Buddhist meditation

• 1. Introduction

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  Buddhist meditation begins with a question that has occupied practitioners for more than two millennia: what does it mean to free the mind from suffering? The classical Buddhist languages offer two words that come closest to what we call meditation today. One is bhavana, meaning mental development. The other is jhana or dhyana, a state of meditative absorption that produces a calm and luminous mind. Neither word is a perfect match for the modern English term, and that small gap in translation turns out to matter enormously.

  Buddhists pursue these practices as part of the path toward liberation from defilements, from clinging, and from craving, a state sometimes called awakening, which culminates in the attainment of nirvana. The range of techniques they have developed over centuries is staggering: mindfulness of breathing, reflections on the repulsiveness of the body, contemplation of dependent origination, loving-kindness, compassion, and practices said to develop supramundane powers. The Tibetan tradition built its practice around deity yoga. Zen masters developed the koan. Pure Land practitioners counted repetitions of a Buddha's name, sometimes committing to fifty thousand or more recitations per day.

  What holds all of these together? And how did a body of techniques shaped by ancient Indian teachers become one of the most studied phenomena in modern neuroscience and psychology? Those are the questions this documentary will pursue.

• 2. The Roots in Early Buddhism

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  Before the great schools of Buddhism diverged, there was what scholars call pre-sectarian Buddhism, a period whose meditation practices are preserved in the Pali Canon and the Chinese Agamas. What those texts describe is a path that begins long before anyone sits down to meditate.

  The Noble Eightfold Path opens with right view, which leads a person to leave the household life and become a wandering monk. From there, morality provides the rules for right conduct. Sense restraint follows, meaning the practitioner controls the response to sensual perceptions and simply notices the objects of perception without giving in to lust or aversion. Right effort then aims to prevent the arising of unwholesome states and to generate wholesome states in their place. According to the early texts, by following these preparatory practices the mind becomes set, almost naturally, for the onset of dhyana.

  Mindfulness, or sati in Pali, is one of the central qualities to be cultivated. The Pali Satipatthana Sutta enumerates four subjects on which mindfulness is established: the body, feelings, the mind, and phenomena or principles such as the five hindrances and the seven factors of enlightenment. According to the scholar Bronkhorst, there were originally two distinct kinds of mindfulness practice, and later texts blended them together in ways that complicates the reconstruction of the earliest form.

  The scholar Johannes Bronkhorst has argued that the earliest satipatthana sutta contained only the observation of impure body parts under mindfulness of the body, and that mindfulness of dhammas was originally just the observation of the seven awakening factors. According to Analayo, mindfulness of breathing was probably absent from the original scheme, since one can contemplate the decay of a body by observing someone else's body, but one cannot be externally mindful of someone else's breath. These scholarly debates open a window onto just how carefully the tradition has been studied and how much remains genuinely uncertain about its origins.

• 3. Jhana and the Question of Liberation

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  Scholars of early Buddhism such as Vetter, Bronkhorst, and Analayo regard the practice of jhana as central to early Buddhist meditation. The four dhyanas are, according to Bronkhorst, among the oldest Buddhist meditation practices, leading to what the texts describe as the destruction of the asavas, the deep-rooted mental corruptions.

  Vetter goes further, arguing that dhyana may have constituted the core liberating practice of early Buddhism. In this absorbed state, all pleasure and pain had waned. Vetter's reading of the early sources suggests that the Buddha's initial interpretation of his own awakening experience used not the language of the four noble truths but the word immortality, a-mata. The later doctrinal framework, in this view, came afterward.

  Alexander Wynne agrees that the Buddha taught a kind of meditation exemplified by the four dhyanas, but traces the origins of those practices to two Brahmin teachers the early texts name: Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta. Both taught formless jhanas. What the Buddha did, according to Wynne, was radically transform what he had learned from these Brahmins. He adapted old yogic techniques to the practice of mindfulness and the attainment of insight. For the Brahminic teachers, liberation required the yogin to be without any mental activity at all, like a log of wood. The Buddha's innovation was the insistence that liberation required not just meditation but an act of insight.

  Beyond the four form-based rupa-jhanas, the early texts also describe formless attainments called arupas: the dimension of infinite space, the dimension of infinite consciousness, the dimension of infinite nothingness, and the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception. A fifth, called nirodha-samapatti, refers to the extinction of feeling and perception altogether. These formless jhanas may have been incorporated from non-Buddhist traditions, which places the question of origins back in play.

• 4. Calm and Insight

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  At the heart of Buddhist meditation lies a distinction that every major tradition has had to negotiate: the difference between samatha, calming the mind, and vipassana, cultivating insight. The Buddha is said to have described both as conduits for attaining nibbana, calling them in the Kimsuka Tree Sutta the swift pair of messengers.

  In the Pali Canon, the Buddha never mentions independent samatha and vipassana meditation practices as separate techniques. He describes them instead as two qualities of mind, to be developed through meditation. Certain practices, like contemplation of a kasina object, are said to favor samatha. Others, like contemplation of the aggregates, tend toward vipassana. Mindfulness of breathing is classically used for developing both.

  The most influential single text in the Theravada tradition on this subject is the fifth-century Visuddhimagga, or Path of Purification, composed by Buddhaghosa. Its presentation centers on kasina meditation, a form of concentration in which the mind is focused on a mental object such as earth, water, fire, air, or one of six colors. Buddhaghosa describes forty meditation subjects in total, and advises that a person should select the one that suits their own temperament, with the guidance of a knowledgeable friend. The text departed from the Pali Canon by making kasina-meditation central, which led Thanissaro Bhikkhu to observe that what jhana means in the commentaries is something quite different from what it means in the Canon.

  From the twentieth century onward, the Burmese Vipassana movement, particularly the New Burmese Method developed by Mingun Sayadaw and U Narada and popularized by Mahasi Sayadaw, treated samatha as optional. Pa-Auk Sayadaw Bhaddanta Acinna held the opposite view, upholding the emphasis on samatha explicit in the Visuddhimagga tradition. The Thai Forest Tradition, deriving from Mun Bhuridatta and popularized by Ajahn Chah, stressed the inseparability of the two and the essential necessity of both. These three positions remain in active dialogue among Western practitioners today, with teachers like Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, and Jack Kornfield carrying Burmese influences into Western Theravada practice.

• 5. Mahayana Innovations

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  Indian Mahayana Buddhism was initially a network of loosely connected groups, each drawing on various texts, doctrines, and meditation methods. Meditation in the Mahayana context is one of the transcendent virtues, the paramitas, which a bodhisattva must perfect in order to reach full Buddhahood.

  The Prajnaparamita sutras, some of the earliest Mahayana texts, describe prajnaparamita, the perfection of transcendent knowledge, as a kind of samadhi that is totally non-conceptual and completely unattached to any person, thing, or idea. The Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita equates this with what it terms the aniyato, or unrestricted, samadhi. A bodhisattva practicing these meditations must take care not to attain enlightenment prematurely and thereby fall into what the tradition calls the lesser vehicle. To stay on the bodhisattva path, the practitioner must base themselves on universal friendliness directed toward all living beings and on bodhicitta, the intention to become a Buddha for the sake of all beings.

  Pure Land texts introduced meditations on particular Buddhas. The Pratyutpanna sutra states that if one practices recollection of the Buddha by visualizing a Buddha in their Buddha field and developing this samadhi for some seven days, one may be able to meet that Buddha in a vision or a dream so as to learn the Dharma from them. In Pure Land Buddhism as it developed in practice, repeating the name of Amitabha became known as nianfo, and practitioners often committed to a fixed set of repetitions per day, from fifty thousand to over five hundred thousand.

  Shantideva's Bodhicaryavatara, written in the eighth century, depicts the bodhisattva's meditation as beginning with isolation of the body and mind from the world, proceeding through tranquility, and culminating in what Shantideva called the exchange of self and other. This meditation involved cultivating the understanding that oneself and other beings are actually the same, so that all suffering must be removed rather than only one's own. Shantideva saw this as the apex of meditation practice, since it simultaneously provides a basis for ethical action and cultivates insight into emptiness.

• 6. Zen and the East Asian Schools

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  The Chinese translator An Shigao, active from 147 to 168 CE, produced some of the earliest meditation texts used in Chinese Buddhism, and their focus was mindfulness of breathing. Kumarajiva, working from 344 to 413 CE, transmitted several meditation works including a treatise on samadhi during sitting meditation, which taught the Sarvastivada system of fivefold mental stillings tailored to different personality types.

  The Tiantai school, developed by Zhiyi, is traditionally held in China to offer the most systematic and comprehensive meditation methods of all the schools. Zhiyi described breathing as falling into four categories: panting, unhurried breathing, deep and quiet breathing, and stillness or rest. He held that only the fourth is correct, and that the breathing should reach stillness. In his work Concise Shamatha-vipasyana, Zhiyi wrote that the attainment of nirvana is realizable by many methods whose essentials do not go beyond the practice of shamatha and vipasyana: shamatha is the first step to untie all bonds, while vipasyana is essential to root out delusion.

  The practice known as silent illumination, associated with Hongzhi Zhengjue who lived from 1091 to 1157, invited the meditator to be aware of the totality of phenomena without focusing on a single object. In Japanese Soto Zen this became shikantaza, just sitting. During the Song dynasty, a different method gained prominence: kanhua chan, observing the phrase, which involved contemplation on a single word or phrase called the huatou, drawn from a gong'an or koan. In the Japanese Rinzai school, koan introspection developed a standardized curriculum of koans to be studied and passed in sequence, with private interviews with the Zen teacher as a formal feature of the practice.

  Huayan Buddhism contributed a meditation theory built around what it called the Fourfold Dharmadhatu, four cognitive approaches to reality ranging from the mundane perception of separate phenomena to the meditation on universal pervasion and complete accommodation, in which all distinct phenomena are understood to interpenetrate.

• 7. Tantric Practice and Deity Yoga

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  Tantric Buddhism, which also goes by the names Esoteric Buddhism and Mantrayana, developed in India from the fifth century onward and then spread to the Himalayan regions and East Asia. To practice its advanced techniques, a practitioner is generally required to be initiated by an esoteric master or guru in a ritual consecration called abhiseka.

  In Tibetan Buddhism the central defining form of Vajrayana meditation is Deity Yoga, or devatayoga. This involves the recitation of mantras, prayers, and visualization of a yidam, a deity usually in the form of a Buddha or a bodhisattva, along with the associated mandala of the deity's pure land. Yidam in Tibetan technically means tight mind, which suggests that using a deity as the object of meditation is intended to create total absorption into the meditative experience. Advanced Deity Yoga involves imagining oneself as the deity and developing what the tradition calls divine pride, the understanding that oneself and the deity are not separate. The practice focuses on three essential aspects of deities: body, speech, and mind. Chanting mantra becomes the manifestation of enlightened speech, with the meditation ultimately aspiring to become Buddha mind.

  Other Tibetan practices include Mahamudra, taught by the Kagyu lineage, and Dzogchen, taught by the Nyingma lineage, both aimed at familiarizing oneself with the ultimate nature of mind, the Dharmakaya. Additional practices include Dream Yoga, Tummo, the yoga of the intermediate state at death known as bardo, and chod. The shared preliminary practices of Tibetan Buddhism are called ngondro and involve visualization, mantra recitation, and a large number of prostrations.

  In East Asia, esoteric practice centered on different tantras than those used in Tibet, particularly the Mahavairocana Tantra and Vajrasekhara Sutra. The Japanese Shingon school and the Tendai school both adopted esoteric practices, and in the East Asian tradition mudra, mantra, and mandala are regarded as the three modes of action associated with the Three Mysteries, the hallmarks of esoteric Buddhism.

• 8. Meditation in the Modern World

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  Mindfulness and other Buddhist meditation techniques found their way into Western psychology and medicine through a network of teachers named in the sources: Dipa Ma, Anagarika Munindra, Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron, S. N. Goenka, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Tara Brach, and Sharon Salzberg, among others. These figures have been widely credited with integrating the healing aspects of Buddhist meditation with concepts of psychological awareness and well-being.

  The accounts of meditative states in the Buddhist texts are, in some respects, free of dogma. This has made the Buddhist scheme attractive to Western psychologists attempting to describe the phenomenon of meditation in general. Loving-kindness meditation, known as metta, and equanimity meditation, upekkha, are beginning to be used in a wide range of research in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, alongside the mindfulness practices that have received the most research attention.

  At the same time, the source texts carry descriptions that resist easy secularization. The early texts depict the Buddha describing meditative states that involve the ability to multiply one's body and return it to one, to pass through solid objects as if through space, to walk on water as if on land, and to travel to other worlds with or without the body. Whether these descriptions are taken as literal attainments or as metaphorical representations of powerful internal states that conceptual language could not capture, they remind practitioners and researchers alike that the tradition from which modern mindfulness derives is rooted in a vision of liberation that extends well beyond stress reduction. The transmission of these practices across more than two millennia, from the river valleys of ancient India to contemporary clinics and neuroscience laboratories, is itself one of the more remarkable journeys in the history of human thought.