And what is meditation? It does not mean meditating upon something; the English word is misleading. In English there is no word adequate enough to translate Buddha's word samasati. It has been translated as meditation, as right mindfulness, as awareness, as consciousness, alertness, watchfulness, witnessing - but there is not really a single word which has the quality of samasati.

Samasati means: consciousness is, but without any content.

There is no thought, no desire, nothing is stirred in you. You are not contemplating about God or about great things ... nature and its beauty, the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas, and their immensely significant statements. You are not contemplating! You are not concentrating on any special object either. You are not chanting a mantra, because those are all things of the mind, those are all contents of the mind.

You are not doing anything! The mind is utterly empty, and you are simply there in that emptiness. A kind of presence, a pure presence, with nowhere to go - utterly relaxed into oneself, at rest, at home.

That is the meaning of Buddha's meditation.