Should you want to sit in the full-lotus position, observe the above procedure; and then place your right lower leg on your left, turning the sole of your right foot up and drawing it in close to your lower belly. Once settled, loosen your belt just enough to keep it from slipping and then loosen anything else that might be even slightly binding, like a wristwatch or a snug collar. When you have done that, lay the back of your left hand in the upturned palm of your right, and rest the back of your right hand on the upturned soles of your feet. Then check to see if you are leaning, slumping or straining, and, having made whatever adjustments you need, shake your limbs seven or eight times to relax them. Then check again to see how you are sitting, making sure that you are not slumped down or sitting rigidly upright but are easily erect. Your head should not jut forward or lean to one side or the other, and your chin should not be vigorously pulled in. You should feel that you are just sitting naturally. Then, slowly and continuously exhale through your mouth, while imagining that all the waste and impurities that might be in your psychic centers are being expelled along with your breath. Close your mouth, so that your upper lip and teeth meet your lower ones and your tongue touches your palate, and then close your eyes and inhale clean air through your nostrils. Now, imagine that you are a mountain, settled and immobile. Sitting in this way, you can avoid both strain and slackness.

Regulating The Breath

For meditation successfully to take place, the breath must first be regulated. There are, traditionally, four kinds of breath: audible, gasping, coarse and restful. The first three are considered to be somewhat disruptive. If you can hear your breath, it is said to be audible. If it is not audible, and is also obstructed or not free, it is called gasping breath. If the breath is neither audible nor fine, it is said to be coarse. When it is neither audible nor gasping nor coarse, but continuous, being barely perceptible and so fine that it is almost imperceptible and also accompanied by comfort and ease, it is called restful breath. An audible breath scatters your composure; a gasping breath ties you up; a coarse breath tires you; but a restful breath indicates a quiet mind. If any of the first three ways of breathing is present, it means that your breath is not yet regulated.

Regulating the Breath: a Summary

There are three notable phases that take place during the course of this practice:

* Concentrating properly, you relax.
* Your mind grows calm as you relax more and more.
* You have the experience of breathing through all your pores.

Regulating The Mind

Entering Meditation

The purpose or goal, is to reduce confusion and thinking, to keep your attention from wandering and to stabilize the mind when it starts sinking, floating, straining or becoming too diffuse.

Sinking mind is dull, confused and untraceable. Even dozing may occur. Therefore, to remedy this, you are advised to fix your attention on the tip of your nose.

Floating mind drifts; you feel uneasy and are concerned about externals. Therefore, you are advised to fix your attention on your navel because this has been found to keep thoughts from arising. This accomplished, the mind is said to be stabilized and is calmed easily. It then becomes a regulated mind.

Sustained Meditation

Meditation ultimately is simply awareness without intention. However, you are encouraged to be constantly aware and to know whether your body, breath and mind are properly regulated. If, after having regulated your body and having sat for awhile, you notice that your sitting has become strained or loose, that you are inclined to one side, drooping, holding your shoulders up or pulling them backward or forward, or that you are somehow not just right, you should make the proper adjustments in order to maintain a regulated mind. It might be possible, however, that even though your body is regulated, your breath is not, even after you have already dealt with various unregulated aspects of the breath, which may be audible, gasping or coarse. It may also happen that, even though the body and breath are regulated, the mind is either floating, sinking, loose, strained or unsettled, in which case the methods mentioned earlier should then be used to regulate the mind. Although these methods are to be used expediently, rather than in succession, they may, nevertheless, seem very willful. Actually, it is a little like learning to ride a bicycle; once learned, it takes care of itself.

Coming Out of Meditation

Before your meditation session is over, you should, in a manner of speaking, put it aside and exhale, using your mouth while visualizing the air leaving your psychic centers. Then gently rotate your shoulders, arms, hands, head and neck; next wiggle your toes to relax them. Having done this, rub your body with your hands, and then rub your palms together and put them over your eyes, cupping them for a while. Finally when you feel that you have cooled down sufficiently, you can leave your seat. To come out of meditation abruptly, even though everything may have been stabilized while you were sitting, can cause headaches and all sorts of illness.

The Practice of Chih-Kuan in Relation to Coarse and Distracted Mind

When a beginner sits down to practice, his or her mind is usually coarse and unsettled. Practicing Chih is conducive to mind control, but, failing that, one can switch to Kuan. Let us see what it all means.

The first approach, called Chih, has three components, as follows:

1. According to the sutra, a fixed mind that cannot stray is like a bound monkey. As applied to practice, it means fixing your attention on the tip of your nose, on your navel, or an inch and a half below it.
2. The sutra further says that the five sense organs are controlled by the mind. To stop a wandering mind, you restrain it through observation as it moves.
3. Understanding is of primary importance. Referring to the sutra again, we find that the causes that create phenomena are ownerless and empty. Whoever calms his/her mind, has the foundation for monastic practice. Stopping all arising causes and ensures the attainment of Absolute Reality by means of the realization that all things (dharmas) arise from the mind, that their existence is due to circumstantial causes and that they are devoid of separate self. If this is understood, the mind will not grasp at anything, and its stirred-up condition will simply come to a complete stop. The term Chih means just that -- stopping.

The second approach, called Kuan, has two components, as follows:

1. If you find yourself caught in sexual desire, for example, you should cultivate the opposite view, seeing sex as dirty and ugly. When you are consumed with anger, you have to find a way to express compassion instead. The opposite of an attachment to the ego's concerns would be to call to mind how everything is an illusion. When you are deluged with thoughts, you count your breaths. The effect of this strategy is, ultimately, to call a halt to discrimination.

2. This consists of looking into the nature of things and seeing that they have no inherent existence and that their apparent existence is dependent upon apparent causes, which, in turn, are dependent upon past experiences and what is presumed to be present circumstances. In other words, causes, also, have no inherent nature; and so they are actually identical with the undifferentiated reality from which they seemingly arise. Since the objects, thus contemplated, are unreal, it then follows that the mind which contemplated them will cease to arise.

The Chih-Kuan Dharma Gate

To recapitulate, remember that in order to prepare for meditation you should sit properly and regulate your breath to stabilize and control your mind. This requires a great deal of patience for most practitioners because the mind is, ordinarily, quite unruly. Not succeeding at it should not keep you from doing Chih-Kuan,however; nor does it mean that you should quit your practice of regulating your body, speech and mind. As it is, you soon discover that the mind's activity is like a monkey, never stopping for an instant. The advice that is traditionally given is to limit this monkey's movement. The Chih,in Chih-Kuan means stopping and refers to stopping the false or misleading activity of the mind. To do this-i.e., to tether the monkey mind by practicing Chih--the first step is to fix the mind on a single object to keep it from wandering from one object to another. Having accomplished this, you look within to contemplate your thoughts. There, you discover anew that they arise in great number and often without any relatedness, appearing, for the most part, randomly. You also realize that future thoughts have not yet come. When you ask yourself which of these thoughts is your mind, you realize that your false mind rises and falls and is, thus, also devoid of reality. If you continue in this way, you become familiar with this unreality, and your false mind comes to an end by itself; and with the false mind at an end, reality is evident.

When you first sit down to practice, your mind is often unsettled. This is appropriately called unsettled mind ,and to set it at rest, stopping, or Chih, is used. If it is stopped again and again, the thinking process gradually comes to an end. While meditating, you may find yourself getting drowsy. This is called sinking mind and the way to awaken it is by contemplation, or Kuan, which involves closing your eyes and looking inward, as it were, to the source of your thoughts. There are three kinds of Kuan, or contemplation: contemplation of the void; contemplation of the unreal; and contemplation of the mean.

Contemplation of the Void

You look into all things within the universe, from the largest-including the earth, mountains and rivers-to the smallest-including your body and mind. Doing so, you perceive that everything changes in every instant and is non-existent and void; and when your mind looks into this voidness, that is called contemplation of the void.

Contemplation of the Unreal

When you are familiar with this contemplation of the void, you look into your mind or the place, as it were, from which thoughts arise, and you find that each thought has its object. You then realize that every phenomenon owes its existence to a union of an inner cause and an outer concurring circumstance. For instance, a grain of rice sprouts because of the union of an inner direct cause, which is the seed, with an outer concurring condition, in the form of the water and mud that moisten and nourish it. If the grain of rice is not sown and is left in the warehouse, it will never sprout because there is only an inner, direct cause without an outer condition. Also, if there are only water and mud, without the seed being sown, they, alone, cannot produce the sprout because there has been no union with an original cause-namely, the seed. Every phenomenon in the world is created by the union of direct and circumstantial causes and vanishes as soon as they are separated. This includes thoughts that arise and disappear in the mind and that cannot be grasped. Such contemplation is called looking into the unreal.

Contemplation of the Mean

There are two contrasting attitudes connected with contemplation of the void, on the one hand, and looking into the unreal, on the other. When you reach this stage, your achievement is still incomplete. Having succeeded with contemplation of the void, do not cling to the void; and when you have achieved contemplation of the unreal, do not grasp at the unreal. When you succeed in keeping from the extremes of the void and the unreal, your non-relying and non-clinging mind will be extraordinarily clear, and this stage is called, contemplation of the mean.

At first glance, the Chih-Kuan Dharma Gate seems to imply diverse or successive stages. In practice, the use of either Chih or Kuan depends solely on the inclinations of the mind during meditation. As a matter of fact, the purpose of Chih is to return all thoughts to one, the one mind,and that of Kuan is to attain clear insight into the truth, which is to be free of illusion. When stopping, or Chih,is practiced, it should not stray from stopping. Do not cling to the printed word, but practice intelligently, according to the circumstances.

The breath is the source of life. When the breath stops, the body is just an inanimate corpse. With the nervous system no longer functioning, the mind vanishes and life comes to an end. That is why life is said to be preserved by the breath, which links the body with the mind. Thus, we see that a human being is composed of body, breath and mind and that the breath plays the important role of uniting the other two components.

The T'ien T'ai meditation manual, entitled The Six Profound Dharma Gates (T'ung Meng Chih-Kuan), focuses on breathing as a comprehensive practice that may be preceded by training in the Chih-Kuan method, or it can be used independently of it. The consecutive stages are as follows:

1. Counting the breath
2. Following the breath
3. Stopping (Chih)
4. Contemplation (Kuan)
5. Returning
6. Purification

The Method of Counting the Breath

The breath-counting method offers two possibilities, as follows: After you have regulated your breath, so that it is neither too tight nor too loose, count slowly from one to ten on either your inhalation or exhalation. Do not count on both. For example, breathing in, count one; then exhale and upon inhaling again, count two, and so on. Your mind soon becomes fixed on the activity and does not wander as readily. If it wanders off before you have reached the count of ten, return gently and without further thought to one, and resume counting as described above. This is the method of meditation known as Breath-Counting.
Realization Attained Through Breath-Counting

As you grow accustomed to the method just described, your breath becomes finer and finer, until it seems to be non-existent. This stage is called Realization By Breath-Counting.

The Method of Following the Breath

This method is both easy and simple: Just focus on your breath and follow it mindfully, holding on gently, until it is no longer an issue. Then mind and breath become one.

Realization Attained Through Following the Breath

As it follows the breath, your mind becomes increasingly subtle. You may notice, at first, the length of your breath; but as it gets more refined it becomes almost undetectable, and at that point it feels as though it is occurring through the pores of your skin. The effect on your mind is stilling or calming. At this stage of practice, you may wish to cultivate your breath further. Your next step will be the practice of stopping, also consisting of two phases: Chih and Kuan.

The Practice of Stopping, or Chih

Focus lightly on the tip of your nose; it leads to stopping. In the course of this simple practice, you may suddenly feel as if your body and mind have vanished; you will, thereby, enter a state of stillness called dhyana.
Realization Attained Through the Practice of Chih

At this stage, clarity develops through awareness. You feel no longer attached to anything, and there is no longer a sense of subject and object while sitting; then you proceed to the stage called Kuan.

The Practice of Contemplation, or Kuan

This practice consists of a gentle, passive observation of your refined breathing, regarding it as a movement in a void that has no reality of its own.

Realization Attained Through the Practice of Kuan

This is a further refinement of practice in which you come to feel as though you are breathing through the pores of your skin. To a bystander, you may appear as if you are not breathing. When you reach this stage, Chih and Kuan become indistinguishable. As a point of interest, the Samatha Vipasyana for beginners differs from Chih-Kuan in intent, in that the former develops mindfulness, while the latter develops absorption. An extended session of contemplation should be followed by
Returning.

The Method of Returning

Contemplating your breath, you may realize that there is an apparently subjective mind that contemplates an apparently objective breath and that these very clearly constitute the two poles, the essence, of duality. However, they are to be returned, as it were, to the one, fundamental Mind.

Realization Attained Through the Method of Returning

This method develops the awareness of the knower that contemplates the breath as rising and falling with the mind. This rising and falling mind is experienced to be like the waves that rise and fall in the sea, and this leads to a realization of the illusory nature of it all. The waves are not the water, the fundamental face of which can be seen only after the waves have subsided. Similarly, the mind that rises and falls, like the waves in the water, is not the True Mind. Now look into this True Mind, which is uncreated. Because it is uncreated, it is beyond is and is not; and it is, therefore, void. Because it is void, it follows that there is no subjective mind that contemplates. Because there is no contemplating mind, it follows that there is no object contemplated; and because knowledge and its object vanish, this is called The-Realization-of-Returning Method. Following that realization, the idea of returning remains; to relinquish it, one should meditate on purity.

Realization of the State of Purity

The practice of purification consists of contemplation on discriminating views. When the mind is still like calm water and there is an absence of false thinking, the Real Mind, which does not exist apart from false thinking, manifests. This water-without-waves sort of Mind is called The Realization of Purity.

These Six Profound Dharma Gates may be seen as consisting of a preliminary set of methods, involving counting and following the breath, the two main practices of Chih and Kuan,and the concluding practices of returning and purifying. More specifically, stopping (Chih) is the chief practice, while contemplation (Kuan) is its support, until perception is realized, which means that one is no longer involved in making distinctions or having attachments. This reference to perception refers to the five skandhas, wherein it is seen that distinctions are made at the level of conception. Thus, no longer being at that level is to be at the more subtle level of perceptions(again relating to the five skandhas).

To realize Great Dhyana and Great Prajna, the mind must be at ease. The-Six-Profound-Dharma-Gates process contains methods that are designed to regulate the mind, enabling it to relax. This is paramount, for if you do not know how to relax, you cannot even begin to practice. Having learned to relax, then, and with mind and breath regulated, meditation can take place. It is then that you can practice The Six Profound Dharma Gates of counting, following, stopping, contemplating, returning and purifying, going through all of them over and over again, slowly and patiently, putting your mind ever more at ease as you let go more and more. To follow any strict order of practice at this time is counterproductive. If you find that counting the breath goes well for you, count your breath. If the purifying method seems called for and works well for you, do that. Then, in only a few days, you may be able to understand your mind easily as never before.