If You Wish to Attain Meditative Concentration Quickly, You Can Practice the Preliminary Guidance

Lantian's Contemplative Practice (Vipaśyanā-caryā) Meditation Diary 

Day 31 of observing the breath. Before sitting, I gave myself a suggestion: during today's meditation, I would no longer think or reduce thinking, and would also let go of everything unrelated to meditation, keeping my mind focused only on the breath. After taking my seat, I adopted active deep abdominal breathing. Today I placed my attention on the lower abdomen; slowly the abdomen began to feel somewhat warm. After about five minutes, a subtle sensation of qi gradually arose, the deep breathing became effortless, and the muscles of the lower abdomen began to twitch, as if the qi mechanism were about to be activated. After about ten minutes, I stopped the active deep abdominal breathing. 

Then I began observing the breath at the nose. Today, unlike the previous few days, I did not switch to natural breathing; instead, I used consciousness to slowly guide the abdominal breathing. After just a few breaths, the qi mechanism in the lower abdomen was activated and it went directly into deep abdominal breathing. At this point, my thoughts were placed solely on the breath, while simultaneously perceiving the sensations throughout the whole body, minimizing analytical thinking activity. Because the mind was concentrated, the breathing became natural, deep, and fine, and the amplitude of the breath was even greater than during active deep breathing. The airflow passed through the chest, upper abdomen, and middle abdomen, reaching all the way to the bottom of the abdomen, and this continued until the end of the sitting. 

During the breath observation, my attention was concentrated, the object of meditation was clear, and the breathing was even, deep, and fine. In the middle portion of the sitting, I suddenly felt a very distinct cool sensation on the outer side of my right hip; before the end of the sitting, my right ear had a continuous sensation of coolness (my right ear had been hot and swollen due to internal heat for the previous two months). 

Assessment: Cultivating meditative concentration (samādhi) can serve as a preparatory practice (pūrvayoga)—actively adjusting the state of body and mind to guide oneself into a state relatively suitable for entering concentration, and then the mind will settle down and enter samādhi. In active guidance, the mind's mental engagement (manaskāra) is focused on one thing, taking interest only in that one thing and screening out all other objects of meditation. This in itself is wisdom, and it is also concentration. In the process of cultivating concentration, one should give full play to wisdom, using wisdom to lead concentration and combining concentration and wisdom—the equal cultivation of Samādhi and Prajñā—then entering concentration will be very fast. Some people, when cultivating concentration, force concentration without using wisdom, and as a result find it very difficult to enter concentration. Others only use the wisdom of the mind consciousness to analyze and deliberate, yet never enter concentration at all. Both of these modes of practice are lopsided and do not follow the Middle Way, and thus cannot give rise to meditative absorption (samādhi).