A meditation on meditation

Sunday Musings on Saturday Buddhist Class

5: A meditation on meditation

Once more it is early Sunday morning. Yesterday, again, I had walked the one mile to class, observing the day as I went. The autumnal sun shone, taking the chill away and blessed the morning with blue skies, just as the sunny greetings from the Centre's Saturday regulars brought a warmth to my heart.

There was no ethical or historical Buddhist talk yesterday for we learners. Instead, that class, the fifth of six classes at the Colchester Buddhist Centre, involved a prolonged meditation session, or should I say sessions as the time was divided into shorter meditation 'bites', making the practice easier to engage with.

Apart from the ethical aspects of Buddhism, living better in the world and with others, meditation, as a regular practice is at the core of Buddhism. Hence images of the Buddha in a seated meditation pose.

A slight meditation on meditation.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes two types of 'Meditation'...

1. the act of giving your attention to only one thing, either as a religious activity or as a way of becoming calm and relaxed:

2. serious thought or study, or the product of this activity.

In English, the word 'meditation' originally meant to ponder or to concentrate, coming from the Latin ‘meditatum’. Hence René Descartes' famous work was translated into English, from the French 'Méditations Métaphysiques' into 'Meditations on First Philosophy', or philosophical pondering.

There are thoughts that the idea of 'meditation' has existed long before the civilisation of man, and that hunter-gatherers and tribal shamans engaged in something similar.

In the East, the concept of 'meditation' has existed for thousands of years, before Hinduism and hence before Buddhism too and has come to include concepts such as 'mindfulness', 'contemplation' 'communion' 'chanting', the spreading of 'Metta' (or Loving Kindness) and 'trance'. In India’s oldest written records (from around 1500 BC), there is the practice of mind training through ‘Dhyāna’ or ‘Jhāna’. In China the idea of mediation can be traced back to six centuries BC to the ‘Daoist’ ancient Chinese philosophers such as Lao zi. 

At the Centre, we learned just how important posture is to meditation, especially when engaging in longer meditations. To be comfortable is very important so that the mind doesn't have to worry about bodily aches and pains. We engaged in a number of short 'guided' meditations (over the two and a half hours of the class), and emerged more enthused than ever. To become proficient in meditation takes years of practice but this, for me, is a good start.