Meditation

← Encyclopedia

A monk in a twelfth-century Carthusian cell turns a single verse of scripture over in his mind, slowly, the way a person works a sweet against the roof of the mouth — and the Latin he uses for what he is doing is meditatio. A wandering Russian pilgrim three centuries later walks the roads with the name of Jesus joined to his breath until, he reports, the prayer begins to say itself. A practitioner of the classical Yoga laid out by Patanjali sits to arrest the turning of the mind until what watches stands alone. None of these would have recognized the others as doing his own thing, and not one of them used the English word meditation — yet that single word now gathers all three, and a great many more besides.

Meditation, in English, is the general name for a family of disciplined practices that work directly on attention and awareness: fixing the mind on a single object, or holding it open and unattached, or watching its own movement without interfering. The grouping is unusually loose for a word that feels so precise. The traditions it names rarely use one term among themselves, and almost never mean the same thing by their own. What follows treats the techniques — the architecture of these disciplines and the divergent ends they serve. The experiential goal-state to which they are sometimes directed belongs to mysticism; the ego-mortifying register that often travels alongside them — fasting, vigil, the wearing-down of the body — belongs to asceticism.

A word that grew by translation

The category is, in large part, an artifact of translation. Meditation enters the European languages from the Latin meditatio, and the home sense of that word is concrete and modest. In the monastic discipline of lectio divina — “divine reading” — meditatio names a single rung on a ladder. The Carthusian prior Guigo II, ninth head of the Grande Chartreuse and the writer who first set the stages out in order in his Scala Claustralium (the “Ladder of Monks,” composed before his death around 1188), arranged four: lectio, the reading; meditatio, the chewing-over of what is read; oratio, the prayer that the chewing-over provokes; and contemplatio, the wordless gift that may or may not follow. Meditatio there is the discursive middle step — thinking, turning, ruminating — and it is explicitly not the summit. The summit is contemplation, which a person cannot manufacture. The Victorines of twelfth-century Paris held a closely related grammar: Hugh of Saint Victor (c. 1096–1141) ranged cogitatio, meditatio, and contemplatio as the threefold work of the soul, and Richard of Saint Victor (d. 1173) built atop it a whole science of contemplation, six ascending kinds rising from the imagination through reason to an understanding that breaks above reason entirely.

So the English word starts life pointing at a preparatory, deliberate, thinking activity — and then, in the nineteenth century, it is stretched far past that. When European scholars and translators began rendering the technical vocabularies of Sanskrit, Pali, Arabic, and Tibetan, they reached for the same convenient label. The Sanskrit dhyāna (a state of absorbed concentration), the Buddhist bhāvanā (literally “cultivation,” “bringing-into-being”), the Sufi dhikr (the repeated invocation of a divine name), the Daoist disciplines of inner quiet, and the silent prayer of the Christian contemplatives all arrive in English wearing one coat. The Theosophical Society and the wider current of orientalist enthusiasm in the late nineteenth century did much to fix the usage, applying meditation indifferently across Hindu, Buddhist, and other Asian practices until it became the natural English cover-term. The word does not, in the end, exclusively translate any one of them: the same English syllables stand in turn for dhyāna, for samādhi, even for the breath-work of prāṇāyāma. A term that once meant a friar ruminating on a psalm now means all of contemplative Asia and most of contemplative Europe at once. Each of the practices it gathers is a precise discipline inside a particular cosmology, with its own aim, its own preconditions, and its own warnings against the wrong turn.

The aims do not converge

The differences are not cosmetic, and they begin with the question of what the practice is for. Hold several of these traditions side by side and the shared gesture — narrow the attention, quiet the churn, attend — sits atop ends so unlike that the instruction means something different in each mouth.

In the classical Yoga of Patanjali, concentration is a technology aimed at a single, sharply defined result: the stilling of the mind’s fluctuations — citta-vṛtti-nirodha, the second aphorism of the Yoga Sutras — so that the seer, the pure witnessing consciousness, abides in its own nature rather than mistaking itself for the mental activity it observes. The staged absorptions are scaffolding toward a release that is conceived as separation: consciousness disentangled from matter and mind. (This is the project of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali specifically; the broader yoga tradition contains many other systems with other goals, and the two should not be collapsed.)

Buddhist practice splits the same field along a different seam. Calm-abiding (śamatha) steadies and gathers the mind; insight (vipaśyanā) turns that steadied attention onto experience to see how it is in fact constructed — and the whole apparatus is held in service of a teaching that there is no fixed, abiding self to be uncovered at the end. Where Patanjali’s seer is found, the Buddhist analysis finds, precisely, that there is no such permanent finder. The same word, meditation, covers a search that expects an unchanging witness and a search that expects to dissolve the assumption of one.

The Christian contemplative tradition behind a text like The Cloud of Unknowing — the anonymous fourteenth-century English work that absorbed the Victorine science and the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius — aims not at a state at all but at a person. The emptied mind, the deliberate forgetting of every image and concept, is a means of approach to God, who remains an Other and is reached, in this account, by love rather than knowledge. Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345–399), the desert theorist whose framework underlies the Eastern Christian discipline, made pure prayer an act of the intellect stripped naked of all mental images, with the intrusive thoughts — the logismoi — as the field of struggle. The point is union with a living God, and the practice is built around what that union requires; the quieting is instrumental, never the destination.

That instrumental shape recurs with its own coloring across the other traditions the English word collects. The Eastern Christian discipline that runs from the desert through Mount Athos into the Philokalia gathers the attention around the name of Jesus held in the heart, oriented toward a real participation in the uncreated divine energies — the theology Gregory Palamas defended and the synods of the mid-fourteenth century confirmed. In Sufism, dhikr — the remembrance of God through the repetition of the divine names — runs from the loud, communal recitation of some orders to the silent, inward dhikr-i khafī that is the signature of the Naqshbandiyya, whose first guiding principle, hūsh dar dam, “awareness in the breath,” ties the remembrance to the rhythm of respiration, and whose ideal of khalwat dar anjuman, “solitude within the crowd,” refuses the cloister and sanctifies ordinary work instead. In Daoist practice within Taoism, the cultivation of stillness and emptiness — and, in the inner-alchemical current of neidan, the refining of the vital energies toward an indestructible spiritual embryo — aims at alignment with the Way and a transformed longevity rather than at union with a personal God or at the extinction of self. The Neoplatonic ascent of the soul toward the One, and the ritual contemplation of theurgy, add a further set of ends again. What a practitioner is finally held to reach — liberation, the cessation of craving, the vision of God, participation in the divine energies, the return of the soul to its source, a transmuted body, or simply a steadier mind — depends entirely on what that tradition holds the cosmos and the self to be. The technique is downstream of the metaphysics, not prior to it.

The body as instrument, and the warnings around it

Several of these traditions reach the body directly, and they do so in ways that again refuse to line up. The breath is the most-shared anchor — hūsh dar dam in the Naqshbandī silent remembrance, the breath-coordinated invocation that the late-Byzantine hesychast manuals of Nikephoros the Hesychast and the treatise long ascribed to Symeon the New Theologian set down in the thirteenth century, the regulation of breath that the Yoga tradition treats as a limb of its path — yet the postures and intentions diverge sharply. The hesychast bows the back and fixes the gaze toward the heart; the yogic seat holds the spine erect; the Naqshbandī master prizes a remembrance so absorbed it can be carried through a crowded market. The convergence of means — sound, breath, a fixed point of attention — coexists with a divergence of bodies: what the body is taken to be, and what it is being made to do, differs from tradition to tradition.

That a body-anchored technique should appear in several places at once has tempted the assumption of borrowing. The strongest such case — that the Athonite breath-and-name method was learned from Sufi dhikr — has been examined carefully and found unsupported: no Greek hesychast text cites a Sufi source, no Sufi manual depends on a Christian one, and the most elaborate Sufi technical descriptions run parallel to or later than the Byzantine ones rather than before them. The disciplined posture and breath of the Christian East developed, on the prevailing reading, out of its own desert inheritance — Diadochus of Photike’s remembrance of the name of Jesus, the Macarian theology of the heart, the dictum of John Climacus that one should remember God more often than one breathes. Resemblance, here, is a recurring human solution to a recurring problem, not a chain of transmission.

The traditions are also alert to the dangers of their own methods in ways the portable modern category tends to drop. The desert literature warns at length against prelest — spiritual delusion, the mistaking of a self-generated state for grace. Patanjali’s text catalogs the siddhis, the powers that arise along the way, precisely as snares that can arrest the practitioner short of release. The Christian apophatic writers insist that the emptied mind is dangerous if it is emptied toward nothing rather than toward God. These are not incidental cautions; they are part of the architecture, the guardrails a tradition builds because it knows where its own road can go wrong. Strip the road of its destination and the guardrails come away with it.

The modern construction of a portable practice

Much of what now travels worldwide under the name meditation was shaped in the twentieth century, and recent scholarship is cautious about treating it as the timeless thing it presents itself to be. Techniques were lifted from their doctrinal settings and re-taught as portable methods, detachable from the cosmologies that once gave them their point, until they could enter clinical, psychological, and frankly secular use as instruments of stress reduction, attention training, or well-being. The historian of religion David McMahan, in his study of how a recognizably modern Buddhism was assembled, argues that the now-obvious claim that meditation and mindfulness are Buddhism’s core practices is itself a modernist construction — that meditation was dissociated from the wider ethical, social, and cosmological setting of the tradition through processes he names privatization, deinstitutionalization, and detraditionalization. The result is a practice optimized for a result the source tradition never defined: not liberation, not union, not the cessation of craving, but a measurable improvement in the life one already has. This is a genuine and widespread thing; it is also a recent one, and it is not metaphysically neutral so much as fitted to a different metaphysics — that of the modern self seeking to function better within the world rather than to be released from it.

Scholarship and texts

The comparative study of these practices as a single object has its own modern history, and it carries its own cautions. The founding attempt to make prayer — including its silent, contemplative, “mystical” forms — the unit of cross-cultural analysis is Friedrich Heiler’s Das Gebet: Eine religionsgeschichtliche und religionspsychologische Untersuchung (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, 1918; English abridgment Prayer, trans. Samuel McComb with J. Edgar Park, Oxford University Press, 1932), which gathered Vedic hymn, Babylonian incantation, Sufi duʿāʾ, Carmelite contemplation, and Reformation prayer-life into a single typology built around a contrast between mystical and prophetic prayer. The work’s empirical sweep has never been matched — and its developmental scheme, which crowned the sequence with a Lutheran-confessional ideal of personal prayer and filed rabbinic Judaism and Islamic ṣalāt under a single legalistic type, is exactly the warning attached to it: a comparative apparatus that smuggles a home tradition in as the measure of the rest. (German editions are in the public domain in the United States; the 1932 English text is best consulted through a library.) Heiler is read now both for what he assembled and for what his assembling shows about the hazard of the whole comparative project.

For the individual disciplines the primary texts are the surer ground. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the charter of the stilling-of-the-mind project, are available in Charles Johnston’s translation (The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, New York, 1912), hosted in full at the Library; the Haṭhayogapradīpikā of Svātmārāma in Pancham Sinh’s edition (1914) is hosted at the Library. The English apophatic apex, The Cloud of Unknowing, edited by Evelyn Underhill from manuscript in 1912, is hosted at the Library. For the Sufi tradition, al-Hujwīrī’s Kashf al-Maḥjūb in Reynold A. Nicholson’s translation (1911) is hosted at the Library, and for the Daoist disciplines of quiet, James Legge’s The Texts of Tâoism (Sacred Books of the East, 1891) at the Library. The standard modern scholarly account of the somatic Christian method and its pseudonymous thirteenth-century manuals is Irénée Hausherr, La méthode d’oraison hésychaste (Orientalia Christiana 9.2, Rome, 1927), which first printed the Greek of the so-called Three Methods of Prayer and dated it away from Symeon the New Theologian. The argument that the secular, portable practice is a recent construction is set out in David L. McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2008). Matthew Kapstein’s survey of the contemplative traditions of Asia frames the whole field for the comparativist; it remains in copyright and is cited as a pointer.

The seam in the category

The single word holds because the gesture it points at really does recur: again and again, across cosmologies that agree on almost nothing else, the instruction is to do less — to narrow or release the ordinary traffic of thought, and to attend. But the word also conceals a join. It was built backward, by translators who needed one term and a modern culture that wanted a portable one, fitted over disciplines that were never designed to be interchangeable and that aimed, each of them, at an end the others would have rejected. To ask what meditation is is already to have accepted that join as seamless — to treat as one practice what is better seen as a label laid across many. The label is useful; it is also a decision, made comparatively recently, about which differences may be allowed to vanish into a name. Reading any one of these disciplines well begins with prying the name back off and asking the older, harder question each tradition asked in its own tongue: not how to meditate, but what the stilled mind is for.

→ In the library: Patanjali — The Yoga Sutras (Johnston, 1912) · The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912) · The Hathayogapradīpikā (Sinh, 1914) · Hujwīrī — The Kashf al-Mahjúb (Nicholson, 1911) · Legge — The Texts of Tâoism (1891)

→ Related: Mysticism · Asceticism · Christian Mysticism · Sufism · Jewish Mysticism · Neoplatonism · Theurgy · Taoism · Buddhism · Yoga · Patanjali · Apophatic Theology · Evagrius Ponticus · Jesus Prayer · The Cloud Of Unknowing · Comparative Mysticism · Gnosis