What is meditation in the Zen tradition?

I’ve come across so many meditation techniques - staying with the breath, mantras, chanting, visualizing a lake, etc. I’ve even tried a bunch myself at this point. What’s the Zen way? And how do I make sense of all these options?

Before telling you how to meditate, let’s first define what it is, its purpose, and the key supporting factors that make it work. When you understand that, the confusion’ll clear.

First, what is meditation?

In both the Pali and Chinese tradition, they rarely use that word. Instead, they say cultivation or development. Bhavana in Pali. Xiūxí in Chinese. When I was a monk in Thailand, this was still how we spoke about practice. We’d often say “I’m going to do samadhi-bhavana” or “This afternoon, I did metta-bhavana for a few hours.” Informally, we might say “I sat in meditation for a few hours,” but we understood that that was shorthand for bhavana. The Chinese are the same.

This word, bhavana, is important because it emphasizes the momentum behind each action, or karma. Karma isn’t that you hold a door open for some grandma and you get a bunch of green lights driving back to work on some far-off day. Karma is the law that physical and mental actions have consequences. If you hold the door open for that grandma with good intentions, you not only help her, but you also strengthen kindness and situational awareness. If you held open the door for her but did it just to impress the girl you were with, you’re still helping the old lady, but you also strengthen vanity. Each action develops, or bhavanas, a certain quality within you. Whatever we do - mowing the grass, watering the plants, or wiping down the grime off the bathroom mirror, every intentional action creates karma. If we mow the grass with a firm mind unmoved by anxiety, we’re lead to spiritual heights. If we do it moaning and wishing we were doing anything else, it drags our spirits into the abyss.

What folks call meditation is two specific types of bhavana, samatha- and vipassana-bhavana. Samatha, serenity, steadies and brightens the mind. Vipassana, insight, observes or analyzes experience to develop insight into the nature of world-body-mind.

These two are mutually dependent. When doing samatha-bhavana, the development of serenity, you learn how to steady your mind and stay with a single object without interruption. To do that, though, requires insight. You have to understand how your mind works, how you get distracted, how you get back on track. You learn how unreliable your mind and emotions are as you watch them come-and-go chaotically for hundreds of hours. That knowledge is insight, but it’s background. The foreground is concentration.

When you closely observe phenomena or try to locate a separate self in direct experience, for example, that’s vipassana-bhavana, the development of insight. You can’t do that effectively if you keep beating yourself up over what you said last week at the meeting or wondering what’s for lunch. You need steadiness of mind for it to be effective. Insight is foreground, serenity is background.

While it’s useful to think of these as separate categories, in reality meditation exists on a spectrum between these two poles. Some are blackish, others are whitish, some gray. None are completely black or white because they both require some tranquility of mind and some insight.

The classic metaphor used to describe the relationship between samatha- and vipassana-bhavana is of a lumberjack felling a tree with an ax. Samatha is the weight of the ax and power of the swing. Vipassana is the sharpness of the blade and precision of the strike. The tree is greed, hatred, and ignorance. Both power and sharpness are necessary and are inextricable. However, when training it’s useful to divide them into separate tasks.

It’s like Muay Thai, then. When you fight, you must have precision and power to win, but when you train, you isolate different qualities and develop them separately. You might spend 30 minutes, for example, improving the speed of your strikes and then another 30 minutes working on precision by hitting pads.

Yes, that’s it. When we train any other skill-set, like playing the guitar, weight lifting, painting, writing, sprinting, or language, isolating skills is a more efficient way to learn. When you isolate a skill, it’s easy to see how it works, how it’s not working, what adjustments to make, and see the steady gains. When you try to do everything at once, like playing the guitar, it’s overwhelming and ineffective.

However, there’s another aspect that these metaphors are lacking: the three trainings in morality, concentration, and wisdom. Sila-bhavana is development of morality. Samadhi-bhavana is development of concentration. Panna-bhavana is development of wisdom. Unless you’re super-talented, it’s going to be impossible to develop strong samatha and vipassana outside of a lifestyle that supports them.
Developing in tandem all three aspects is crucial for the work of uprooting greed, hatred, and ignorance from the mind. Yes, settle into a still and radiant mind and develop penetrating insight into the nature of reality, but also be a person of integrity. Don’t waste time on meaningless junk. Eat well. Sleep well. Be kind and generous. Be aware, be aware, be aware, not just when you’re seated with your eyes closed. And make time for formal practice. These, in combination, make that blade sharp, powerful, and precise.

So the purpose of meditation is to destroy greed, hatred, and ignorance?

Yes, that’s one way of looking at it. Another way: freedom.

And freedom here means what, exactly?

Freedom to be as you are. What you are is both changing and eternal, moving and still, incomplete and complete, suffering and serenity. Being as you are means always becoming what you’re not and simply being without change. Don’t worry if you don’t quite get this yet, we can talk about it later. For now, take this as a taste of freedom. Meditation’s purpose is to not taste that freedom, but to make that freedom pervade your very bones.

Concentration stills and sharpens the mind. Insight recognizes the nature of world-body-mind. Seeing that truth again and again, your vision and understanding irrevocably shifts. You see the world as an undivided, luminous whole and as the unending display of the ten-thousand things. You find yourself living from an inner stillness and power that was once unimaginable. The fears, anxieties, addictions that once enslaved your heart drop away. It’s not that you no longer experience longing, worry, or anger, but that you’re no longer bound by them. You are free.

So how do I develop samatha and vipassana-bhavana?

To simplify this, I’ll just talk about concentration practices first. We can discuss insight practices later when we’re discussing wisdom, as it’ll make much more sense when you understand the context.

The core of samatha is getting the mind to stay with one or one set of objects without interruption. Doing so makes the mind steady, sharp, and pliable. For beginners, it sounds unbelievable, but if you can stay with an object without thinking of anything else for 30 minutes, you’ll experience a bliss that surpasses any drug. The object of focus could be anything - the sound of a waterfall, the sensation of the breath in your lungs, the mantra “the chicken is red,” or even the image of a stick of gum. If you do it without wavering, the concentration will be the same.

The fact that the principle’s so simple also means that the possibilities are limitless. There are thousands of options on offer: mantras, visualizations, the breath, body scans, pictures of puppies, kundalini, music, dance.

Are there differences between the different techniques?

Yes. Some techniques are ineffective. Some are extraordinarily effective. Some fail for one group but are life-changing for another. I won’t go through all of them, as that’d take volumes. Instead, I’ll offer the core Buddhist meditations which have proven themselves effective over millennia and across different cultures. I’ll also teach the main Zen techniques and some alternatives for those who struggle with formal meditation.

Before describing the methods, though, it’s best to understand the principle that informs them. In Buddhist psychology, there are Five Hindrances to concentration. They are:

1. Sensual desire: craving pleasure through the five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.
2. Ill-will: hatred, resentment, or remorse.
3. Sloth-and-torpor: half-heartedness, sleepiness, listlessness, or haziness.
4. Restlessness: the mind jumping from topic-to-topic, feeling-to-feeling, unable to settle down.
5. Doubt: Uncertainty about a certain topic or decision.

Concentration arises when these Five Hindrances are absent. Think of it like light and dark. When darkness is absent, light is necessarily there and vice versa. Light is a concentrated mind. Darkness is a scattered mind. The path of meditation is removing these five hindrances from the mind. Each of these hindrances also has a specific remedy to counteract it. To understand the principle of remedy, imagine that you just took an ice-cold cup of coffee out from the freezer and wanted to bring it to room temperature. The swiftest way to lower the temperature isn’t to let it sit on a counter and cool. Instead, it’s to warm it up. Throw it in a microwave or pour it into a pot on the stove and get a flame going. That cup’ll be hot in one minute, not thirty.

The remedy principle also applies to the mind. If you want to cool an angry mind down, for instance, spread love. If you’re being barraged by thoughts of ice cream, sex, or both, focus on the foulness of the body.

The remedy principle also applies to the mind. If you want to cool an angry mind down, for instance, think loving thoughts. If you’re being barraged by fantasies of ice cream, sex, or both, focus on the foulness of the body. By focusing on the opposite of what’s disturbing it, the mind rapidly settles into stillness.

What is foulness of the body?

It’s a meditation designed to counteract sensual desire. To do it, you visualize the different parts of the body, like the liver, lungs, spleen, undigested food, and blood, and focus on its ugliness. If you do that, the mind will quickly abandon the ice cream fantasies. It sounds strange, but remember this is just a means to get the mind to concentration and cast out the hindrance of sensual desire, not a condemnation of the body. If you find that thoughts of food, sex, or music are a recurring obstacle in meditation, it might be worthwhile making foulness of the body a go-to meditation practice until it calms down.

Uhhhh…that sounds really weird.

Weird, but works.

Before I ordained as a monk, I had the great misfortune of falling in love with durian. If you’ve never had it before, imagine mango and vanilla ice cream having a child. For 70% of people, that child smells like a rotting corpse and tastes like heaven. For 20%, it smells like the perfume of the gods and tastes just as good. For the other 10%, it’s disgusting through-and-through. I was in the 20%. And, while living on an island resort in Malaysia, I was introduced and became addicted to durian.

Although it’s wildly expensive elsewhere, I was working in durian-central, Perak province. For a few dollars, I could stuff myself with world-class durian until I wanted to throw up. And I did just that for months on end at every chance I got.
When I left for Thailand to ordain, though, I went cold turkey. I went for months without hardly a thought of its delicious, golden flesh. That all changed when I entered the monastery. Meditating 12+ hours a day and living without internet, TV, or any other form of entertainment for months on end began to take its toll on me. Soon, durians visited me in my dreams. In some dreams, I feasted on them until I burst. In others, they came and told me how much they missed me and lured me to return to Perak. When I meditated, durians flew around me and mocked my asceticism. When I went on the daily alms round to the village, I prayed that the divine fruit to find its way into my bowl. I became obsessed.

I struggled with these cravings for months to little effect. They would come in fits, seizing my mind for a few hours before vanishing without a trace then return a few days later to scourge me again. Whilst in the grip of craving, I tried to bring the mind back to the breath to little effect. Imagining durians was a temptation I was too weak to resist. I grew more-and-more frustrated. By that time, I was familiar with the foulness of the body meditation but never tried it. Like you, my feeling towards it was a big ewwwwwww. But at the end of my rope, I gave it a shot. What happened next was a miracle. The flying durians disappeared. The dreams of durians evaporated. The fits of craving vanished. In one afternoon, I was free.
Not everyone has such dramatic effects from foulness of the body, but for me it stomped out that durian fire. Since then, I come back to it whenever I struggle with sensuous cravings. If I just sit the fire of lust, it can burn me up for hours before it runs its course. If, on the other hand, I see lust begin rip through me - BOOM - foulness of the body. It’s usually gone in a few minutes and doesn’t show its ugly head for a long while. This is the power of the remedy principle.

This principle applies to all the other hindrances. The next hindrance, for example, is ill-will. Ill-will encompasses feelings like resentment, dislike, dissatisfaction, or anger. The remedy to ill-will is loving-kindness.

Sloth-and-torpor is the next hindrance. There are two traditional meditations linked to this: visualizing light and death contemplation. For the light visualization, you focus on a bright object, like a candle or light bulb, or visualize a disk of bright light. This can brighten up the mind and cast sleep away.

Restlessness, the second-to-last hindrance, is when the mind’s churning out random thoughts with little break and jumping from one train of thought to the next. In other words, monkey mind. When the mind’s restless, it’s not particularly angry, sad, or thirsty, just scattered. For this state, the remedy is the breath.

Finally, doubt. This is the one that I have struggled with the most since my teen years until today. Doubt is not simply being unsure of what to do or what’s correct. I’m pretty sure you don’t know how old the sun is, how many nose hairs the average human has, or how you’ll spend your time if you reach 95, but are you losing sleep over that? No. Doubt is not knowing and feeling distressed by the fact. It can feel paralyzing or cause the mind to spiral into thought in the hope of arriving at a definitive answer. In such cases, trying to figure it out usually throws gasoline on the fire. Instead, the remedy is witnessing thoughts. Instead of engaging with thinking, step back and observe. As you witness the thoughts instead of engaging them, their energy dissipates until the doubt disappears altogether.

We’ve now covered all of the Five Hindrances:

1. Sensual desire.
2. Ill-will.
3. Sloth-and-torpor.
4. Restlessness.
5. Doubt.

And their Six Remedies:

1. Foulness of the body.
2. Loving-kindness.
3. Visualization of light.
4. The breath.
5. Witnessing thoughts.

I’ll explain how to practice these in detail later. The key thing is to understand what the hindrances are and the remedy principle that inform the meditation techniques most commonly used.

But what about the other one’s you’ve been talking about: koans and shikantaza?

Zen teachers like to brag that these two techniques are unique to the Zen tradition, but they’re not as unique as they’re made out to be. Shikantaza is found in every Buddhist contemplative tradition. Koans are less commonly used techniques, although similar practices can also be found in other Buddhist traditions.

The koan’s a logic-defying phrase or question used as a focus of meditation. It’s designed to settle the mind while also pushing it to leap beyond concepts and directly recognize truth. One of the classic koans, for example, is this: “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?” Another one is this exchange between Zen master and student: “What is the Buddha?” the student asked. “This very mind is Buddha,” the master replied.

In koan contemplation, a teacher gives the student a koan and then the student meditates on the key phrase. For example, the student might repeat the question “What is the sound of one hand?” like a mantra and turn it over again-and-again in their mind throughout the day. The student doesn’t try to arrive at an answer through thinking about the question and arriving at a logical answer. Instead, they simply focus on the question itself until the mind explodes and the answer reveals itself as clear as the lines on the palm of their hand.  Koan contemplation suits doubting types because it pins the intellect down and drives it a million miles deep. Koan contemplation also merges samatha and vipassana-bhavana, since the mind first concentrates on the question before bursting with intuitive insight into the nature of reality.

The other practice, shikantaza, is just sitting. What is just sitting? Not interfering. Not trying to focus on anything. Not thinking. Not stopping thinking. Just resting and allowing everything to be as it is. This practice is suitable for meditators who are chronic over-achievers. It also blends samatha and vipassana-bhavana, as when the mind settles into stillness, one simultaneously recognizes one’s true nature.

Do these practices follow the remedy principle?

Partially, yes. Koan contemplation is a remedy for doubt. Shikantaza is a remedy for restlessness and willfulness.  However, these techniques are traditionally taught once a student has a solid foundation in traditional samatha practices. For shikantaza, this makes sense, as if the mind’s still scattered, it’s easy to waste time just letting the mind run amuck. But I believe Zen students can start koan practice from the outset if it’s under a teacher’s supervision. If not, koan practice is risky. It might launch a student to the heights of illumination, but it might also destroy all sanity. Proceed with caution.

That’s 6 different practices, but I only have 40 minutes or so a day to meditate.

Pick a main practice and stick with it. The others are weapons in your armory to be used when necessary. Ideally, you should consult with a teacher to find a main practice that suits you. If you don’t have a teacher, then try out these six different practices and see what works. My suggestion: lead with strength. Make the main practice something that comes naturally and you enjoy.

If you’re the sensuous type, you’re going to think a lot about food, sex, travel, ice cream, old friends, music. Contemplating the foulness of the body will stamp out that craving, but it’ll also feel grating. For that reason, a lot of my friends of this type can hardly bring themselves to do it. They know how effective it is. They’ve done it. They’ve seen the results for themselves. And yet, they’ll do anything other than that. The breath or loving-kindness, however, are sweet and easy.

Once you have a main practice, commit to it for two years.

That’s a long time!

Yes, but concentration is a skill that takes consistent effort over a long period of time to master. If you frequently change the main practice, the gains in concentration will be largely lost each time you switch. I’ve seen many dedicated practitioners squander decades jumping from one practice to another without making much headway. Casual practitioners with few expectations who grind away for years with the same practice often end up far more capable.

Committing to two years doesn’t mean you can never use other practices. You can and should, especially if one hindrance is wreaking havoc. However, always come back to the main practice as the foundation. Through that practice and the other remedies, you’ll learn about your mind, the hindrances, how to deal with them, and, once you gain mastery, have a well of strength and serenity to draw on for the rest of your life.