c. 1997 Religion News Service

BOSTON _ The common perception of Buddhist meditation involves someone sitting for long periods in a darkened room with legs crossed and eyes closed.

But those who practice Buddhist-style meditation view it as more a way of perceiving the world than a set of exercises to calm the mind and body.”Buddhism is something other than a religion,”said Robert Thurman, a Columbia University professor who is among the nation’s foremost scholars of Buddhism.”Fundamentally, it’s a therapy about selfishness. … Buddha’s great insight was that we are not the center of the universe; that we are only a part of everything else.” Over the course of its 2,500-year history, Asian Buddhism has developed a variety of practices designed to discipline the mind to access the innate wisdom Buddhists say all humans possess.

Some practices do involve sitting. However, Buddhist meditation also may involve walking, physical exercises such as yoga and tai chi, chanting mantras _ phrases said to evoke high states of consciousness _ or creating works of art.

Some practices are intellectually complex, such as the Tibetan Buddhist technique of meditating on elaborate mental constructs involving other-worldly images. Others are more simple, such as the Theravadan Vipassana technique of quietly paying attention to each breath.

Regardless of the techniques employed, Sharon Salzberg, a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Mass., said the aim is always the same.”The point is to reveal the nature of the mind so that we may see how it envelopes us in dwelling in the past or worrying about the future, when all there is now is the moment,”said Salzberg, one of the first Americans to introduce Theravadan Vipassana meditation to the United States.”The theory is that concentrating the mind on the moment allows us to access the huge amount of energy usually lost to us, which is a healing and empowering state to be in. It achieves stillness of mind and a sense of wholeness.”

MJP END RIFKIN