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(Continued)

The Buddha said that the bhikkhu must be perfectly trained in the moral rules, must keep his senses restrained, must have acquired mindfulness and self-possession, must be contented and that these qualities are the prerequisites for effective meditation. In the monastery a monk can train himself in these qualities so that he can obtain the benefits of meditation, the sine qua non of the monastic life.

A monk’s meditation practice differs from that of a layperson’s. The lay meditator usually observes one or both of the two forms of Buddhist meditation. Most popularly practiced is samadhi meditation, intended to induce tranquility through concentration on a single object. An example is the breathing meditation, anapanasati, in which an individual tries to let go of all thoughts, emotions, and distractions, and concentrate only on the observation of inhalations and exhalations. The other form is known as vipassana — insight meditation — in which the individual strives to be aware of all thoughts, emotions, senses, and distractions as they arise and pass away.

For a layperson who meditates consistently the objective of samadhi meditation is to calm the mind and develop concentration, and of vipassana meditation to sharpen one’s intellect through total, alert awareness of oneself and one’s own nature. For a monk the objective and the forms of meditation include these but also go far beyond.

Forty different kinds of meditation were taught by the Buddha to his monastic disciplines, and are listed and described in the Vishddhi Magga.

Ten are known as kasina, devices for meditating on earth, water, fire, air, the colors of blue, yellow, red, white, and on the light and limited space. (These are infrequently practiced.)

Ten are meditations on the “foulness corpses”: the bloated corpses, the livid, the festering, the cut up, the gnawed, the scattered, the hacked and scattered, the bleeding, the worm-infested, and the skeletal bones. (These too are infrequently practiced. In the Buddha’s time charnel houses, where corpses could be seen. Were common, and these meditations were practiced. In some monasteries skeletons are displayed for monastic meditation.)

Four meditations are on the “immaterial states”: boundless space, boundless consciousness, nothingness, neither perception nor non-perception.

There is a meditation on the “repulsiveness of nutriment”, and one on the “defining of the four elements”.

The most commonly practiced of the monastic meditations are ten described as “recollection” meditations — recollection of the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha, of virtue, generosity the devas (celestial beings), death, foulness of body, and breathing (which is the meditation most highly recommended by the Buddha and most frequently practiced by monks) — and four described as “devine abidings”: meditations on loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. Not all meditations are suitable for all monks. Suitability depends, the Buddha said, on an individual monk’s temperament: whether it is a greedy temperament, or various combinations thereof. A senior monk, a “good friend”, is best able to determine a junior’s temperament and thus to recommend appropriate meditations accordingly, a procedure that was followed in former times more so than now.

In some monasteries today senior monks, meditation masters, do attempt to determine the temperaments of the monks whom they instruct; however, regardless of temperamental dispositions, all monks are required to practice the “protective acts of meditation”: those appropriate to the elimination of lust (meditation on the foulness of the body) to the elimination of fear of death (the death meditation), to the elimination of selfishness, anger and hatred (the loving-kindness, compassion, and sympathetic-joy meditation), to elimination of stressful imbalance (the mindfulness of breathing meditation); and meditation on the wisdom and excellence of the Buddha. (by Gerald Roscoe, The Monastic Life, Orchid Press, Bangkok 2000)


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*Photo taken of young monks getting ready for time of evening mediatation at Vat That Foun Monastery in Vientiane, Laos.




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