Buddhist meditation and recollection
Trained attention as the central Buddhist discipline, and the recollections that accompany it.
Silent cultivation is the practice outsiders know best: attention to the breath, mindfulness of the body, and structured reflections such as recollecting the qualities of the Buddha. Loving-kindness meditation, which extends goodwill outward in widening circles, sits closest to intercession, since it takes the welfare of others as its object. Traditions differ on how central seated meditation is for laypeople, and historically it was mainly a monastic pursuit.
Meditation in Buddhism covers several distinct trainings rather than one. Calming practice settles attention, often on the breath. Insight practice examines experience as it arises. Loving-kindness practice deliberately extends goodwill outward, beginning with people it is easy to feel it for and moving to people it is not.
Recollection is a related discipline of calling particular things to mind: the qualities of the Buddha, of the teaching, of the community, and in some practices the certainty of death.
Whether any of this is prayer depends on what is meant by the word, and Buddhist teachers differ. It is not petition addressed to a god, and traditions that emphasise this most strongly also tend to be the ones Western readers meet first.
Does it have a text?
Meditation itself has no text. The loving-kindness practice is closely associated with the Karaniya Metta Sutta, which this site holds in Fausboll's 1881 English, though the practice is far older and wider than any recitation of it.
When it comes up
Other forms of prayer in Buddhist
- Buddhist chanting and recitation — Communal recitation of discourses and formulas, usually in a liturgical language.
- Buddha-name recitation — Repeating the name of a Buddha, above all Amida, as the practice of Pure Land Buddhism.
- Aspiration and dedication of merit — Directing the benefit of a good act towards others, including the dead.
- Buddhist offerings and devotional acts — Bowing, incense, flowers and light before an image, at a temple or at home.
- Buddhist mantra and embodied recitation — Repeated syllables, often with the body and the mind engaged alongside the voice.
This page describes a practice. It does not tell you how to perform it, or whether you should. Practice varies by region, community and household far more than a page like this can carry, and nobody credentialed in the tradition has signed anything here. The full dossier names its sources.