Serenity and insight in Chinese buddhism

• Reviewing relationship between body, breath and mind
• Adjusting windy, uneven or ordinary breath
• Counteracting lethargy, restlessness, agitation and laxity
• Maintaining mindfulness and introspective awareness on the body, breath and mind
• How to emerge from meditation
• Serenity and wisdom
• Developing serenity and insight in meditation
• Cultivating serenity and insight while walking
• Cultivating serenity and insight while hearing

86 Serenity and Insight in Chinese Buddhism (download)

Contemplation points

1. Review how your mind and body affect one another. When your mind is agitated, what is your breathing like (and vice versa)? How does this affect your ability to concentrate during meditation? What are some antidotes to help calm both the body and mind?
2. Practice noticing for the three imbalanced ways of breathing and applying the appropriate antidotes as you meditate:
   • Settle the body into a comfortable and stable posture.
   • Balance the breath by expelling the stale breath.
   • Adjust the breath if it is windy, uneven, or ordinary by focusing at the navel.
   • Place mindfulness on your meditation object if it is other than the breath.
   • Balance the mind in reining in distracted thoughts and then looking out for lethargy, restlessness, agitation, and laxity, and apply the appropriate antidotes should they occur.
   • At the conclusion of the session, dedicate the merit and arise from meditation gently.
3. What are some of the benefits of both serenity and insight? Why is it important that we have both in our practice?
4. What are practices we can do (or questions we can ask ourselves) to implement the practice of serenity and insight as we’re interacting with the environment around us (i.e. walking, standing, sitting, speaking, hearing, etc)?