Meditation and Wisdom

This is a vast subject so all I want to do in this blog is pick out some key pieces of information so that if anyone was to ask you, ‘What sort of Buddhist meditation do you do and why do you do it?’, you could answer easily and with confidence.

Calm and Insight

All Buddhist meditations contain within them methods that achieve a calm state of mind, shamatha, that then enables insight, vipashyana, into how things really are - reality once our obscuring ‘beautiful monsters’ have been seen through. Why is this important? Because, as the Dharma understands it, ignorance causes suffering, so it follows that knowledge/insight into the nature of reality will bring this suffering to an end. How does it do this? By enabling us to make wise and compassionate choices based upon insight rather than being driven by unconscious reactivity. Here it's interesting to notice that while our practice starts with a growing awareness of how we are caught up within our thoughts and emotions, it continues beyond this into insight into the ‘empty’ nature of the entire universe. More on this below.

Calming the Mind

The fifth Perfection is frequently described as ‘meditation’ but the Pali and Sanskrit words are better translated as ‘concentration’. This is important because it is through concentration that a strong and stable mindfulness is achieved. This is what we are cultivating when we practice a ‘doing something’ meditation - mindfulness of the breath, body sensations, sound, sight, emotions or thoughts. Repeatedly coming back to our object of mindfulness - training the puppy as Pema Chödrön calls it - builds concentration and this gradually creates the sustained states of deep calm and equanimity that enable insight and final realisation. What is absolutely certain here is that this is the foundation and without it the non-dual or ‘doing nothing practices’ that may follow will be unachievable.

Wisdom - Gaining Insight into the Nature of Mind

This is a really difficult bit of writing. How can you capture in words something that is essentially ineffable? (Clue: you can’t.) Of course that has not stopped generations of Buddhists for the last two and a half thousand years having numerous goes but that just makes it worse because what they come up with, though quite similar, is also not exactly the same. Our small Sangha broadly follows teachings found in Mahayana Buddhism and the non-dual traditions practised in Tibet and Japan - Dzogchen and Zen. Here the key word is 'emptiness' which simply means an absence of anything unchanging in both ourselves and everything else as well. This is how things really are - they are empty. Knowing this, not just as an idea, but as a vivid and transformative experience, is what constitutes wisdom in Mahayana Buddhism. That’s one definition. Another is that when we look into our minds in an attempt to find the person who is doing the looking there is no one there - just a space, a peculiar nothingness - it is empty of self. Strictly speaking the notion of emptiness has changed a bit here - no longer a pervasive quality of phenomena but more an experience - but then who said the notion of emptiness was not quite tricky? That said, the space we find within our mind is not some sort of dark void, it's a vast unlimited space pervaded with awareness and experiential knowledge of this, our buddha nature, in the non-dual traditions is what counts as wisdom.  Well that’s a start anyway …

So back to the questions at the beginning of this piece:

In the meditation described here we begin by calming our minds using mindfulness and this leads to an insight into the nature of our mind which experientially is an indivisibility of emptiness and clarity. And the reason we do this is because this places us in the best position to find a place of rest and ease, not driven by fear and unhappiness, and this is good for everyone around us as well.

NW. 8 December 2025