Knowra Buddhist meditation Buddhist meditation Buddhist meditation comprises contemplative practices used to cultivate attention, insight, ethical qualities, and liberation. Its methods and aims vary across Buddhist traditions.
Anapanasati : A meditation practice that uses awareness of breathing to develop mindfulness and concentration. It provides a foundational method for steadying attention through the breath.
Noble Eightfold Path : The Buddhist path of ethical conduct, mental discipline, and wisdom leading toward the cessation of suffering. It places meditation within a broader training rather than treating it as a standalone technique.
Gautama Buddha : The spiritual teacher traditionally regarded as the founder of Buddhism, who lived in ancient northern India. Early Buddhist accounts present him as the teacher of contemplative paths to awakening.
Zen : A Mahayana Buddhist tradition that emphasizes meditation and direct realization, developed in Japan from Chinese Chan. Its characteristic practice and teachings differ from many insight-centered approaches.
Vipassana : A Buddhist practice of insight that investigates experience and its changing, unsatisfactory, and non-self nature. It shows how observation can become insight into the characteristics of experience.
Four Noble Truths : The Buddha’s framework describing suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path leading to cessation. They explain the problem that Buddhist contemplative practice is intended to address.
Pali Canon : The canonical collection of scriptures preserved by the Theravada Buddhist tradition. Its discourses and meditation instructions are among the earliest surviving Buddhist sources.
Theravada : A Buddhist tradition whose scriptural canon is preserved primarily in the Pali language and whose major living school is Theravada. Its texts and practice systems offer a contrasting historical framework for meditation.
Samatha : A Buddhist practice of calming and concentrating the mind, often through sustained attention to an object. It develops the mental stability that supports deeper contemplative investigation.
Mindfulness : The capacity to attend to present experience with awareness, often understood within Buddhist practice as part of a wider path. It is a central faculty cultivated across many forms of Buddhist meditation.
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