Fake Frameworks for Zen Meditation (Summary of Sekida's Zen Training) - LessWrong
Meditation, and Zen meditation in particular, is hard to teach in the sense that
most people cannot learn to do it as intended by simply reading or hearing about
it. Instead they need to attempt it, talk about what happened with someone more
experienced, get feedback, and try again. I think this is because most models of
how to meditate are implicit and complex, so written meditation instructions
tend to leave out important subtle details.
Probably the most successful attempt to counter this dynamic and get all the
necessary instructions in writing is The Mind Illuminated, which offers a book's
worth of words and diagrams to teach you how to perform a particular style of
Theravada concentration meditation. Aside from a lot of specific advice and
answers to questions, it usefully contains a lot of explicit models built using
fake frameworks to give the reader gears for understanding meditation.
Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy by Katsuki Sekida does something similar,
but for Zen.
In this post I'll share some of Sekida's models that I think are especially
useful to have if you're interested in Zen, Buddhism, or meditation more
generally. I have to cover a couple sections of preliminaries to set those
models up, though, so things don't really get going until the section on
breathing.
Caveat lector:
Sekida's models as presented in the book have some limitations. In particular, I
think he often gets the low-level details wrong when he tries to ground his
models in science because much of his information was outdated even at the time
of writing (1960s). Thankfully this ends up not being too much of an issue
because the models don't actually rely on those details, which is to say Sekida
is sometimes overzealous in trying to ground his models in scientific details
that are not actually gears within his models.
Thus what follows is my take on his models. It's fairly faithful, but I've taken
editorial license in places to either increase concision (this is a post