Buddhist-Meditation-Systematic-and-Practical

taken in the sense of mathematics, but as the continuous
perfectly concentrated "one" of samatha. This is quite
different from ideas of "one" here and "one" there
(separate individual "ones"), for in Hua Yan, one is
equal to many and yet still is one. The meditator must
recognize this to understand the stanza properly and
meditate on it correctly. (In Tian Tai it is said that this
one mind contains three great chiliocosms.)
The method of practice here is that first the meditator
memorizes the whole stanza and repeats it
continuously—it is no use reading it from an open book
placed in front of one's seat. The stanza must appear in
the mind as a whole, not sentence by sentence. Before
this can occur, it is necessary to develop a deep samatha,
and then take up this stanza as described above. In this
meditation, sunyata of nature and its conditions are
identified.
This concludes our brief survey of Hua Yan
meditations.
C. Meditations of the Tian Tai School.
The great patriarch of this school, Zhi Yi, wrote
altogether four books about samatha and samapatti. The
first is very bulky, a work in many volumes entitled
"Round, Perfect, and Immediate Meditations" (or,
"Great Samatha and Samapatti"). This is one of the most
learned works produced by any Chinese sage, the
383