Buddhist Meditation: Why Do We Practice It?
Today I want to talk about Buddhist meditation. There are three things we need to examine in this subject: why we practice Buddhist meditation, how we practice it, and what we must be careful about while meditating. The first of these is why we do it.
The Words Samatha and Samadhi
A slight change in terminology can make practices seem different from one another, so let us first look at the names used for Buddhist meditation. Those who have studied Theravada, or Southern Buddhism, will be familiar with the term samatha practice. In the language commonly used at Korean temples or by monks, we also encounter terms such as meditative absorption and seated meditation. For people who have not encountered Buddhism or religion, the most approachable word may be samadhi. Even in everyday Korean, we use expressions that mean being absorbed in reading or being in a state of self-forgetfulness.
The Korean term sammae arose as a Chinese transliteration of the word samadhi. The collected state of concentration reached through samatha practice is called samadhi, or sammae. The point I emphasize here is ‘gathering.’ Instead of being scattered in many directions, the mind gathers in one place, and through concentration and immersion one enters fully into a single activity. That is samadhi. Absorption in reading means being immersed in reading a book. If someone enters samadhi while dancing, that person is so focused on the dance that everything else is forgotten. A state of self-forgetfulness can be understood in the same way. It is the state of forgetting even oneself and entering fully into the activity itself.
Finding the Purpose of Meditation in the Purpose of Buddhism
Buddhist meditation, however, does not take the experience of immersion itself as its goal. One enters samadhi in accordance with the goal of Buddhism. To speak about the purpose of meditation, therefore, we must first ask about the purpose of Buddhism. The methods used to fulfill that purpose include stopping and observing. Stopping means bringing activity to rest. Observing means examining, understanding, and discerning. It is the practice through which I understand what I have understood incorrectly. If an earlier video dealt with observation, this discussion concerns stopping, samatha, and samadhi.
The purpose of Buddhism is to become free from mistaken ideas, understand human beings and the world, and become a genuinely free person. In Buddhist language, becoming free is liberation. It means being released from what has bound us and stepping out of it. Once free, we can stop suffering from attachment to irrelevant things, become peaceful, and live this present moment happily. The goal of meditation is not separate from this purpose of Buddhism.
The Human Being Who Reacts to Stimuli
To understand the purpose of meditation, we must first see what kind of being a human is. The music played at the beginning of the video was ‘Fly Me to the Moon.’ It was once widely known, and for people now in their late forties or early fifties it may be a song they often heard in their youth. The moment they hear it, some people feel nostalgia and remember their younger selves. When I hear it, too, my room away from home during my early university years and my memories of that period naturally return.
I may have intended to listen to the music and recall the past. Yet I did not necessarily intend every memory and emotion that rises automatically the instant the music is heard. This is the human being. Living things respond to stimuli in their environment. Even a tiny single-celled organism must perceive and respond to its surroundings in order to maintain itself, divide, and leave descendants. The human brain likewise learns countless stimuli and is formed to respond to them.
Scenes and memories stored together during the period when a piece of music first became familiar are drawn out together when that music is heard again. Even when I do not want it, a stimulus entering through hearing makes the brain naturally produce a response. This operation is necessary for survival. If a primitive human ate an apple in a certain place and found it delicious, that person had to remember the place, the season, and the experience in order to return at the same time and eat apples again. Depending on the strength of the stimulus, emotion, surroundings, and thought are stored together, and a similar stimulus later pulls them out again. This is one characteristic of the human brain. Once we understand the human being in this way, Buddhism also becomes easier to understand.
Is What We Learned Really Correct?
Now we need to question one thing. If the human being is a being who reacts to stimuli, is what I learned actually correct? We accept what we have once learned far too naturally. Whether it is a story learned about the sky and heaven, the claim that rebirth exists, or the idea that the world is flat, we seldom take a belief back out and make room to determine whether it is true. Seen in terms of the human way of reacting, this too is natural.
The Buddhist practice of observation, however, takes what has been stored and examines it one item at a time. It is to understand completely that it is only my thought and may not be one hundred percent true. Only then can I become free from suffering because of my thoughts and from clinging to mistaken ideas. This is why I earlier described the human being as an animal that creates images. We listen to music, eat delicious food, and watch television and films with our eyes, continually creating images. The operation itself is entirely natural. The problem is that what it creates may not be true.
Understanding Thoughts That Keep Moving on Their Own
Responses continue in the human mind in real time. We may hear music, remember something, and cry. We may think again about being reprimanded by a supervisor today and suffer. We may recall something we did years ago and regret it, asking, ‘Why did I do that then?’ We also draw in our minds a future that has not yet arrived. When we are not fully concentrated on another activity, the brain keeps thoughts moving according to the language, ideas, and knowledge it has learned. The thoughts accumulated as ‘I must do this,’ ‘I must do that,’ ‘This is good,’ and ‘That is bad’ react on their own.
Once we understand this operation, we can see that the suffering I experience now is also an operation of this reaction. Guesswork and the ideas accumulated through that guesswork operate in everything I ordinarily judge, say, do, accept, and perceive. In Buddhist language, these are images or forms. Whether we call them images or shapes is not important. What matters is that they become the standards for my thoughts and actions. By understanding the reactions that continue by themselves and examining whether learned thoughts are true, we can become free from the suffering created by those thoughts and attachments.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.