What is Meditation ?
If you search the word "meditation" on Google, you will get more than 149,000,000 results, and a large number of these websites differ in their explanations towards "meditation". Commonly, meditation refers to a group of spiritual practices that aim to train one's mind in order to find inner peace, promote relaxation and happiness, and build positive characters such as compassion ,courage and forgiveness.
However, although most forms of meditation have the same goal, depending on different schools of thoughts, different forms of meditation can vary largely in regarding to their specific methods. For example, in the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, monks train themselves through the use of thoughts. In other words, their typical way of training include thinking about how they love their enemies , and how they can be compassionate about creatures including even the smallest insects. This type of cognitive-based training often results in the gaining of some moral characters.
In contrary, other schools such as Zen Buddhism will not focus on thoughts, since they believe the chase of the truth is post-rational. That is, it is beyond our binary logical thinking system and can not be attained through mental activity. As a result of that, Zen Buddhism will train people's choiceless, non-dual awareness, and they believe through this unbiased awareness people could truly eliminate their sufferings and obsession, and finally become free.
Other schools of Buddhism also have their unique forms of meditation. For instance, Chinese Zen includes the practice of marital-arts meditation in order to cultivate practitioners' persistence, and at the same time let them realize the transiency of their body life. Even many ancient Western wisdom systems adapt meditation, and those include new-platonism, Patristic philosophy and Biblical Hermeneutics in different eras.
However, although most forms of meditation have the same goal, depending on different schools of thoughts, different forms of meditation can vary largely in regarding to their specific methods. For example, in the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, monks train themselves through the use of thoughts. In other words, their typical way of training include thinking about how they love their enemies , and how they can be compassionate about creatures including even the smallest insects. This type of cognitive-based training often results in the gaining of some moral characters.
In contrary, other schools such as Zen Buddhism will not focus on thoughts, since they believe the chase of the truth is post-rational. That is, it is beyond our binary logical thinking system and can not be attained through mental activity. As a result of that, Zen Buddhism will train people's choiceless, non-dual awareness, and they believe through this unbiased awareness people could truly eliminate their sufferings and obsession, and finally become free.
Other schools of Buddhism also have their unique forms of meditation. For instance, Chinese Zen includes the practice of marital-arts meditation in order to cultivate practitioners' persistence, and at the same time let them realize the transiency of their body life. Even many ancient Western wisdom systems adapt meditation, and those include new-platonism, Patristic philosophy and Biblical Hermeneutics in different eras.