Meditation

The teaching

As the meditation tradition of the Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Sufi and Stoic schools teaches it.

A mind that can be trained

The first teaching, before any method, is that the mind as it stands is untrained, and that it can be trained. The Buddha says that he knows of nothing so unwieldy as a mind left undeveloped, and nothing so ready for work as a mind that has been developed. The Dhammapada calls the mind flickering and unsteady, hard to guard and hard to hold back, and says that the wise make it straight as a fletcher straightens an arrow.

The untrained mind is restless rather than bad. The Buddha calls the mind luminous, stained only by what comes to visit it, and he likens its restlessness to a monkey in a forest, which lets go of one branch only to seize the next. Abba Moses, in the first of John Cassian's Conferences, likens it to a millstone turned by running water: it cannot stop grinding, but the miller decides whether it grinds wheat or darnel. So the work is not to stop thought, which no one can do, but to choose, again and again, what the mind works on.

The Stoics give this care a name of their own, prosoche, attention to oneself. Epictetus warns his students that attention once let go is not simply taken up again at will, because every lapse lays down a habit of not attending, and the next lapse comes more easily. Meditation is the daily exercise of that attention: kept short, and kept up.

Remembering

The old languages name this attention with words for remembering. Sati, the Pali word put into English as mindfulness, comes from the word for memory: to be mindful is to keep in mind what one is doing while one does it, and not to forget it. Dhikr, the Sufis' word for their practice, means remembrance. The Greek teachers of the Eastern Church speak of the remembrance of God and of nepsis, watchfulness, the guard kept over the heart. In each of these the trained mind is the one that does not forget.

Buddhaghosa's great manual, the Path of Purification, takes a moment of attention apart. First the mind is set down on its object, which is called vitakka, and then it is kept there, which is called vicara. The setting down is like the striking of a bell and the keeping like its ringing; or the first is a bird beating its wings to rise, and the second the bird gliding on wings spread wide. For a beginner most of a sitting is the first, the mind set down again and again. When it has gone, the noticing is mindfulness coming back, and the attention is set down once more without scolding, as gently the hundredth time as the first.

The four foundations

The Buddha's discourse on the foundations of mindfulness names the four fields in which this attention is trained. The first is the body: the breath, the postures, the ordinary acts of the day and the parts of the body. The second is feeling, the pleasant, unpleasant or neutral tone of whatever is felt. The third is the mind itself, known as it is, gathered or scattered, troubled or at ease. The fourth is experience as the teaching sorts it, among other things into the hindrances, the senses and the factors of awakening.

Most of the practices on this page stand in these fields. Resting on the breath and walking practice belong to the first. The body scan moves from the first into the second, meeting each sensation as pleasant, unpleasant or neither. The five hindrances that carry a sitter away belong to the fourth, and the page on the breath names them and shows how they are met.

Calm and insight

The Buddha names two things that meditation grows. Samatha is calm, the mind gathered on one thing until it is quiet and steady. Vipassana is insight, the mind seeing clearly how whatever it meets arises, changes and passes. Calm, he says, develops the mind and lets passion go; insight develops wisdom and lets ignorance go. What insight sees, the teaching puts in three words: anicca, impermanence; dukkha, the unease of what cannot last; and anatta, not self, since nothing so seen is a self or belongs to one.

The manuals differ on the order, and both orders are kept. Some build calm first, through long concentration on one object, and turn to insight afterwards. Others, like the Burmese schools that note each step and each sensation, turn to insight from the first sitting, with only as much calm as the noting needs. The Buddha's disciple Ananda teaches that calm may come first, or insight first, or the two together, yoked like a pair of oxen.

The Christian contemplatives draw a different line. Meditation, for them, is the mind at work on a passage of Scripture, turning it over; contemplation is the rest that comes beyond the words, received rather than made, and the monks' sacred reading climbs from the one to the other, as the page on contemplative prayer teaches. The Stoic review is another kind again: the mind turned on its own judgements and deeds, to set the next day right.

Good conduct comes first

The old schools do not teach meditation as a technique apart from a life. The Buddhist path is a threefold training, in good conduct, in concentration and in wisdom, and the Path of Purification takes the three in that order. The Buddha gives the reason as a chain. Good conduct leaves nothing to regret; freedom from regret brings gladness; gladness brings joy, joy brings calm, calm brings ease, and a mind at ease gathers of itself.

For a lay follower that conduct is five precepts: not to kill, not to steal, not to commit sexual misconduct, not to lie, and not to cloud the mind with drink or drugs. The desert monks set the practice of the virtues before contemplation in the same way, and the Sufis say there is no path without the law. A reader need not belong to any of them to take the point: a day lived honestly, kindly and moderately makes for a quieter sitting, and the sitting shows the day more plainly.

One thing to rest on

Buddhaghosa's manual counts forty subjects of meditation, among them the breath, the parts of the body, a disc of earth or of colour, the qualities of the Buddha, death, and loving kindness towards all beings, and it has the teacher fit the subject to the pupil's temperament. Whatever the subject, the mind is given one thing at a time. A beginner is best served by something plain and always to hand: the breath where it is easiest to feel, the soles of the feet, one short word.

The breath has a place of honour. The Buddha called mindfulness of breathing his own dwelling, the way he most often spent a retreat, and Zen halls and Burmese centres alike begin with it. It is always present, it moves with the mind, and nothing needs to be added to it. Keep the same object for some weeks before trying another; a practice changed every morning has no time to deepen.

The seat, the time and the tone

A student begins with a place, a time and a short period. The place is a chair or a cushion somewhere quiet enough. The time is one that can be kept every day, after waking perhaps, or before the evening meal. The period is five to ten minutes, with a timer, so that the clock is no concern. Coming back each day matters more than sitting long, and the length can grow later.

The body sits upright and at ease, the back free of the chair, the hands resting, the eyes lowered or closed, and the breath goes at its own pace, never held or forced; the seat is taught in full on the page for the breath. At the end the meditator stays a few moments more, notices how the mind is, and gets up slowly.

The tone matters as much as the seat. Buddhaghosa asks for the faculties to be kept in balance: faith with understanding, so that trust is not blind and thought is not cunning; energy with concentration, so that the mind neither races nor drowses; and mindfulness everywhere, like salt in every dish. Zen teachers ask for a beginner's mind, open and expecting nothing. No school asks a beginner to chase an experience, and those that describe lights, sweetness or bliss along the way warn the meditator not to cling to them.

Hindrances and hard places

The Buddhist teachers name five hindrances that carry a sitter away: longing for pleasant things, ill will, dullness and drowsiness, restlessness and worry, and doubt. They are met by name when they come. The desert monks knew the restless misery of the cell as acedia, the noonday demon, and answered it by staying, with a little work for the hands. These are the ordinary troubles of practice, and they are sat through with patience.

Another kind of trouble is not to be sat through. For some people silence stirs panic, a pounding heart, a flood of memory or a sense that the body or the room has gone unreal. That is a sign to stop: open the eyes, feel the feet on the floor, stand, move and speak to someone, and on another day sit for less time, with the eyes open. Both kinds are taught on their own page, When sitting is hard, which is worth reading before the first sitting and not only after a hard one.

Attention through the day

The sitting is training for the rest of the day. The Buddha's discourse asks for clear knowing in every ordinary act: in looking ahead and looking away, in bending and stretching, in dressing, eating, drinking and tasting, in walking, standing, sitting, falling asleep and waking, in speaking and in keeping silent. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches it over the washing up: the dishes are washed in order to wash the dishes, and not only to have them clean.

The Naqshbandi Sufis keep rules for the same watch: awareness in every breath, the eyes on one's own steps, and solitude in the crowd, alone with God among people. In the gloss on its first lines, the Jewish code of law asks a person to keep in mind, at every moment, before whom they stand. Brother Lawrence, a Carmelite lay brother set to work in his monastery's kitchen, taught that the time of work need not differ from the time of prayer. A minute of attention at the sink, the door or the kettle carries the sitting into the day.

The practices on this page

The six branches below are six ways into one training. Resting on the breath is the plainest and the usual first, with the seat, the counting and the wandering mind taught in full. The body scan widens the same attention into the body, place by place. Walking practice keeps it while the body moves, for days when sitting brings sleep or stillness stirs too much.

Contemplative prayer is the same return to a single word, made by one who prays within a faith and said to God; a reader with no faith is better served by the breath. The evening review turns the attention on the day itself before sleep, with the Stoics and with Ignatius of Loyola. When sitting is hard stands beside all of them. A beginner takes one practice for a few weeks before adding a second.