The Discipline the Buddha Taught

Buddhist meditation (bhavana, cultivation) is the training of the mind that the Buddha presented as the direct means to liberation from suffering, and it takes many forms across the traditions. The two great families are the cultivation of calm and concentration (samatha), which steadies the mind on an object such as the breath, and the cultivation of insight (vipassana), which observes the arising and passing of bodily sensation, feeling and thought in order to see directly their impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and absence of a fixed self. The Zen (zazen) traditions of East Asia developed the practice of seated attention in their own directions, from the breath-counting and just-sitting of Soto to the concentrated inquiry of the koan.

It is worth noting that the mass lay meditation movement, the idea that ordinary householders should sit in insight practice, is largely a modern development, associated with Burmese reformers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and spread worldwide from there. For most of Buddhist history intensive meditation was chiefly a monastic specialism, a point scholars such as Erik Braun and Robert Sharf have documented against the assumption that today's global practice simply reproduces an ancient one.