This was in the works before Ethan Nichtern’s recent allusion to Proust, but I think it’s an appropriate follow-up.
In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, dathün is the word for a month-long session of practice in retreat. In the Shambhala community to which I belong, dathüns have been an essential part of the path of practice since the first one was held in 1972. In our context, the core of dathün practice is always simple shamatha, with the cycles of the breath as the primary object of meditation. As the great scholars Kamalashila and Jamgön Kongtrul outlined, shamatha practice is intended to further the development of a pliant, supple, workable mind.

What might one expect in the course of that process? Recently I’ve been reading the work of Marcel Proust, and I came across the following in a reader review of In Search of Lost Time on Amazon:

His work has attuned me to the importance of paying attention, resisting the dulling effects of habit, slowing down, finding meaning in the ordinary rhythms of life, accepting the painful inevitabilities of existence, laughing at my own foibles.
I’ve never read a better description of the dathün experience. Indeed, reading In Search of Lost Time very much recalls the dathün experience for me. Hopelessly boring for long stretches, but boredom with the potential to settle and pacify and become “cool boredom,” which, in The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation, Trungpa Rinpoche describes as “refreshing boredom, boredom like a mountain stream.” Rinpoche continues, “there must be some sense of discipline if we are to get beyond the frivolity of trying to replace boredom . . . As we realize that nothing is happening, strangely we begin to realize that something dignified is happening. There is no room for frivolity, no room for speed. We just breathe and are there. There is something very satisfying and wholesome about it.”
It is certainly taking me a lot of discipline and exertion to maintain the level of attention needed to stay with Proust’s sentences, as he strings together more subclauses than I would have thought possible. But as I read in the park on my lunch break, I’m finding that it’s the perfect anecdote to the way I’m accustomed to reading most of the time (and the state of mind engendered thereby). As refreshing as a mountain stream to be sure. And, in a further dathün parallel, it’s even taking me a month of steady effort to get through Swann’s Way.
While the process of reading Proust involves shamatha discipline, the novel itself mirrors the mind observable in meditation—one encounters long, discursive digressions occasionally punctuated by penetrating, ripe insight. The narrator spends a considerable amount of time reliving various slights, faux pas, and fantasies. Anyone who has meditated recognizes this all too well. But he also slows down enough to see his world very precisely and with great appreciation—glimpses of vipashyana, in Buddhist terms.
Having resolved to read for a certain duration of time, I found myself checking my watch with anticipation, hoping it was time to stop. Until the drama finally got started, that is—now I’ve worked up some enthusiasm. Nonetheless, I’m not planning to sit another dathün anytime soon, and neither am I gearing up to read In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.