Performance
A Japanese lay practitioner gives a technically detailed account of posture, breathing, attention, and absorption.
The author treats meditation not as philosophy or mysticism but as a physical practice that readjusts nervous activity. On his account, sitting practice restores a distorted nervous system to its normal functioning, so the work is bodily before it is spiritual.
In a sudden moment of insight, an ordinary sound or sight can seem overwhelmingly beautiful. The author argues the change is not in the world but in the perceiver: you have become purified, and the insight is recognising your own clear mind.
Reasoning about the nature of mind is not a separate activity from sitting practice; both arise from the same body and mind. Understanding grows out of what you do with your body and attention, not only from thinking about it.
The mind's condition can be mapped by where attention rests, inward or outward, and the different combinations of the two. Naming these combinations gives a practitioner a clear way to recognise what state they are in.
Instead of dozens of fine-grained stages, training is laid out in a handful of broad steps, likened to searching for, catching, and taming a runaway ox. The one doing the taming is an ordinary person, vulnerable but full of potential, not a born master.
Attention is treated as something the body does, not just something the mind wills, and so it can be studied and trained like any other skill. Counting the breath, then simply following it, are given as graded steps for steadying it.
Deep absorption can be genuine or false, and the test is whether the person stays in command of themselves. A blank, drifting trance is not the goal; real absorption keeps the practitioner awake and in control.
Flashes of enlightenment have often been emphasised at the expense of the rest of training. What matters as much is the long work before and after the breakthrough, and learning how to live, not just how to have a peak experience.
Deep absorption is not reserved for formal practitioners. A boy losing himself in brushwork, or someone gazing at an evening star with no idea of meditation, can fall into the same state, which suggests training refines a capacity people already have.