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Comment by odiroot | Hacker News Reader

> Also, the modern focus on meditation is, well, modern—a result of Buddhism finding purchase in the psychology-loving West as a sort of innovative lifestyle choice. Most lay Buddhists of history did not engage in meditation.

This is the part that resonated the most with me. Never understood this (western) obsession with meditation. I have a few friends, born and raised in Buddhist homes; not a single one of them was taught to meditate.

In any case, I still have a lot of respect for Buddhism. Remember your good friend, breath.

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I’m Hindu, not Buddhist. But I don’t teach my children to meditate either although meditation is part of Hinduism. In fact I’d volunteer that most Hindu’s don’t meditate. It may be that it’s similar for Buddhism as well.

There’s a lot of churn around meditation. In my experience it’s not something you do unless you really want to. Even then, do not stress. I started meditation at around 25 and have been doing it for about 20 years now. You do how much you can. Sometimes 30-35 mins, sometimes just 5. But you do it daily. There is no magical peace that comes with overdoing it. It’s not that there is no benefit though. I have noticed I can better control my emotions and let go of irritations a lot better.

But meditation is the main focus of zen Buddhism, which took the practice back to _what the Buddha actually did himself_ to become enlightened, which was sit under the bodhi tree and meditate until the truth came to him. Other Asian traditions have long reached the point where it's the monks and priests who do the Buddhism same as in Catholicism it's the Pope and the priests who are the main channels of actual Christianity. For example, Pure Land Buddhism relies on chanting the nembutsu, a chant that is designed to bring you to the Pure Land aka Heaven eventually, none of this is in the original Buddhism, hence why Zen and similar sects tried to strip out all the fluff and accoutrements that they considered needlessly tacked on to the original Buddhism, with the idea of returning practice back to what truth and reality means for you, because your subjective experience is necessarily unique to you, and any words or teaching added in to it are going to be trivial compared to what you find out for yourself about how the world presents to you and your life, hence the need for meditation to give you the space and time and peace to work that out.

It depends on the tradition I guess. Mahamudra and Dzogchen have been in Vajrayana traditions since they were developed around Bengal over a thousand years ago, and are a major part of that yana's training. It's also not just for monks, as there's the Ngagpa in Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan.

Whether or not you learn it at home is complicated, as it'd depend on so many things -- lineage/yana, caste/social class, country/region, etc.

Meditation is the fundamental novel thing in Buddhism that western religions simply don’t have. Prayer has kind of the same benefits, but as a layperson I’ve never experienced anything at a Protestant or Catholic church as powerful as Buddhist group meditation. It’s like experiencing AR but without technology, drugs, herbs.

I think this is the effect that singing hymns is supposed to provide, though doubtlessly the euphoric effect is most pronounced in a grand cathedral with its glorious acoustics.

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