The Pyramid Power

Winner of the Golden Spire Award at the 1998 San Francisco International Film Festival, this extraordinary documentary takes viewers into India’s largest prison – known as one of the toughest in the world – and shows the dramatic change brought about by the introduction of Vipassana meditation.

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Doing Time, Doing Vipassana – part 1/5

Doing Time, Doing Vipassana – part 2/5

Doing Time, Doing Vipassana – part 3/5

Doing Time, Doing Vipassana – part 4/5

Doing Time, Doing Vipassana – part 5/5

Vipassanā (Pāli) or vipaśyanā (विपश्यना, Sanskrit) in the Buddhist tradition means insight into the nature of reality. A regular practitioner of Vipassana is known as a Vipassi (vipasya).

In the Theravadin context, this entails insight into the three marks of existence. In Mahayana contexts, it entails insight into what is variously described as sunyata, dharmata, the inseparability of appearance and emptiness, clarity and emptiness, or bliss and emptiness.[1] Vipassana is one of Asia’s most ancient techniques of meditation, attributed to Gautama Buddha. It is a way of self-transformation through self-observation and introspection. In English, vipassanā meditation is often referred to simply as “insight meditation”.

In a broader sense, vipassanā has been used as one of two poles for the categorization of types of Buddhist meditation, the other being samatha (Pāli; Sanskrit: śamatha). Samatha is a focusing, pacifying and calming meditation, common to many traditions in the world, notably yoga. It is used as a preparation for vipassanā, pacifying the mind and strengthening the concentration in order to allow the work of insight. This dichotomy is also sometimes discussed as “stopping and seeing.” In Buddhist practice it is said that, while samatha can calm the mind, only insight can reveal how the mind was disturbed to start with, which leads to prajñā (Pāli: paññā, wisdom) and jñāna (Pāli: ñāṇa, knowledge) and thus understanding, preventing it from being disturbed again.

The term is also used to refer to the Buddhist vipassana movement (modeled after Theravāda Buddhism meditation practices), which employs vipassanā and ānāpāna meditation as its primary techniques and places emphasis on the teachings of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. The primary initial subject of investigation in that style of meditation is sensation and feeling (Skt: Vedanā).

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “Vipassanā”

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