What
Buddhists Believe
Venerable K. Sri Dhammananda Maha Thera
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Meditation
Meditation is the
psychological approach to mental culture, training and purification.
In
place of prayer, Buddhist practise meditation for mental culture and for
spiritual development. No one can attain Nibbana or salvation without
developing the mind through meditation. Any amount of meritorious deeds
alone will not lead a person to attain the final goal without the
corresponding mental purification. Naturally, the untrained mind is very
elusive and persuades people to commit evil and become slaves of the
senses. Imagination and emotions always mislead man if his mind is not
properly trained. One who knows how to practise meditation will be able to
control one's mind when it is misled
by the senses.
Most of the troubles which
we are confronting today are due to the untrained and uncultured mind. It
is already established that meditation is the remedy for many physical and
mental sickness. Medical authorities and great psychologists the world
over say that mental frustration, worries, miseries, anxieties, tension
and fear are the causes of many diseases, stomach ulcers, gastritis,
nervous complaints and mental sickness. And even latent sickness will be
aggravated through such mental conditions.
When the
conscious 'I' frets
too much, worries too much, or grieves too long and too intensely, then
troubles develop in the body. Gastric ulcers, tuberculosis, coronary
diseases and a host of functional disorders are the products of mental and
emotional imbalance. In the case of children, the decay of the teeth and
defective eye-sight are frequently related to emotional disorders.
Many of these sicknesses
and disorders can be avoided if people could spend a few minutes a day to
calm their senses through the practice of mediation. Many people do not
believe this or are too lazy to practise meditation owing to lack of
understanding. Some people say that mediation is only a waste of time. We
must remember that every spiritual master in this world attained the
highest point of his life through the practice of meditation. They are
honored today by millions of people because they have done tremendous
service to mankind with their supreme knowledge and patience which they
obtained through the practice of meditation.
Meditation
should not be a task to which we force ourselves 'with
gritted teeth and clenched fists'; it
should rather be something that draws us, because it fills us with joy and
inspiration. So long as we have to force ourselves, we are not yet ready
for meditation. Instead of meditating we are violating our true nature.
Instead of relaxing and letting go, we are holding on to our ego, to our
will power. In this way meditation becomes a game of ambition, of personal
achievement and aggrandizement. Meditation is like love: a spontaneous
experience -- not something that can
be forced or acquired by strenuous effort.
Therefore Buddhist
mediation has no other purpose than to bring the mind back into the
present, into the state of fully awakened consciousness, by clearing it
from all obstacles that have been created by habit or tradition.
The Buddha obtained His
Enlightenment through the development of His mind. He did not seek divine
power to help Him. He gained His wisdom through self-effort by practising
meditation. To have a healthy body and mind and to have peace in life, one
must learn how to practise meditation.
Nature of Modern
Life
Today we
are living in a world where people have to work very hard physically and
mentally. Without hard work, there is no place for people in the modern
society. Very often keen competition is going on everywhere. One is trying
to beat the other in every sphere of life and man has no rest at all. Mind
is the nucleus of life. When there is no real peace and rest in the mind,
the whole life will collapse. People naturally try to overcome their
miseries through pleasing the senses: they drink, gamble, sing and dance?all
the time having the illusion that they are enjoying he real happiness of
life. Sense stimulation is not the real way to have relaxation. The more
we try to please the senses through sensual pleasures, the more will we
become slaves to the senses. There will be no end to our craving for
satisfaction. The real way to relax is to calm the senses by the control
of mind. If we can control the mind, then we will be able to control
everything. When the mind is free from mental disturbances it can see many
things which others cannot see with their naked eyes. Ultimately, we will
be able to attain our salvation and find peace and happiness.
To
practise meditation, one must have strong determination, effort and
patience. Immediate results cannot be expected. We must remember that it
takes many years for a person to be qualified as a doctor, lawyer,
mathematician, philosopher, historian or a scientist. Similarly to be a
good meditator, it will take sometime for the person to control the
elusive mind and to calm the senses. Practising meditation is like
swimming in a river against the current. Therefore one must not lose
patience for not being able to obtain rapid results. At the same time the
meditator must also cultivate his morality. A congenial place for
meditation is another important aspect. The meditator must have an object
for his meditation, for without an object the jumping mind is not easy to
trap. The object must not create lust, anger, delusion, and emotion in the
meditator's mind.
When we
start to meditate, we switch the mind from the old imaginative way of
thinking, or habitual thought into a new unimpeded or unusual way of
thinking. While meditating when we breathe in mindfully, we absorb cosmic
energy. When we breathe out mindfully with Metta?loving
kindness, we purify the atmosphere. Intellect is necessary for the
overcoming of emotionality and spiritual confusion as intuition is
necessary for overcoming intellectual limitation and conceptual
abstraction.
We spend most of our time
on our body: to feed it, to clothe it, to cleanse it, to wash it, to
beautify it, to relax it, but how much time do we spend on our mind for
the same purposes?
Some people take the
Buddha Image as an object and concentrate on it. Some concentrate on
inhaling and exhaling. Whatever may be the method, if anyone tries to
practise meditation, he is sure to find relaxation. Meditation will help
him a great deal to have physical and mental health and to control the
mind when it is necessary.
Man can do
the highest service to the society by simply abstaining from evils. The
cultured mind that is developed through meditation performs a most useful
service to others. Meditation is not simply a waste of man's
valuable time. The advanced mind of a meditator can solve so many human
problems and is very useful to enlighten others. Meditation is very useful
to help a person live peacefully despite various disturbances that are so
prevalent in this modern world. We cannot be expected to retire to a
jungle or forest to live in ivory towers?'far
from the madding crowd'. By practising
right meditation we can have an abode for temporary oblivion. Meditation
has the purpose of training a person to face, understand and conquer this
very world in which we live. Meditation teaches us to adjust ourselves to
bear with the numerous obstacles to life in the modern world.
Some people practise
meditation in order to satisfy their material desires; they want to
further their material gains. They want to use meditation to get better
jobs. They want to earn more money or to operate their business more
efficiently. Perhaps they fail to understand that the aim of meditation is
not to increase but to decrease desires. Materialistic motives are hardly
suitable for proper meditation, the goal of which lies beyond worldly
affairs. One should meditate to try to attain something that even money
cannot buy or bring.
If you practice
meditation, you can learn to behave like a gentleman even though you are
disturbed by others. Through meditation you can learn how to relax the
body and to calm the mind; you can learn to be tranquil and happy within.
Just as an engine gets
overheated and damaged when it is run for a prolonged period and requires
cooling down to overcome this, so also the mind gets overtaxed when we
subject it to a sustained degree of mental effort and it is only through
meditation that relaxation or cooling can be achieved. Meditation
strengthens the mind to control human emotion when it is disturbed by
negative thoughts and feelings such as jealousy, anger, pride and envy.
If you practise
meditation, you can learn to make the proper decision when you are at a
cross-roads in life and are at a loss as to which way to turn. These
qualities cannot be purchased from anywhere. No amount of money or
property can buy these qualities, yet you attain them through meditation.
And finally the ultimate object of Buddhist meditation is to eradicate all
defilements from the mind and to attain the final goal -- Nibbana.
Nowadays,
however, the practice of meditation has been abused by people. They want
immediate and quick results, just as they expect quick returns for
everything they do in daily life. In Buddhism, as is the case with other
eastern cultures, patience is a most important quality. The mind must be
brought under control in slow degrees and one should not try to reach for
the higher states without proper training. We have heard of
over-enthusiastic young men and women literally going out of their minds
because they adopted the wrong attitudes towards meditation. Meditation is
a gentle way of conquering the defilements which pollute the mind. If
people want 'success' or
'achievement' to
boast to others that they have attained this or that level of meditation,
they are abusing the method of mental culture. One must be trained in
morality and one must clearly understand that to be successful in the
discipline of meditation worldly achievement must not be equated with
spiritual development. Ideally, it is good to work under an experienced
teacher who will help his student to develop along the right path. But
above all one must never be in a hurry to achieve too much too quickly.
-ooOoo-
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Source: Buddhist
Study and Practice Group, http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/
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Layout: Chan Duc - Nguyen Thao
Update : 01-11-2002