Geshe Thabke is a Buddhist monk at the Sera Jay monastery near Mysore, Karnataka. On the sidelines of a conference called “Science for Monks,” I sat down with him for a chat, during the course of which he mentioned a curious thing. When most people think about the meditative element of the practice of Buddhism, he said, they think only about single-point meditation, which is when a practitioner closes their eyes and focuses their mind’s eye, so to speak, on a single object.
The less well known second kind is analytical meditation: when two monks engage in debate and question each other about their ideas, confronting them with impossibilities and contradictions in an effort to challenge their beliefs. This is also a louder form of meditation. Thabke said that sometimes, people walk into his monastery expecting it to be a quiet environment and are surprised when they chance upon an argument. Analytical meditation is considered to be a form of evidence-sharpening and a part of proof-building.