The Still And Clear: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation Across Multiple Traditions

The Still and the Clear is a journey through Buddhist meditation across Therav¿da, Zen, Pure Land, Tibetan Buddhism, and the lesser-known Bor¿n Kammä¿h¿na traditions.Drawing on more than two decades of practice and study, the author explores what actually happens when meditation becomes deep: the movement from effort to stillness, from concentration to clarity, from constructing experience to recognising it.Along the way, the book enters territories rarely placed side by side: samatha and vipassan¿, Mah¿si insight practice, Goenka's body scanning, Zen k¿ans and silent illumination, J¿do Shinsh¿'s radical emphasis on receiving rather than achieving, and the Tibetan paths of ¿amatha, vipäyan¿, Mah¿mudr¿ and Dzogchen.But this is not an argument that all Buddhist traditions are secretly the same. Their doctrines, practices and understandings of liberation remain profoundly different. The question is more subtle:When different paths are followed deeply enough, do they reveal structural similarities in the experience of mind?Part meditation memoir, part comparative map, and part investigation into the territory between stillness and clarity, this book invites the reader to look beyond the boundaries between traditions, without erasing them.