13 Facts About Buddhist meditation

Two major traditions of meditative practice in pre-Buddhist meditation India were the Jain ascetic practices and the various Vedic Brahmanical practices.

Pali Satipatthana Sutta and its parallels as well as numerous other early Buddhist meditation texts enumerates four subjects on which mindfulness is established: the body ; feelings ; mind ; and phenomena or principles, such as the five hindrances and the seven factors of enlightenment.

Alexander Wynne agrees that the Buddha taught a kind of Buddhist meditation exemplified by the four dhyanas, but argues that the Buddha adopted these from the Brahmin teachers Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta, though he did not interpret them in the same Vedic cosmological way and rejected their Vedic goal.

Oldest material of the Theravada tradition on Buddhist meditation can be found in the Pali Nikayas, and in texts such as the Patisambhidamagga which provide commentary to Buddhist meditation suttas like the Anapanasati sutta.

Less common type of Buddhist meditation is practiced in Cambodia and Laos by followers of Boran kammatthana tradition.

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The Sarvastivada system practiced breath Buddhist meditation using the same sixteen aspect model used in the anapanasati sutta, but introduced a unique six aspect system which consists of:.

Later Mahayana work which discusses Buddhist meditation practice is Shantideva's Bodhicaryavatara which depicts how a bodhisattva's Buddhist meditation was understood in the later period of Indian Mahayana.

Buddhist meditation promotes classic practices like meditating on corpses and living in forests, but these are preliminary to the Mahayana practices which initially focus on generating bodhicitta, a mind intent on awakening for the benefit of all beings.

Works of the Chinese translator An Shigao are some of the earliest Buddhist meditation texts used by Chinese Buddhism and their focus is mindfulness of breathing.

The Chinese translator and scholar Kumarajiva transmitted various meditation works, including a meditation treatise titled The Sutra Concerned with Samadhi in Sitting Meditation which teaches the Sarvastivada system of fivefold mental stillings.

In China it has been traditionally held that the Buddhist meditation methods used by the Tiantai school are the most systematic and comprehensive of all.

Meditation based on Buddhist meditation principles has been practiced by people for a long time for the purposes of effecting mundane and worldly benefit.

Accounts of meditative states in the Buddhist texts are in some regards free of dogma, so much so that the Buddhist scheme has been adopted by Western psychologists attempting to describe the phenomenon of meditation in general.