Meditation & Yoga

Still the mind. Patanjali codified the practice into eight limbs. The Buddha made it the core of his path. Both said the goal is the same: seeing clearly.

Meditation, in the Indian tradition, is not relaxation. It is investigation. The Buddha taught four foundations of mindfulness (body, sensation, mental states, mental objects) as a way of seeing the mind's contents without being swept away by them. Patanjali, writing in a different but related current, laid out eight limbs of yoga: ethical restraints, physical postures, breath control, withdrawal of the senses, and then three increasingly fine-grained stages of concentration leading to samadhi, a state of absorbed stillness. Both saw ordinary waking life as a kind of fog: reactive, grasping, mistaking the surface of things for the whole. Meditation clears that fog not through belief but through practice. You sit, you watch, you notice what the mind does when left with no distraction. What becomes visible in that quiet is the subject of most serious Indian philosophy.