There is a common misunderstanding that the yoga meditation traditions teach only what is referred to as samadhi -- concentration practices -- and that the Buddhist traditions primarily stress insight, or vipassana, practice. This misperception is often flavored with the view that samadhi is really about "blissing out," while insight is about the more serious business of seeing clearly.

But in each of these classic paths, practice begins with the cultivation of the mind's natural capacity for concentration. What is truly freeing in both traditions is much more similar than either realizes. And in the final stages, meditators in both traditions see that the world of ordinary experience and the Self are actually constructions, compounds in nature rather than "real things" in and of themselves.

The great classic meditation traditions are interested in two outcomes: helping the practitioner end suffering and helping her see reality more clearly. Both traditions discovered that these dual goals are intimately connected and that only the strategy of methodically training both concentration and insight can accomplish these astonishing end states. It is for this reason that both traditions are valued as authentic and complete paths toward liberation.

There is a common misunderstanding that the yoga meditation traditions teach only what is referred to as samadhi -- concentration practices -- and that the Buddhist traditions primarily stress insight, or vipassana, practice. This misperception is often flavored with the view that samadhi is really about "blissing out," while insight is about the more serious business of seeing clearly.

But in each of these classic paths, practice begins with the cultivation of the mind's natural capacity for concentration. What is truly freeing in both traditions is much more similar than either realizes. And in the final stages, meditators in both traditions see that the world of ordinary experience and the Self are actually constructions, compounds in nature rather than "real things" in and of themselves.

The great classic meditation traditions are interested in two outcomes: helping the practitioner end suffering and helping her see reality more clearly. Both traditions discovered that these dual goals are intimately connected and that only the strategy of methodically training both concentration and insight can accomplish these astonishing end states. It is for this reason that both traditions are valued as authentic and complete paths toward liberation.