginary pain would build up to a peak, and then completely disappear and turn into jhana. I tried the same thing on actual physical pain a few times during that period and there was a noticable divide between the sensations and the magnification in the mind. The emotional aspect was always the bulk of the problem.

I think the corpse meditations that the buddha recomends are related to this. Negative visualization in general is a great tool for getting over everything from the "willies" to extreme disgust related to the various possibilities that could happen to our bodies. Around that same time I was using Google's image search a lot to look at surgical and car accident pictures, along with various creepy insects, haha. "Necrotizing faciitis" on Google's image search makes for a good modern day corpse meditation.

Hi Chris,
Good topic. Have you inadvertently referenced the wrong thread in ur post? Although Laurel Carrington is in that one she's not discussing "working with a chronic pain condition". I'd quite like to read that. Cheers, Piers.

(I haven't figured out how to put a url-hypertext link behind some arbitrary text, so that should be the full url.)

From my browser at least, that url links to:

RE: Do arahants have afflictive feelings?
3/9/15 7:38 AM as a reply to Alin Mathews

I was going to say--when people are joking or not being completely serious, emoticons can help do what tone of voice would do if we were speaking face to face. Alin has demonstrated this in his most recent post. Or else, say, do something like <joking>insert verbiage </joking>. Whatever. 

I have a chronic pain condition that has been dragging me down, and I can clearly testify that I cope with it with more equanimity than in the deep past, but I can't say that it hurts any less. And sometimes I am reduced to depression or even tears, and I think, "Look at this, I'm crying!" There's no self-reproach to go with it, just the observation that this is what the illness does. Still, I think that more maturity in my practice could help me regulate myself to manage the condition more skillfully. I have not done much metta. Perhaps that would help. Sometimes just getting to the cushion is difficult. 

Am I happy? I must say that this is just the way things are. I can work with it or fight against it. I am working with it.

Shninzen Young's formulation: Suffering = pain x resistance.

What is now days called Medical Qigong has helped me and a number of people I know. Also reclining energy practices - like Reggie Ray teaches (examples). Both are good for chronic pain.

Hi Chris, it,s not you it's me. I somehow missed that post. Curiously it's easier to navigate a post when ur logged out as the string of responses is shown and you can click one to go straight there. Once logged in this feature is absent and you have to scroll down... I digress.

A friend of mine was on retreat in Burma last year practicing intensive methods to sit long hours to become equanimous with extremely painful bodily sensations.

I said to her in an email:

"I get pain even using cushions and mats.

Heck, forget about meditation. I can't even sit cross legged on a stone or wood floor (to eat a meal). It kills my ankles in seconds. The Thais I've been with in the past - all non-meditators - don't seem to have a problem. The men laugh and wonder why I'm sitting like a girl (kneeling with both legs to one side like the Thai women commonly sit in front of monks)"

Her response:

" just a thought re ankles ...i didnt do this but i observed that many who did the vassa intensive retreat ...ie doing the the 3 overnight consecutive sits of 16 hours .....well their ankles swelled ...from friction... and the skin came off ....bleeding etc ...watching ..as I was put on a different programme and a lot of judgment re their foolishness went through the mind but afterwards they told me that once this happens, you then never get any more ankle pain! .....and one said at first she felt burning in the ankles but this changed to emptiness ......"

Anyone else think this is a tad too extreme? Or are we just wimps? When I say we I mean generally Westerners who have had a rather pampered material existence.

She did also have this to say:

".....anyhow these thais and burmese have been sitting on hard floors probably before they could walk ...whereas probably most of us had soft matresses, soft furniture and never sat  on the floor ...until we came to meditation ...not really an even playing field ......"

Thoughts?

Use a chair. I notice that a lot of yogis that have spent years in Southeast Asia  now use chairs. Joseph Goldstein is one.

I'll weigh in now with a couple of comments. 

• I have not done much with mindfulness as a meditation tactic for physical pain. All of my practice has been with the goal of awakening. That goal has been realized to the extent that there is sustained non-dual awareness. It has not been realized according to the four-path Therevadan model, nor has it been realized according to Daniel's definition of a stable state, with no further development, as far as I can tell. I am willing to talk at greater length about where I am "at," but for the time being let's just work with the statement that there has been a degree of awakening. 
• Being awake and in pain is not much different from not being awake and in pain, as far as I have been able to remember. It hurts just as much, the sense of fatigue is just as severe, and it is even possible to experience the side effect of depression. In general, however, the depression is something I experience as not-me, not-mine. It just is. 
• I still behave unskillfully at times for reasons I don't know, but I do not feel sorry for myself, because there is no meaning to that statement. I put off doing things I don't want to do, I feel pressure from obligations, and I seek to change things in ways that I can handle more easily. For example, I just cut my workload, and am in the process of negotiating a phased retirement plan. Being a married tenured professor in my early 60s helps a lot. I do not know how I would deal with this condition as a single mother with no job security and an unsympathetic boss, awake or not. I suspect it would be no picnic.
• I experience acceptance and gratitude. I have to say, though, that I am reminded of Daniel's discussion of morality in the first edition of MCTB. He says that many people who are not awake are far superior in their handling of this training than some who are awake. It behooves us  all (me speaking now) not to get complacent about the first and the last training, wherever we may be on the path. 

re: Travis Gene McKinstry (3/12/15 12:15 PM as a reply to Chris JMacie.)

"…I tried to use meditation as a pain reliever in my early years of mediation but found it to just frustrate me if it didn't do it well enough. Using meditation as a means to escape reality, i.e., not feel pain, doesn't sound like a good idea to me (in terms of pragmatic meditation)…"

Interesting. At some level of reality, an organism will naturally (deep instinct / DNA?) seek to relieve or escape pain.

Pain could be considered a physiological warning signal of various degrees of seriousness. If we add a sort of mindfulness, or perhaps 'common sense' at this level, and given that situations arise where one can't simply stop everything else to deal with pain, then a task is to determine just what is the risk of damage? What kind of damage? a) Extreme (death)? b) Permenent moderate damage? c) Damage that can be readily healed? d) Or actually no damage? And then, what to do? (Is overcoming the pain more important than other considerations?)

Case (d): as when meditation teachers advise to check it out and adjust if the knee pain or numbness is potentially damaging (as mentioned by Dream Walker (3/12/15 1:08 PM); or maybe an indirect risk – jumping up and trying to walk with a numb limb could lead to an accident that would be more damaging. Another example would be acupuncture, which, when done well, leaves no marks other than energetic; or hypodermic injections, which more often result in brusing and pain for some time (this is actually more under (c)).

Case (c) Some other priority seems worth the relatively minor risk. The Burmese meditators with swelling, bleeding, mentioned by Piers M (3/13/15 11:05 PM); the soreness from gung-ho skiing or weight-lifting (any strenuous sport); in general "learning pains".

Cases (a) and (b) – s/t hard to know the difference, but clearly people (and animals) do face pain and extreme risk but jump into it anyway: e.g. saving one's offspring, or other heroic actions less related to personal/family self-interest.

Could be reframed then as a matter of priorities, or perhaps different sorts and levels of "reality"?

As to working with pain… and Buddhisttradition…

re: Dream Walker (3/12/15 11:08 AM as a reply to Chris J Macie.)
"The dissolving of the pain was an excellent exercise." …
"There is a post where Daniel talked about a certain sub jhana aspect that was very numbing and might be useful for anaesthesia"

And "…I'm wondering if acheiving any of the lower Jhanas would help relieve pain...?" (Travis Gene McKinstry 3/12/15 12:15 PM)

One might wonder at the definition of the traditional (Visudhimagga interpretation) '4th' jhana, as "beyond all pleasure and pain". (Daniel's post relates to that?)

Having some experience with 4th jhana (it's said to be quite a bit more difficult to get to than the 1st 3 levels), I can understand how that's true. Mastering (which I've yet to get far into) 4th jhana could conceivably provide the ability to overcome the experience of physiological pain at will, and at any intensity. And that mental control might extend to not only blocking the consciousness component, but also the physiological reflexes (e.g. sympathetic nervous system activation).

Anecdotally there is credible evidence.(Scientific validation I haven't seen, and it would be quite challenging to arrange any experimentation, ethically and practically.)

1) I think it was Than-Geof (Thanissaro Bhikku) who mentioned somewhere the case of one of his teachers, or at least some very advanced Thai Forest monk, who underwent serious surgery, and chose to use his own jhana faculty as the anesthesia; he asked how long the procedure would last, and then entered jhana (presumably 4th) for that specific amount of time (being able to pre-determine the length of absorptionis one of the traditional "5 masteries" of concentration). It turned out complications led to the procedure lasting longer than planned; the monk came out of absorption at the initially forecased duration, got another estimate as to the overall time, and promptly reprogrammed and rentered his jhanic state for that duration.(And probably avoided the rare but significant risks anesthesia side-/ after-effects.)

2) Remember the well publicized video-taped case of the Vietnamese monk who burned himself to death in Saigon during the Vietnamese war? I've watched that video many times, and it's clear that the monk's body remained in fully erect sitting posture for several minutes at the center of the blaze,without any indication of movement – conceivably up to the point that the fire so deeply damaged the body that muscular-skeletal control mechanisms failed (when it slumped over and fell).

The media didn't report it, but later history indicated that the American-supported South Vietnamese government was on the verge of purging Buddhism in the South (maybe as sympathizing with the enemy?), i.e. arrest and/or kill tens of thousands of monks in the next couple of days. So that particular monk who started off the self-immolations (others followed, if I recall) was not some fringe fanatic, but a highly advanced practitioner, who knew exactly what he was doing (the publicity did derail the government's plan), and exactly how to do it – possibly intentional parinibbana.

Anecdotal, as I mentioned, and open to skepticism; but considering the evidence and sources, my bet (as a trained historian) is that these cases could be verified.

The point is that advanced training (bhavanga) in Theravadan meditation techniques appears to have noteworthy capabilities of "working with pain." (Not Tao (3/12/15 5:04) adds other angles here, e.g. corpse meditations.)

What that might mean to "us"here, practically, is a different matter; but does support the notion– that's arguably one of the "core teachings" ala MCTB –of practice, practice, practice,…

re: Piers M (3/13/15 9:05 PM as a reply to Chris J Macie.)

"" just a thought re ankles ...i didnt do this but i observed that many who did the vassa intensive retreat ...ie doing the the 3 overnight consecutive sits of 16 hours .....well their ankles swelled ...from friction... and the skin came off ....bleeding etc ...watching ..as I was put on a different programme and a lot of judgment re their foolishness went through the mind but afterwards they told me that once this happens, you then never get any more ankle pain! .....and one said at first she felt burning in the ankles but this changed to emptiness ......"
Anyone else think this is a tad too extreme? Or are we just wimps? When I say we I mean generally Westerners who have had a rather pampered material existence.

She did also have this to say:
".....anyhow these thais and burmese have been sitting on hard floors probably before they could walk ...whereas probably most of us had soft matresses, soft furniture and never sat  on the floor ...until we came to meditation ...not really an even playing field ......"
Thoughts?"

Very interesting – thanks for that input. For years (since 2008) I went to "Insight Meditation" type retreats, though mostly focused on concentration (jhana), and noticed many people would build little temples of comfort around themselves – multiple pads, extra cushions, blankets,… And I was doing similar, to a lesser extent, but still had to have special props.

Then I started going to weekend retreats as a nearby monastery in a Vietnamese community, but with a live-in "sangha" of genuine Mahasi-lineage monks from Burma / Myanmar. (This place is actually closer than any of the IM retreats, and costs much much less: weekend retreats no cost; longer retreats $25/day – dana extra.) The mostly Vietnamese "yogis" do keep themselves warm, but always make do with the given simple single mats and cushions. Even at non-retreat ceremonies (e.g. vessak and vassa) the "devotees" or lay congregation, simply sit down, mostly cross-legged, on just a mat, or even on the hardwood, for 2 or 3 hours, even the kids. (The elders, in their 80s-90s, sit in chairs.)

So I started to experiment as to what degree of comfort was really necessary. It's still necessary to keep the toes from taking certain weight/pressure, which is quickly "unbearable" and have lasting negative side-effects (like 'corns'), but otherwise, with strong intention and persistence, pains come and go, but over shadowed by benefits, and don't hinder.

Reminds me of going skiing for a week or more (in younger years): for the first couple of days, agonizing soreness and weakness, but the excitement and motivation far greater, and from day 3 or so, no pain, and increasing strength. One learns skills to avoid certain things like bad blisters, but even those tend to disappear from awareness when one's at the top of the mountain about to take off downhill. (A German friend who taught me a lot used to say that the art of skiing is to go to the top, highest elevation, and then ski down in such a way (full-out) that when you get to the bottom, you've actually become "higher" – as in psycholdelic "high".)

This topic relates to 'asceticism', which is pretty much out of the question for Westerners. It's emphasized that G. Buddha found "the middle way between pleasure and asceticism", but being willing to undergo, to master acertain amount of asceticism, of pain and deprevation is still in the training, e.g. there's a section on it in the Visudhimagga. Otherwise there's a substantial, usually unrecognized (deluded) clinging to comfort that can limit progress.

Another point about the magic of persistent practice, so to speak: I first starting sitting-type meditation (at age 60's about 10 years ago, albeit in a HindhuKriya-Yoga tradition), it was on chairs. But, noting that most chairs, for most people, aren't really that ideal, tried the floor sitting. Very difficult, painful at first… but, easing into it gently and persistently, amazingly, can now do "taylor" leg-position, even ½ "lotus" relatively painfree, for up to 1.5-2 hours. Adaptability of the human body, and the benefits of well-informed practice are not to be underestimated!

re: Chuck Kasmire (3/13/15 4:48 PM as a reply to Chris J Macie.)
"What is now days called Medical Qigong has helped me and a number of people I know. Also reclining energy practices - like Reggie Ray teaches (examples). Both are good for chronic pain."

Do you mean helped by being a "patient" for "medical" qigong treatment -- which can be relatively passive – or/and practice / cultivation of exercises / forms?

What kind of pain? How long course of treatment? How long did results last? -- Don't mean to pry, but trying to get some practical specifics on the table here…

Footnote: Listening to parts of the Reggie Ray guided meditations, he starts off calling "breath at the tip-of-the-nose" meditation "shamatha", "which is mindfulness practice". Sounds strange from the vipassana perspective, which clearly de-stresses the 'samatha' (to use Pali pronounciation) aspect. But maybe it's a terminological convention in his background, which is Tibetan lineage?

re: Jack Hatfield (3/14/15 5:31 PM as a reply to Piers M.)

"Use a chair. I notice that a lot of yogis that have spent years in Southeast Asia  now use chairs. Joseph Goldstein is one. "

Apparently sometimes age-related. Pictures of ancient Asian monks, very skinny and very old, in full lotus probably only because they've spent the better part of 80-90 years doing it; and probably have some difficultly getting into and out of it. (I noticed that watching Sayadaw U. Pandita – the "elder" – at a vessak ceremony in 2013.)

A year prior to that, at a Spirit Rock retreat, Philip Moffit (close cohort of Jack Kornfield) was teaching and remarked that just recently his age and ailing knees had forced him to do chair sitting.

Flexibility can endure, but bones tend to get brittle and muscles to waste-away.

re: Laurel Carrington (3/15/15 11:17 AM as a reply to Chris J Macie.)

"2. Being awake and in pain is not much different from not being awake and in pain... It hurts just as much, the sense of fatigue is just as severe, and it is even possible to experience the side effect of depression. In general, however, the depression is something I experience as not-me, not-mine. It just is."

The fact that pain can be so draining (-> fatigue) is a good reason for trying to relieve it, or even "escape" from it. The sort of reflexive muscular (and mental/emotional) tension, as in "muscle-guarding", just costs further energy. Also perhaps the logical basis of the default pharmacological approach: pain-killers and muscle-relaxants. Depression as a side-effect is also logical, as insufficient 'physical' energy can't help but reflect in lessened mental/emotional energy. (This may not apply to "clinical" depression, which may have some independent organic basis.)

So then maybe techniques of "working with pain" might include:

a) cultivating strong motivation (desire and intention), some purpose to living and doing that taps deep strength and provides an alternative to just keeping to one's self, cornered with the pain. This may indirectly tie in with Laurel's 4th point -- that I'll paraphrase as a moral attitude; some compassionate purpose beyond one's own poor suffering little self (not referring to anyone's comments here).

b) trainings like the concentration that can seclude the mind from pain, enable a place where it's impervious to such sensations, without being drugged-out or otherwise mentally impared. (And has a track-record of co-relating with deepening insights that contribute to liberation from the suffering add-ons.)

Stephen Levine had a way of aptly putting this: when pain becomes "the pain", rather than "my pain", then space opens up which is much larger than the confinement of "my" pain, in which the pain floats… Sounds mystical (Levine was also a master writer and poet), but actually stems from observations of the experiences of the thousands of people he (together with his wife, Ondrea) worked with, over several decades, in helping them work with dying and death. (Aside from starting off as a beatnik poet in San Francisco, he also was a student and colleague of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.)

btw: Laural, your original statement (2. awake + pain ~= not awake + pain) is rhetorically meant? Awake doesn't per se reduce pain? It would seem that your other statements indicate that being awake does make a difference (beyond the matter of pain)?

Once a month I do a 2 hour sit without moving (using a chair). For several reasons I have always avoided the jhanas and stick, especailly in this case, to vipassana. I have one leg pain that starts up at about the 1 hour and 15 minute mark. None of the instructions about seeing it change, notice its shape and color, etc., work for me. I do watch the thoughts and resistance that arise. The pain doesn't change but its relationship to "me" does.

Shinzen Young was asked about some of the extreme practices he does that cause him a lot of pain. He responded that he saw his father spend the last weeks of his life in extreme pain. Shinzen says that he is preparing himself for the eventuality of his possibly going through the same thing. Then he was asked if he could withstand extreme torture such as use of a blow tourch, pulling out finger nails and so on. Shinzen said yes he could deal with it for about 6 months (I might have this nuimber wrong but it was at least 6 months) but no longer.

jack.

Personally, I'm not against the use of a chair and when on retreat do so from time to time. However, some Burmese would see this as avoidance of pain. They want you to confront the painful vedana directly as part of the practice.

One Burmese teacher (Ven. Sayadaw U Pannananda) at MBMC couple of years ago criticised me for using a chair (just so happened he walked by when I was) despite fact other 6 sits I was on the floor mat. Then again he was critical of the use of cushions too. He was very uncompromising and unsympathetic to Westerners ways IMO.

Sayadaw U Pandita said in a Dhamma talk that fear of pain at its root is fear of death itself.


Anyone familiar with the Sunlun Way in Burma?

(See here: http://www.sunlun.com/EXPNOTES.html if you want to read the whole article)

This is an excerpt from their webpage:

"Therefore, if you are a beginner or one who has not yet started vipassana (insight meditation), do not be alarmed by some of the questions which seem to indicate that the Sunlun way is full of pain.  It is not the Sunlun method that causes the pain, but the bad and unwholesome past deeds of the meditator which causes pain to arise in him.  There are broadly two classes of meditators – firstly, those who have the kind of good karma which leads to sukha padipada (easy Path) and secondly, those who have the kind of bad karma that leads to dukkha padipada (difficult or painful Path).  But the majority belongs to the second class.

         Both classes of meditators can surely and successfully reach the stage of sottapanna in a ‘short’ time, though what is meant by ‘short’ in turn depends upon his karma.  Some have been successful within a period of just ten days of full-time meditation, but we must remember that they were studious enough to have performed ninety percent or more of the necessary vipassana practice in their previous lives.  Those who have not yet fulfilled the required vipassana (insight) in order to attain sottapanna and later stages up to Nibbana will, of course, have to meditate longer.

         Irrespective of whether a person takes a long time or a short time to reach Nibbana, there is also the difference in how easy or how painful the path will be, as pointed out above, depending on that person’s previous good and bad deeds.  For example, persons who have caused great pain and many deaths to other creatures or beings (including human beings and animals) in this and previous lives will normally have to tread the painful path (dukkha padipada).  It does not matter what system of meditation they follow, they will have to suffer, according to the universal law of cause and effect, the same pain that they caused to others.  Until thesekarmic wrong doings have been eliminated, they cannot pass over to the stage of sottapanna (the other side of the stream).  Once a person has become a sottapan, that person will no longer be born in the Four Woeful States (apaya) — those of animals, ghosts, demons and hell.  For this to happen, the pre-requisite is that thekarmic unwholesome deeds which would normally send one to these Four Woeful States have to be all eliminated through vipassana practice."

Hey Piers,

That passage you quoted is interesting.  The Buddha specifically argued against this kind of reasoning on Vulture Peak while talking to the ascetics who practiced self-mortification and endurance.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.014.than.html

Many Buddhist, as well as other mystics throughout history, have a kind of addiction to pain - possibly because acceptance of pain can lead to blissful states and great releases that feel like progress. I've made this same mistake myself in the past, so I feel justified in saying that it's a bad route to take. I think a teacher's time would be better spent encouraging people than criticising their use of a chair. Meditation can be difficult enough on its own without persistent back and knee pain.

Pain is the body's way of signalling that something may be wrong. So I think if we want to honor the body and practice the middle way, we should care for it diligently. Ignoring pain could land a person with untreated cancer or, in my case, arthritis. There's no sense in being a martyr.

That being said, there's a lot of pain that's more of the nuisance variety than a real threat to one's wellbeing. So we should practice awareness. And yes, I use a chair. I feel plenty of pain even in the chair with a meditation retreat.

I mean having a regular practice as I don’t have experience of receiving treatment. By regular, I mean at least 30 min. a day. There are many studies out there that look at the effectiveness of these techniques (Qigong, Taichi, etc.) for various sorts of pain, balance, release of stress. Over the years I have known quite a few people that have done these kinds of practice and the common benefits include various aches and pains disappearing as well as a general sense of well being and vitality. This has been true for myself also.

Footnote: Listening to parts of the Reggie Ray guided meditations, he starts off calling "breath at the tip-of-the-nose" meditation "shamatha", "which is mindfulness practice". Sounds strange from the vipassana perspective, which clearly de-stresses the 'samatha' (to use Pali pronounciation) aspect. But maybe it's a terminological convention in his background, which is Tibetan lineage?

Yes, probably does sound strange - I don’t get the sense that consistency of terminology has ever been a priority among Buddhist traditions. But he gives details of the practice so anyone can follow it if they can get beyond their views on what these terms mean :-)

re: Piers M (3/16/15 10:21 PM as a reply to Jack Hatfield.)
"Anyone familiar with the Sunlun Way in Burma?"

re: Not Tao (3/17/15 12:05 AM as a reply to Piers M. )
"That passage you quoted is interesting.  The Buddha specifically argued against this kind of reasoning on Vulture Peak while talking to the ascetics who practiced self-mortification and endurance."

What GB argued against and for (in the Cula-dukkhakkhandha Sutta) might be more subtle. The Jain (Niganthan) position was:
"…Niganthas, there are evil actions that you have done in the past. Exhaust them with these painful austerities…"That is that kamma / conditioning is to be overcome by austerities/asceticism, by practicethat intentionally creates pain.

The Sunlun position (from the quotations cited by Piers M) states:
"It is not the Sunlun method that causes the pain,…"
"Until these karmic wrong doings have been eliminated, they cannot pass over to the stage of sottapanna (the other side of the stream)."

This does not imply asceticism, but that kamma / conditioning must be overcome, in action here & now and onwards; and the text mentions the ease of achieving this is conditioned (by the past) and evidenced in the differences between individual capabilities. One needs to overcome conditioning, modify behavior patterns. Doing so may incur 'pain' (e.g. "DN"?), but it's not sought out for the sake of pain (asceticism). (And this line of reasoning is independent of whether kamma / conditioning must involve "past lives / rebirth" or not.)

G. Buddha summarizes his questioning (Cula-dukkhakkhandha Sutta, again):
"'So, friends [the Naganthans], it seems that you don't know that you existed (or not) in the past, … that you did (or not) evil actions in the past, … that so-and-so much stress has (or not) been exhausted, … what is the abandoning of unskillful mental qualities and the attainment of skillful mental qualities in the here-&-now."

He's not commenting on austerities/asceticism per se (at least here). He's pointing out that the Niganthans are in the dark (deluded) about at just about every step of their belief system, and culminating in the last clause (what is skill in the hear & now) – i.e. how really to overcome kamma / conditioning, which is GB's area of speciality.

"Many Buddhist, as well as other mystics throughout history, have a kind of addiction to pain - possibly because acceptance of pain can lead
to blissful states and great releases that feel like progress."

Apparently so, as Than-Geof points out (footnote 6 in his translation of the Cula-dukkhakkhandha Sutta – "In some circles, a teaching similar to this one — that non-reactivity to pain burns away the impurity of past kamma and creates no new kamma for the future — is still taught as Buddhist to this day.").

Again, though, the middle way here is subtle: The essential point is to overcome past kamma / conditioning such that one's behavior (bodily, verbal, mental) here&now etc. doesn't make more of it. (Even for arahants, the past kamma will still play out, affect the external aspects of their lives, passively, so to speak, but they're not adding to it, moving it forward.) The path to that does imply developing non-reactivity, but not by intentionally creating pain as the object. Being human (body) will of itself incur enough pain to work with.

To turn it around ("Many Buddhist… have a kind of addiction to pain…"), modern Westerners, it has been argued, are addicted to avoiding pain (see a following post citing anthropological research). To what extent that implies "addicted to pleasure" is again subtle. An interpretation (of the cited research) could be that trying to banish pain from living also leads to numbness to the pleasure ofliving.

Also, austerity is not the same as masochistic asceticism. A subtle dissonance between GB's teaching and modern Western interpretations (preferences) is that GB clearly recommended austerity for those dedicated to living and teaching his way (renunciates – e.g. having just a bowl, simple robes made from rags, medicine, and shelter vs the elements), though not necessarily for all who follow it (lay people). Western Buddhist modernists (secularist, pragmatists,…) are experimenting with the notion that that sense of austerity was a culture-bound artifact of Indic civilization, and that people today can reach comparable heights of attainment and teaching in the context of their own culture-bound preferences. History will tell if any sustainable and substantive"tradition" emerges from this.

So thanks, folks, for the many perspectives here.

1) This week I ran across the latest copy of Mindful magazine (April 2015 issue), head-lining "Finding Relief from Chronic Pain" ("Trapped In the box We call PAIN" by Christiane Wolf, pp 70-76). E.g.:
"Chronic pain affects more people in the US than diabetes, heart disease, and cancer combined: more than 100 million adults. More than have of them feel they have little or no control over the pain…"

Overall the article goes through the basics, much of which has also been voiced here. And overall it's authoritative (the author is a former MD, German educated), although s/w mushroomy (the author is currently a MBSR teacher and Spirit-Rock teacher-trainee).

yawn… Noticing that how what we've said here (at least speaking for myself), is not that adventuresome. On the other hand…

2) Quite startling was finding a paper titled "Acute Pain Infliction As Therapy," by one Elizabeth Hsu (2005) -- down-loadable at:
https://sites.google.com/site/elisabethhsupublications/publications

She's a medical anthropologist focusing a lot on traditional Chinese medicine – I'd read her published dissertation, which is landmark in the field. This paper keys-off the use of "pain" (inaccurate translation of the Chinese terms used) in acupuncture therapy, but goes far beyond that, into cross-cultural comparisons beyond Chinese and Western, and into urgent issues in modern society.

Some quotations to give a taste:

"Based on an anthropological definition of acute versus chronic pain, this essay suggests that life cycle events typically structure intrinsically (or potentially) painful situations into acute pain events. Concluding, this essay suggests that in medicalised societies the decline of acute pain events in life cycle rituals has led to the silent rise of chronic pain syndromes."

"It is interesting to note that pain affects one’s perceptual and cognitive faculties and alters them; or, as some put it, even enhances them. One becomes capable of ‘seeing’:…"

"… acute pain evokes ‘presence’ and alerts one’s ‘sensory attentiveness’. ..The most crucial fact about pain is its presentness."

"… pain is hard to put into words and that chronic pain alienates the person from the environment, to the effect that ‘After a While No One Believes You’. .. this does not apply to acute pain. In contrast to chronic pain, acute pain is easily, rapidly, and extremely efficiently communicated from one to the other…."

"Acute pain is thus a state of being where the habitual centre of the ego is shaken and displaced – into the small finger, for instance – it decentres and thereby opens up the person beyond the habitual boundaries and limitations. Acute pain is acute for both the person in pain and those surrounding him or her, and it thus generates synchronicity, a situation in which all participants involved are acutely aware of only one single event and turn their full attention to it."

"… one’s experience of pain is a ‘perception’ rather than a ‘reflex’ or ‘sensation’ has been convincingly demonstrated through sociological studies of pain... pain is not a ‘reflex’ or ‘sensation’ but a complex ‘perception’ with a more or less strong emotional component. It is shaped by culture, gender, age, status, et cetera, apart from personal disposition."

"Chronic pain belongs among the most frequent reasons for disablement in the United States and the European Union (Kleinman et al. 1992).5 No doubt, ‘chronic pain’, like ‘PTSD’ (Young 1995), is one of these cultural constructs of societies in the northern hemisphere that due to globalisation processes are reified also in other cultural settings. However, regardless of whether they are cultural constructs or not, and whether they are indefinable due to their diversity or not, the lived experience of the peculiarly changeable sort of pain known as ‘chronic pain’ is real. Medical anthropologists have amply documented this."

"According to Illich: Progress in civilization became synonymous with the reduction of the sum total of suffering. From then on, politics was taken to be an activity not so much for maximizing happiness as for minimizing suffering. … In this context it now seems rational to flee pain rather than to face it, even at the cost of giving up intense aliveness. It seems reasonable to eliminate pain, even at the cost of losing independence. … With rising levels of induced insensitivity to pain, the capacity to experience the simple joys and pleasures of life has equally declined. Increasingly stronger stimuli are needed to provide people in an anaesthetic society with any sense of being alive. Drugs, violence and horror remain the only stimuli that can still elicit an experience of self (1976:106)."

"In medicalised societies acute pain is not openly displayed. Great efforts are made to suppress it whenever it surfaces – with the compartmentalisation of suffering into institutions that make death and protracted illness invisible to daily life and with pain killers that reinforce the imperative of individual autonomy. However, pain manifests itself in the silently increasing chronic pain syndromes. Interestingly, this overt versus covert expression of pain parallels that of the power of government. As power is no longer displayed in a spectacle of inflicting gruesome pain in punishment, but has become invisible (Foucault 1975), acute pain episodes are rarely played out in temporally structured life cycle events. Yet people increasingly suffer from peculiarly unregulated temporally unstructured chronic pain syndromes. Chronic pain syndromes, which result in the complete isolation of the individual, are bound to reinforce the currently observed fragmentation of medicalised societies. By contrast, acute pain events in life cycle rituals make possible the embodied experience of social cohesion, which indirectly may strengthen the health of all
participants...."

Hi NT & Chris: you're both far more versed on the suttas than I am. Perhaps you know the exact sutta this exchange comes from?

I have a Thai  &  English book in front of me called "Buddhawajana Revealing the hidden Dhamma".

Chapter 6 " Considering the practice of austerity " strangely does not pinpoint the sutta, just says its a translation by Bhikkhu Bodhi from the Anguttara Nikaya. It concerns a householder called Vajjiamahita speaking with a group of ascetics who say to him:

"Is it true householder, as it is said, that the ascetic Gotoma criticised all austerities and that he unreservedly condemns and reproves all who live a harsh life and austere life?"

To which he responds " No Bhante, the Blessed one does not criticise all austerities and he does not unreservedly condemn and reprove all who live a harsh and austere life. The Blessed One criticizes what deserves criticism and praises what is praiseworthy. By criticising what deserves criticism and praising what is praiseworthy, the Blessed One speaks on the basis of distinctions; he does not speak about such matters one-sidedly".

Which seems to suggest to me that sometimes austere practices are okay. But it's very much on a case by case basis and should not be applied as a blanket approach to all and sundry...

This is the link:
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an10/an10.094.than.html

re: Piers M(3/21/15 4:19 AM as a reply to Not Tao.)
"…the exact sutta this exchange comes from? … translation by Bhikkhu Bodhi from the Anguttara Nikaya…"

In Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation of the AN at hand, there's an "Index of Proper Names" at the back where one can look; for "Vajjiyamahita" there's cited one place where the name just appears in a list, and reference to pp 1467-70.

At the top of p. 1468 appears that text Piers M quoted, where Vajjiyamahita is answering challenging questions from "wanderers of other sects". Also, at the top of p.1469 is the passage below, where G. Buddha responds when Vajjiyamahita asks him about those questions:

"If… when one practices a particular austerity, unwholesome qualitites increase and wholesome qualities decline, then, I say, one should not practice such austerity. But, if, when one practices a particular austerity, unwholesome qualities decline and wholesome qualities increase, then, I say, one should practice such austerity."

Than-Geof's translation (thanks, Chuck Kasmire, I usually prefer Than-Geof's translations for their more vivid use of English):
"If, when an asceticism is pursued, unskillful qualities grow and skillful qualities wane, then I tell you that that sort of asceticism is not to be pursued. But if, when an asceticism is pursued, unskillful qualities wane and skillful qualities grow, then I tell you that that sort of asceticism is to be pursued."

Then follow paragraphs with exactly the same structure, but for the cases:
"when one undertakes a particular observance…",
"when one strives in a particular way…",
"when one relinquishes something…", and
"when one attains a particular liberation..."

So, it does follow a pattern generally found in G. Buddha's purported teachings, which is (to borrow from Than-Geof's pointing this out in various talks) that, at least sometimes, he didn't so much teach this or that specific or exact practice, but rather principles (aka heuristics) on how to figure-out for oneself when a practice is in the right direction or not.