Meditation covers a wide range of distinct activities united mainly by disciplined, repeated attention rather than by any single method. Concentrative forms train the mind to rest on one object, a breath, a syllable, an image or a deity, until distraction falls away. Insight or analytic forms use sustained attention to examine the nature of experience itself, as in Buddhist vipassana. Devotional forms recollect and dwell on a beloved figure, as in much Hindu bhakti meditation and Christian contemplative prayer. Chinese traditions developed their own quieting and internal-alchemy methods within Daoist and, later, Chan Buddhist practice. Each tradition sets its own criteria for what counts as progress, from one-pointed absorption to insight into impermanence to union with the divine, and each embeds meditation within a larger framework of ethics, community and, in most traditional settings, teacher guidance.
Secular mindfulness meditation, the form most widely taught today outside religious contexts, generally isolates a version of Buddhist present-moment attention from that larger framework and reframes it around stress reduction, attention training or general wellbeing, a reframing scholars have studied and, in cases, critiqued rather than simply accepted as continuous with the tradition it draws on. Because meditation is this broad, claims about what it does or where it comes from need to specify which tradition's meditation is meant.