..續本文上一頁ed in an unfocussed way on the path about ten paces ahead -- not to observe anything, but to maintain the most comfortable angle for the neck. The walking then begins in a composed manner, and when one reaches the end of the path, one stands still for the period of a breath or two, mindfully turns around, and mindfully walks back again.

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　　Mindfulness is the path to the deathless;

　　Heedlessness is the path to death;

　　The mindful do not die;

　　But the heedless are as if dead already.

　　Dhammapada 21

　　Investigation

　　What is Meditation

　　The word meditation is a much used word these days, covering a wide range of practices. In Buddhism it designates two kinds of meditation -- one is called ”samatha”, the other ”vipassana”. Samatha meditation is one of concentrating the mind on an object, rather than letting it wander off to other things. One chooses an object such as the sensation of breathing, and puts full attention on the sensations of the inhalation and exhalation. Eventually through this practice you begin to experience a calm mind -- and you become tranquil because you are cutting off all other impingements that come through the senses.

　　The objects that you use for tranquillity are tranquillising (needless to say!). If you want to have an excited mind, then go to something that is exciting, don”t go to a Buddhist monastery, go to a disco! ... Excitement is easy to concentrate on, isn”t it

　　 It”s so strong a vibration that it just pulls you right into it. You go to the cinema and if it is really an exciting film, you become enthralled by it. You don”t have to exert any effort to watch something that is very exciting or romantic or adventurous. But if you are not used to it, watching a tranquillising object can be terribly boring. What is more boring than watching your breath if you are used to more exciting things

　　 So for this kind of ability, you have to arouse effort from your mind, because the breath is not interesting, not romantic, not adventurous or scintillating -- it is just as it is. So you have to arouse effort because you”re not getting stimulated from outside.

　　In this meditation, you are not trying to create any image, but just to concentrate on the ordinary feeling of your body as it is right now: to sustain and hold your attention on your breathing. When you do that, the breath becomes more and more refined, and you calm down ... I know people who have prescribed samatha meditation for high blood pressure because it calms the heart.

　　So this is tranquillity practice. You can choose different objects to concentrate on, training yourself to sustain your attention till you absorb or become one with the object. You actually feel a sense of oneness with the object you have been concentrating on, and this is what we call absorption.

　　The other practice is ”vipassana”, or ”insight meditation”. With insight meditation you are opening the mind up to everything. You are not choosing any particular object to concentrate on or absorb into, but watching in order to understand the way things are. Now what we can see about the way things are, is that all sensory experience is impermanent. Everything you see, hear, smell, taste, touch; all mental conditions -- your feelings, memories and thoughts -- are changing conditions of the mind, which arise and pass away. In vipassana, we take this characteristic of impermanence (or change) as a way of looking at all sensory experience that we can observe while sitting here.

　　This is not just a philosophical attitude or a belief in a particular Buddhist theory: impermanence is to be insightfully known by opening the mind to watch, and being aware of the way things are. It”s not a matter of analy…

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