Or at the very least doesn’t mean what St. John of the Cross means by it.
When I took ascetical theology in seminary, my professor told us that if someone comes to you and says they’re undergoing the Dark Night, they probably aren’t. (Unless you for some reason happen to be the spiritual director of a contemplative order, but even then.) He wasn’t being flippant; it was just a recognition of the degree of spiritual progress needed even to arrive at that point.
It can be easy to confuse aridity or even unaddressed psychological issues for something like the Dark Night, but it does have a precise technical meaning in the mystical literature. It isn’t just “prayer is difficult for me right now.”
Well, vipassana meditation is just as intense as any other tradition of contemplative prayer.[0] Canonically the Dark Night happens soon after the first loose "hint" of stream entry or actual awakening/enlightenment, namely the second vipassana jhana, characterized by seeming effortlessness of insight (Daniel Ingram calls this the "Arising and passing away") and this should be enough to tell whether you're facing it.
[0] And yes, in case you didn't know, prayer is definitely a legitimate part of meditation, even going by Buddhist teachings - the typical metta/loving-kindness meditation is indistinguishable from a kind of prayer.
Arguably, a very legitimate role can even be recovered/reconstructed for outright theistic contemplative worship directed at the "Ultimate Self", essentially the Brahman of Hinduism - although this would of course reflect a very imperfect understanding of the Brahman, one way too error-prone for those who would seriously aim at enlightenment and unity with the Ultimate Self in this very lifetime. But nonetheless plenty enough to look forward to what's effectively an afterlife in the Pure Abodes realm as an anagami or "non-returner"! Hinduists in the "dualist" tradition, for all its imperfection, have of course always been aware of this as a possible path.
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that vipassana isn’t a serious and intense contemplative discipline. If I did, that certainly wasn’t my intent.
At least in St. John’s use of the term, it’s a spiritual and even existential desolation that leads ultimately to a radical purifying of love through the apophatic way. As such, it represents a fairly advanced stage in the spiritual life. I’m not sure if this is the same way the term is used in the vipassana tradition (making the necessary accommodations for the translation needed to take a Christian mystical concept and import it into that tradition).
Yes, this can be directly paralleled with the jhana of equanimity, which canonically follows the Dark Night. ("Equanimity" itself being the fourth vipassana jhana, whereas the "Dark Night" is essentially a feature of the transition from the second and/or third to the fourth vipassana jhana. The consistently "apophatic" character is hopefully clear enough from the very fact that it is understood as a transition stage between different degrees of insight.) Daniel Ingram's book on Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha does a very nice job of "decoding" the Buddhist tradition in very modern and understandable terms, and I'm not aware of people involved in the actual tradition who have raised any deep, substantive objections to the understanding he conveys.
(Note that "Dark Night" as applied to vipassana meditation is a modern term, but one that does reflect traditional understanding of the relevant jhanas-- the Buddhist traditional name is apparently "dukkha ñana", or "Knowledge of Suffering", and in the Vimuttimagga it is known, rather descriptively, as the stage of "fear and disadvantage and disenchantment", followed by "delight in deliverance and equanimity". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassan%C4%81-%C3%B1%C4%81%E1... It was not the result of forcefully "importing" something that came from outside, but rather of carefully drawing empirically-sensible parallels between the two traditions.)
Fascinating. I will check out Ingram’s book. This sounds like an interesting and fruitful appropriation of the mystical term. Thanks for the explanation!
AIUI, it seems that Daniel Ingram has cautiously endorsed the work of well-known Christian mystic Bernadette Roberts as potentially a useful take on stream entry/enlightenment and related things from a theistic, and specifically Christian tradition.
(I'd like to stress the point that no matter what one's stance on the basic question of theism - which to be fair, is only ever referenced very obliquely by Buddhism, with very obscure paraphrases such as "Buddha-Nature"; perhaps out of wishing to avert conflation with the much more clearly theistic-leaning Hinduist tradition - it's clear enough to me that such a well established tradition as Christian contemplative prayer has to be doing something useful for its practitioners, and it makes sense to ask ourselves what might be happening there, and how it might work at a basic level!)
Fairly extensive sections of the Tipitaka deal with the existence and nature of superhuman beings and attribute Hindu explicitly theist beliefs to encounters with them. I don't think it's true that Buddhism only ever references it very obliquely or that it conflates deities with the Buddha-nature. But my understanding is very limited, so you could be right.
I think it's true that Christian contemplative prayer does something useful for its practitioners, but not for the reason you give. Your argument rests on a flawed premise: minimally, that any tradition at least as well established as Christian contemplative prayer does something useful for its practitioners. Traditions better established include alcoholism, contracting sexually transmitted diseases, and death. Your argument would prove that all three of these traditions also do something useful for their practitioners, but I think almost everyone would disagree with regard to at least one of them.
