What is meditation?

 

 

 

A great Zen master who was sitting on the sea beach when a king happened to pass by. He had always wanted to see the master, but there was no time – the affairs of the kingdom and the worries and the wars… this was a golden opportunity. He stopped his chariot, got down and went to the master and asked him, “I don’t have much time, but I want to know what the essential teaching is. I don’t want to die ignorant.”

The master remained silent.

The king said, “I can understand, you are very old and perhaps you have gone deaf.”

The master smiled.

The king shouted in his ears, “I want to know the essence of your teaching!”

The master wrote with his finger on the sand, “Dhyan.” He did not speak.

The king said, “But that does not make much sense to me. I have heard that word many times. Elaborate a little more.”

The master said to him, “I have already fallen for your sake. Otherwise the right answer was the first, when I had remained silent. But perhaps you don’t know the communion that exists in silence. Out of compassion, I wrote `dhyan’; now you want elaboration. I will try.” He wrote again in bigger letters, dhyan.

The king was getting a little angry. He said, “What kind of elaboration is this? It is the same word!”

The master said, “You will have to forgive me, because I cannot fall more. Just for your sake, I will not let the centuries laugh about me. Nobody has said anything about dhyan, and nobody can say anything about dhyan.”

Then what have the masters been doing down the ages? They create devices, situations in which they hope that perhaps in a thousand people one may get an insight. Those devices are not meditations. Those devices are only to bring you to a point in your own inner space where suddenly you realize and you say “Aha!” And the moment you understand the state of meditation, all methods of meditation become futile. Those methods are just arbitrary, created out of compassion for people to whom there is no other way to communicate a higher reality than the mind.

 

 

 

 

 

The Neglected Temple

Once, three monks gathered at an unattented lonely temples. “Why is this temple so unattended?”, nobody knew who started the conversation, but then, “Must be because the monks do not have the sincerity in doing the prayers and rituals that the deities did not showed them their miraculous powers.”, answered the first monk. “Must be that the monks here are not hard-working enough that the temple was left unattended,” explained second monk. “Must be because of the monks living here do not respect one another that the followers grew few, ” added the third monk.

Three of them argued…until that they decided to live in that temple to see who was the truest. The first monk do prayers, ceremonies, rituals sincerely, the second monk fi

xed and renovated the temple, and the third monk went preaching out to the public. Time passed and the temple became a very crowded well known temple.

“This all happened because of my sincerity in prayers that the deities decided to help and grant me miracles,” said the first monk. “No, because of my hardwork working on the temple that it looked so magnificent and beautiful,” replied the second monk. “Of course because of me who goes out teaching truths and preaching that our followers grow even larger every Day and night they kept arguing, and cared less of the temple condition. They did not realized that they began to neglect the temple’s prosperity and was more concerned with their egoistic pride. Time passed again and the temple returned to its former condition, it was then as unattented as it once was before.day,” the third monk explained.

The three monks left the temple, they realized and concluded that the temple was unattented not because of anything, but because there was lack of harmony within the people inside.

Perfect patience

Patrul Rimpoche was roaming the Tibetan mountains. One day he heard about a great hermit who had spent twenty years in a cave meditating on the Perfection of Patience. Desirous to meet such a saintly being, he went in search of his cave. Poking his head around the entrance, he called out, “Hello there, what are you doing?”

His meditation disrupted by this impertinent hollering, the hermit opened his eye and inquired,

“What do you want?”

The beggar crouched down in front of him, his eyes glinting with mischief, without uttering a word.

“Who are you? Where do you come from?” pressed the hermit.

“I come from behind my back, and I’m going in the direction I am facing.”

Nonplussed, the hermit continued, “Where were you born?”

“On earth.”

“OK,” he said, trying to contain his rising frustration, “What – do – you – want?”

“Well, I was curious to know what you’re doing here.”

The hermit was keen to impress this simpleton. “You see my son, I have been meditating here for twenty
years on Lord Buddha’s Perfection of Patience.

The beggar howled with laughter, poking him in the ribs with a dirty finger, and said, “Oh, what a great
scam. Gullible locals, are they? How much are you making these days?”

The hermit thundered, “How dare you! You barge in here. You give me all these crazy lines. Now you
insult me. Out. Out.”

As he rose to leave, Patrul Rinpoche calmly observed, “And where’s your perfect patience now?”
The hermit’s anger froze instantly, as he realized the vanity of his claim. Sitting down and taking a deep
breath, he started meditating in earnest for the first time.

Reflection

Patrul Rimpoche lived in the nineteenth century and was one of the greatest scholar in Buddhism. This highly realized saint roamed all over Tibet anonymously, dressed as a beggar, creating mischief along the way. His primary goal was to focus the mind of people on true spiritual pursuits, while exposing false teachings and fake spirituality.This hermit had deluded himself for over twenty years, and grew comfortable in it. But a single encounter with a master can shatter a lifetime of delusions and re-establish us on the true path. Were these twenty years of previous meditation a waste of time? Quite the contrary. They were the necessary preparation to bring about this profound transformation.