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2

Mindfulness and Meditation

Andrew Olendzki

What should be done for his followers by a teacher with compassion

and care for their welfare, that I have done for you. Here are the roots

of trees. Here are empty places. Meditate! Do not be lazy. Do not be

ones who later have regrets. This is my instruction to you.

Buddha (Majjhima Nik¯

aya 8)

As words become more widely used, and especially as they become

fashionable, they may often become more difficult to understand. One might

think it would be the other way around, but this obfuscation of meaning

has generally been the rule with the popularization of Buddhist vocabulary.

While each had a precise technical meaning in its original context, terms like

zen, yoga, karma, and nirvana can mean almost anything the modern writer

wants them to mean. A similar trend may well be underway with
mindful-

ness
, and perhaps even with the more general word
meditation
. Understand-

ing the sense in which these words are used in their original setting should

prove to be a worthwhile undertaking as we see them applied in the current

creative encounter between psychology and Buddhist thought.

What Is Meditation?

The traditional sense of meditation in Western culture, before significant

encounter with Asian practices, involves sustained consideration or thought

√

upon a subject. Originating from the Indo-European root

med
, primarily

meaning “to measure,” it suggests a discourse upon a subject (as in the title

of Descartes’ famous work) or calm thought upon some subject (as with

structured religious prayers). As such, it is always an exercise of ordered

conceptual contemplation, involving the systematic and disciplined use of

language, symbol, and concept. As we shall see, this is exactly what one is

not
doing in mindfulness meditation. While such a structured exploration of

a conceptual landscape can be important to some forms of psychotherapy

that focus on reframing the narrative of one’s prior experience, most forms

of Buddhist meditation are working in the other direction, toward less con-

ceptual modes of consciousness.

The most common word for meditation in the classical languages of

Buddhism (Sanskrit and Pali) is
sam¯

adhi
. The etymology of this term sug-

√

gests gathering (
sam
-) the mind and placing (

dh¯

a) it upon (
-¯

a-
) an object.

In this broad sense, its meaning seems similar enough to English usage, but

there is a subtle and crucial difference between the Western and Buddhist

understanding of how the mind operates. As mentioned in the previous

37

38

Andrew Olendzki

chapter, experience ensues from the confluence of three things: conscious-

ness, an organ, and an object. An organ cognizes an object; an object is cog-

nized by an organ; consciousness of an object arises by means of an organ—

these are three ways of describing the same event. What we consider concep-

tual thinking is only one of six modes of the mind, the other five being sen-

sory, so meditation may or may not involve conceptual thought. Placing the

mind upon a sensory object is just as much meditation as placing the mind

upon a conceptual object, and it is not possible to do both at once. The point

here is that while in Western usage meditation generally assumes the exer-

cise of “thinking about” something, in Buddhism it may mean this, but more

often refers to placing the mind upon physical sensations, upon raw sights or

sounds, or upon the tangible objects of smell and taste. This gives it a wider

range of meaning, and this difference will become important.

The primary characteristic of meditation, and the term most often used

to define it, is
ekaggat¯

a
, which literally means one (
ek
-) pointed (
-agga-
)

ness (
t¯

a
). Meditation is about focusing the mind to a single point, unifying

it, and placing it upon a particular object. To some extent this happens natu-

rally every mind moment, and it if did not, there would be a serious lack of

cohesion to mental experience. According to Buddhist models of mind, con-

sciousness takes a single object at a time and organizes various supporting

mental functions around it. This can be construed as a single episode of con-

sciousness, which is essentially an event that takes place rather than some-

thing that exists. The knowing of a particular object by means of a particular

organ arises in response to a stimulus, persists for only a very brief moment,

and then passes away almost immediately. Another mind moment arises right

away in response to another stimulus, and this too immediately ceases. Sub-

jective experience presents itself to us as a stream on conscious moments;

the sense of continuity, and of subject and object stability, is projected onto

the stream much as a narrative is constructed from rapidly presented frames

of a movie. One-pointedness is a factor in every frame, for each moment

has a single focus, but concentration meditation has to do with extending

this singularity of focus over multiple ensuing mind moments. Using the cin-

ema image further, concentration meditation is like holding the video camera

steady for a long time—one takes multiple pictures of the same scene.

This is something that does not come easily to the human mind and must

be practiced diligently if the skill is to be learned. We have evolved to stay

alert to all significant changes to our environment, and attention is naturally

drawn to sensory data that is out of the ordinary or that presents in sudden

or unexpected ways. Like a bird or chipmunk, rapidly casting around in all

directions to check for danger, our mind is habituated to lurching rapidly

from one sense object to another, or from one thought to another. As anyone

who has practiced meditation can attest, or as you can discover for yourself

in a few moments, holding the mind steady on a single object, such as the

breath or a repeated word, is exceedingly difficult to do. But like so many

other things, it is a skill that can be learned through patient and diligent

practice. Much of Buddhist meditation is a process of placing the mind on a

particular object, often called the primary object, and then noticing (sooner

or later) that it has wandered off that object. When one notices this, one

gently and forgivingly abandons the train of thought the mind has boarded

and returns the attention once again to the primary object. This process is

Chapter 2 Mindfulness and Meditation

39

then repeated again and again: The mind is placed on a particular object;

it wanders off on trails of association, reverie, recollection, judgment, plan-

ning, verbalizing, conceptualizing, calculation, commentary, fantasy, and day-

dream, only to be carefully and patiently retrieved from its adventuring and

settled back upon the primary object.

Obstacles to Meditation

As with every other learned skill, people have differing aptitudes for med-

itation; make progress in an apparently endless series of breakthroughs,

plateaus, and reversals; and can experience repeated episodes of triumph

and failure in rapid succession. Any given meditation session might be influ-

enced by how comfortable the body is, how much sleep one has had

recently, the overall state of health, the temperature in the room, whether

one has a problem on the mind or is working through some emotional

issues—all sorts of factors. An interesting feature of the traditional Buddhist

understanding of meditation is that it is always influenced by one’s overall

ethical behavior. The ability of the mind to concentrate is directly hampered

by such acts as deliberately harming living creatures, taking what has not

been given, speaking untruthfully or harshly, misbehaving sexually, or tak-

ing intoxicants of various kinds. Thus, the ethical precepts of Buddhism are

a matter of great practical importance, rather than mere moral injunction.

But if one is relatively free of the remorse and emotional turmoil that can

come from unhealthy behavior, it is reasonable to expect significant progress