Our Way

You may think that if there is no purpose or no goal in our practice, we will not know what to do. But there is a way. The way to practice without having any goal is to limit your activity, or to be concentrated on what you are doing in this moment. Instead of having some particular object in mind, you should limit your activity. When your mind is wandering about elsewhere you have no chance to express yourself. But if you limit your activity to what you can do just now, in this moment, then you can express fully your true nature, which is the universal Buddha nature. This is our way.

When we practice zazen we limit our activity to the smallest extent. Just keeping the right posture and being concentrated on sitting is how we express the universal nature. Then we become Buddha, and we express Buddha nature. So instead of having some object of worship, we just concentrate on the activity which we do in each moment. When you bow, you should just bow; when you sit, you should just sit; when you eat, you should just eat. If you do this, the universal nature is there.

~Shunryu Suzuki, in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Meditation

The practice of zazen is not for gaining a mystical something. Zazen is for developing—or allowing—a clear mind, as clear as a bright autumn sky.

~Shunryu Suzuki

Meditation Off the Cushion

Cooks enact the Buddhist Way by rolling up their sleeves and getting to work.

~Eihei Dogen

Presence

Gently notice when your mind drifts into the elsewhere and the elsewhen.

When you are not here and now, you are likely lost in imagination, worry, wish, or rehashing.

Simply and gently notice this.

Buddhist Meditation

Buddhist meditation is not intended to induce some special mystical state. Buddhist meditation is a tool to help us experience clearly and to its fullest extent whatever it is we're experiencing at any given moment.

Emptiness

Perhaps our first glimpse of emptiness in meditation is the recognition that our thoughts are not actually "real."

~David Nichtern

Awareness Meditation

Being aware of everything without being involved in anything.

Right Mindfulness

With the practice of mindfulness awareness is applied at a special pitch. The mind is deliberately kept at the level of bare attention, a detached observation of what is happening within us and around us in the present moment. In the practice of right mindfulness the mind is trained to remain in the present, open, quiet, and alert, contemplating the present event. All judgments and interpretations have to be suspended, or if they occur, just registered and dropped. The task is simply to note whatever comes up just as it is occurring, riding the changes of events in the way a surfer rides the waves on the sea. The whole process is a way of coming back into the present, of standing in the here and now without slipping away, without getting swept away by the tides of distracting thoughts.

Bhikkhu Bodhi, in The Noble Eightfold Path

Clarity of Vision

Buddhist practice and philosophy offer powerful hope. Buddhism isn't alone in this promise. There are other spiritual traditions that address the human predicament with insight and wisdom. But Buddhist meditation, along with its underlying philosophy, addresses that predicament in a strikingly direct and comprehensive way. Buddhism offers an explicit diagnosis of the problem and a cure. And the cure, when it works, brings not just happiness but clarity of vision: the actual truth about things, or at least something way, way closer to that than our everyday view of them.

~Robert Wright, in What Buddhism is True

Self-Awareness

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a meditation teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, has said, "Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them." What he meant is that if you want to liberate yourself from the parts of the mind that keep you from realizing true happiness, you have to first become aware of them, which can be unpleasant.

~Robert Wright, in Why Buddhism is True

A Radical Promise

At the heart of Buddhism is a simple claim: The reason we suffer—and the reason we make other people suffer—is that we don't see the world clearly. At the heart of Buddhist meditative practice is a radical promise: we can learn to see the world, including ourselves, more clearly, and so gain a deep and morally valid happiness.

~Inside flap of the dust jacket of Why Buddhism is True, by Robert Wright

Zen Meditation

In Zen meditation we think nonthinking—that is, we think nothing. What this means is that our whole psychological mind ceases to function, and as a result, our whole being becomes united with the essence of mind. You call this essence the God within you, Absoluteness, Ultimate Reason—it doesn't matter. No matter what you call it, to unite with this essence is the very reason we meditate together.

~Nyogen Senzaki 

Meditation

If a town is bothered by bandits, it must first find out where their hideout is located before it can deal with them. So, when a person is troubled by jealousy, anger, judgment, fear, bigotry, hatred, or any of the unwholesome emotions, they must first discover the origins.

When the origins are understood, they can be addressed.

The Liberation of Meditation

In Buddhist practice we come to know things through mindfulness, through nonjudgmental, moment-to-moment awareness. As we pay attention to sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and thoughts, we begin to see that they are just things that come and go. We begin to dis-identify with them, to not hold tightly but let them be. The realization that our thoughts are just something that is coming and going, that they are not ourselves, is often one of the most striking and liberating aspects people experience when they begin meditation.

~Ben Connelly, in Inside Vasubandhu's Yogacara

Meditation

Meditation is running into reality. It does not insulate you from the pain of life. It allows you to delve so deeply into life and all its aspects that you pierce the pain barrier and go beyond suffering.

~ Bhante Henepola Gunaratana

Meditation

In the practice of meditation, within the Buddhist tradition, we do not take up a passing thought, nor do we push it way. Both these actions are a form of involvement. In the practice of meditation we simple allow the thought (or emotion) to pass as a cloud passes a mountain top.

Easily said, difficult to do.

This is the practice.

Nirvana

The simple (though not necessarily easy) step of standing back and mindfully attending to one's experience rather than being uncritically overwhelmed with the imperatives of habitual thoughts and emotions can allow a glimpse of an inner freedom not to react to what one's mind is insisting that one do. The experience of such inner freedom, I would argue, is a taste of nirvana itself.

~Stephen Batchelor, in Secular Buddhism

The Mind and Its Clever Ace

To quote our Bengali saint, Sri Ramakrishna, if you go on saying you are a sinner, you become a sinner. There are people who suffer so much from a guilt complex that it hampers their spiritual progress. This is one of the cleverest aces the mind can play. "You, you are no good. You, what can you say for yourself?" This dismal refrain can be a serious obstacle to meditation, which is why the mind does it. To get angry with oneself and reject oneself is not helpful and is not what the Buddha teaches. The best thing is not to say either "I'm all good" or "I'm worthless; I'm no good." The best thing is not to think about oneself, not talk about oneself, not dwell upon oneself at all—to be neither overconfident nor self-deprecating.

~Eknath Easwaran, in Essence of the Dhammapada

Meditation

Meditation is more appropriately compared to the ongoing practice of an art rather than the development of a technical skill.

Meditation

The Pali Jhana, the Sanskrit Dhyana, the Chinese Ch'an, the Korean Seon, and the Japanese Zen all mean Meditation.

Meditation is a tool.

The Four Jhanas (Four Meditations) are tools:

1. The first jhana (meditation) is the rapture and pleasure born of seclusion from the five senses. The first jhana may seem to come and go, to strengthen and weaken.

2. The second jhana is the rapture and pleasure born of concentration. It's the perfection of samadhi. The “doer” vanishes. The second jhana is stable, no rising and falling as in the first jhana.

3. The rapture of the first two jhanas disappears in the third jhana, leaving behind serenity.

4. The serenity of the third jhana disappears, leaving what Venerable Ajahn Brahm calls “the bliss of no more bliss.” The fourth jhana exhibits true tranquility.

Meditation, jhana, zen = Tool. Don't get enraptured by the tool. Meditation (jhana or the jhanas) is/are not something to hang onto or to long for in and of themselves—they're tools. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.