rainrain

"anchor like function" and community standards aside...

The central thing that the technique does. The stillness, clarity etc. For that it doesn't matter at all.

Cheesecake doesn’t make you think of...

What one thinks doesn't matter. Because thinking has nothing to do with this technique.

...Shakyamuni said...pali canon...mahayana sutras...primal vows...

Scriptural relevance doesn't matter either.

What matters is what you are doing with your awareness. In this meditation technique you are directing your awareness at a thing (the repeated phrase) and holding it there. Like you would hold a thing in your hand.

It doesn't matter if the thing that you hold is a pebble, a grape or a chip of wood. It's the same holding.

This nembutsu meditation is a variety of samatha. The "object" in this case being a scripturally-relevant phrase.

The phrase is not chosen because the phrase has special power. The phrase is chosen because we like scripture.

I am of the opinion that you would get the same effect by repeating "cheesecake".

But I'm open to argument.

I have some experience in repeating-words type meditation.

That fruit hangs so low you needed to dig a hole to pick it

I have done a bit of "concentrating on breathing" meditation.

There's a lot to breathing. The sound of it. The thought of it (if I'm counting breaths). The feeling of it, in my belly, throat and nose...

I find all those things to be too much to concentrate on. So I concentrate on just one of those things. I concentrate on the feeling of breath in the tip of my nose.

Excellent one

What do you do in nembutsu?

I don't think it matters why you meditate.

Meditation helps me with stress too. And use it for other less than elevated reasons too.

What technique do you like?

The military can physically push everybody around but that doesn't mean that you have to buy into this "age of majority in late teens" thing, surely.

I can respect that. I can't say that I have any strong beliefs either.

But then there's "keep the bills paid or things will get bad". But that's strongly empirically based.

And there are beliefs like "reality is composed of a multitude of things flapping around in time and space" which is popular but stands on the rock of mere convention (ok, maybe it's deeper than that). And might bear questioning. How strong is my belief there? I dunno.

I assume that our culture delivers a fair sack of authority-based beliefs. It would be nice to get a list.

But then it's like asking a fish what water tastes like.

I meditate. Shikantaza every day. I used to do concentration for a few years. Then both for a few years. Now just Shikantaza.

(I am of the opinion that there are only 2 meditation techniques, the rest being relatively trivial twists).

You?

It's a great idea. But people are touchy about that. This is where democracy fails.