Meditation Sickness
The Oxford Handbook of Meditation October 8, 2020 Juhn Y. Ahn 7 citations
In Buddhist traditions, the path to liberation was thought to require perfect concentration or supernatural insight, or both. Concerns about failing to achieve concentration or having insight go wrong were common; Buddhists called these undesirable conditions meditation sicknesses. This chapter surveys canonical Buddhist discussions of these two meditation sicknesses, starting with hindrances to concentration and then covering concerns about insight, which appear mainly in Mahayana, Chan, and Zen sources.