Meditation in Buddhism involves the body and the mind as a single entity. It takes control of the mind so that becomes peaceful and focused. The aim of meditation is to still the mind.
Part of meditation is allied with morality: the attempt to restrain one's senses from what is immoral and to create good, wholesome, and skillful frames of mind within which to work. The basic skill is concentration, coupled with equanimity, and this meditative control is then the basis of insight meditation. Insight meditation, however, is not practiced only by sitting in quiet solitude. For it demands a general attitude on self-recollection, of clear consciousness, of awareness of one's surroundings, one's experience, and one's actions and their consequences moment by moment, day by day.
A new attitude, a new habit of mind grows out of the equanimity of meditation. One can now stand aloof from experience. One can see the dangers in it and turn away. One can observe, yet not pursue, even fleeting pleasures and aspirations as they flicker before the mind's eye. Perhaps the most compact statement of this sensibility is found in the stock prescription that the monk should "not cling to the here and now, not grasp after situations, relinquish easily".
"The monk neither constructs in his mind, nor wills in order to produce, any state of mind or body, or the destruction of any such state. By not so willing anything in the world, he grasps after nothing; by not grasping, he is not anxious; he is therefore fully calmed within."
In support of the view
ReplyDeleteNeed to train the mind in meditation in order to have deep understanding of dhamma
and to remove defilements and hindrances in order to practice morality and attain
higher state of consciousness.
Other views
All 3 aspects of the Eightfold Path are essential. Morality can be the essential basis as it is universal