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elfs"You must know what the breath is," the Buddha said. But what the breath is, is very different in our century than it was in his.
Buddhist meditation begins with learning how to breathe. Apparently, old Siddhartha Buddha could do this readily and without effort, but most people have to spend some time paying attention to all the little things that go into breathing, all the sensations that we've learned to take for granted, to ignore, to accept as mere signs that we're still breathing.
Breathing is one of the most remarkable of all our biological systems. It has to be fast; one breath is barely in our lungs for half a second, and in that time we have to swap out the oxygen for carbon dioxide just to keep living. It's under our control when we want, and it goes on automatically when we're not paying attention to it. Regulating it gives us expressive power in speech and the capability to dive deep underwater. Buddhism wants you to pay attention to its sensations while not trying to exert control over it— a fairly difficult exercise that can take weeks or months for most meditation practioners to master.
But in the Buddha's time, all that was known about breathing was about its sensations and our impressions of them. Prior to the discipline of microbiology, all we knew about breathing was the animal understanding we had of its necessity, our limited control over it, and that if we stopped bad things happened. It's that centrality to our lives, and the sheer amount of brain structure turned over to managing the demands of our bodies' oxygen levels while at the same time letting us control it to swim and speak, that makes breathing exercises and meditating on breathing so effective.
When I meditate, I have to avoid the mantra "Know what the breath is" because if I do that my hyperactive brain goes down a rabbithole of biology and neurology, because breathing "is" all these extra things we understand now about the low-level processes.
Buddhist meditation begins with learning how to breathe. Apparently, old Siddhartha Buddha could do this readily and without effort, but most people have to spend some time paying attention to all the little things that go into breathing, all the sensations that we've learned to take for granted, to ignore, to accept as mere signs that we're still breathing.
Breathing is one of the most remarkable of all our biological systems. It has to be fast; one breath is barely in our lungs for half a second, and in that time we have to swap out the oxygen for carbon dioxide just to keep living. It's under our control when we want, and it goes on automatically when we're not paying attention to it. Regulating it gives us expressive power in speech and the capability to dive deep underwater. Buddhism wants you to pay attention to its sensations while not trying to exert control over it— a fairly difficult exercise that can take weeks or months for most meditation practioners to master.
But in the Buddha's time, all that was known about breathing was about its sensations and our impressions of them. Prior to the discipline of microbiology, all we knew about breathing was the animal understanding we had of its necessity, our limited control over it, and that if we stopped bad things happened. It's that centrality to our lives, and the sheer amount of brain structure turned over to managing the demands of our bodies' oxygen levels while at the same time letting us control it to swim and speak, that makes breathing exercises and meditating on breathing so effective.
When I meditate, I have to avoid the mantra "Know what the breath is" because if I do that my hyperactive brain goes down a rabbithole of biology and neurology, because breathing "is" all these extra things we understand now about the low-level processes.
