Meditation (Vipassana / Zazen)

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.

Vipassana and zazen both descend from the meditative discipline attributed to the Buddha, but they reached their present form through separate historical routes and now differ noticeably in method. Vipassana, insight meditation, is the Theravada tradition's systematic observation of breath and the arising and passing of bodily sensation, and the form most widely taught today owes a great deal to a twentieth century lay revival in Burma, associated above all with the teacher Mahasi Sayadaw and later popularized worldwide through students such as S. N. Goenka, whose residential courses introduced the practice to audiences with no monastic background.

Zazen followed the opposite route geographically, carried from India through Chan Buddhism in China into Japan, where it split into distinct schools with different emphases: the Soto school associated with just sitting, shikantaza, meditation without an object or goal, and the Rinzai school's use of koans, paradoxical questions a student works with under a teacher's direction to break ordinary logical thought. Vipassana centers on sustained, gradual observation; koan practice centers on a sudden breakthrough forced by an unanswerable problem. Both traditions describe themselves as returning to the Buddha's own method, and both have developed substantial modern lay followings far from their monastic origins, but a practitioner moving from one to the other is learning a genuinely different technique, not a regional variant of the same one.