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What is Meditation?

We should also put the advice from Je Tsongkhapa’s heart, The Three Principal Aspects of the Path to Enlightenment, into practice by training in meditation on the stages of the path to enlightenment. This will now be explained.

In general, the definition of meditation is a mind that is single-pointedly focused on a virtuous object and whose function is to make the mind peaceful and calm.

We want to be happy all the time, even during sleep. How can we do this? We can do this through training in meditation because meditation makes our mind peaceful, and when our mind is peaceful we are happy all the time, even if our external conditions are poor. On the other hand, when our mind is not peaceful we are not happy, even if our external conditions are excellent. We can understand this through our own experience. Since the actual method to make our mind peaceful is training in meditation, we should apply effort to this training. Whenever we meditate, we are performing an action or karma that causes us to experience peace of mind in the future. From this we can understand the importance of training in meditation.

The difference between concentration and meditation is that concentration is necessarily a mental factor but meditation can be either a mental factor or a primary mind. We can understand the meaning of primary mind and mental factor from the book How to Understand the Mind. The object of concentration can be anything, but the object of meditation is necessarily a virtuous object. Whether an object is virtuous or non-virtuous depends on our position. For example, when our enemy harms us and we practise patience, our enemy is our virtuous object, the object of our patience, but if instead we get angry with him he is our non-virtuous object, the object of our anger. So it is our choice whether someone or something is our virtuous object or non-virtuous object. We should learn to use all living beings as our virtuous objects, the objects of our compassion and patience, and all phenomena as the objects of our training in emptiness. There is no greater Dharma practice than this.

There is a threefold division of meditation:

1. Meditation of a person of initial scope

2. Meditation of a person of middling scope

3. Meditation of a person of great scope