Curated category
Buddhist meditation
- BuddhānusmṛtiThe term Buddhānusmriti appears in numerous Buddhist sources, including the Pali Nikayas where it is described as a practice leading all the way to nirvana.
- AnapanasatiA Buddha statue sits in quiet meditation, hands resting gently on its lap. This image represents the practice known as anāpānasati, meaning mindfulness of…
- Buddhist meditationBuddhist meditation begins with a question that has occupied practitioners for more than two millennia: what does it mean to free the mind from suffering?
- VedanāVedanā is an ancient Pāli and Sanskrit term, and it may be the most consequential concept you have never heard of. Right now, as you listen to these words…
- Five hindrancesIn the Buddhist tradition, mental factors known as hindrances block progress in meditation and daily life. Theravada teachers identify these five specific…
- SatipatthanaThe word satipatthana appears in the Pali Canon as a compound term that scholars have parsed in two distinct ways. One parsing reads it as presence of…
- Samatha-vipassanāSamatha-vipassanā names two qualities of the Buddhist mind that have, for over two millennia, been at the center of a quietly fierce debate.
- ZazenZazen is a meditative discipline and the primary practice at the heart of Zen Buddhism. Picture a meditation hall in a Zen monastery, the kind called a…
- Sati (Buddhism)In 1881, Thomas William Rhys Davids first translated the Pali term sati into English as mindfulness. This translation appeared in his work Buddhist Suttas…
- YogacharaIn the first centuries of the common era, a group of yogis from the Sarvastivada and Sautrantika traditions in north India began to adopt Mahayana Buddhism.
- Noble Eightfold PathThe Noble Eightfold Path is the central practical teaching of Buddhism, described in its earliest texts as the road out of samsara, the painful cycle of…