Protective Meditations

In times of uncertainty, when there’s disease and social unrest, it’s only natural that we think about issues of protection. And the Buddha’s teachings offer a kind of protection through meditation.

There’s a set of four topics that traditionally have been put together called the “guardian meditations” or the “protective meditations.” They may not necessarily protect you from disease or from being a victim of social unrest. After all, karma is complex, and who knows what we have in our past karma?

But, when you follow these meditations, they prevent you from creating any bad new karma. And that’s important because that’s where you actually can make a big difference. As we know, if we develop the right attitude toward the present moment, sometimes it can help us to not suffer from past karma. So you want to focus on what you can do right now, here with your mind, to protect yourself from the biggest danger, which is that you might act on unskillful intentions.

The list of guardian meditations is four: recollection of the Buddha, goodwill, contemplation of the unattractiveness of the body, and mindfulness of death. It sounds like a rather random collection and, in the sense that they focus on different defilements, they are diverse.

Metta is usually used as the antidote to anger; contemplation of the body as an antidote to lust; recollection of the Buddha as an antidote to discouragement and nihilism; and recollection of death as an antidote to laziness and heedlessness.

But they all come together on one topic, which is that they focus on the power of your intentions and the importance of being skillful in your intentions, simply that they remind you in different ways.

This reflection by Than Ajaan Geoff is from the talk Protective Meditations, June 10, 2020.