Why the Rosary is better than non-Christian eastern forms of meditation.

As a young college man, yours truly and two buddies studied Transcendental Meditation. Little did I realize at the time its significant dependence on the Vedic religion, i.e., Hinduism. Despite marketing the basic technique as non-religious, the marketeers forgot to mention upfront that each of us would be initiated into a tradition beginning with a Hindu ritual when the teacher would discern and pass on a mantra tailored to each of our "unique needs". Because of the personal nature of the ritual and the mantra, we were instructed not to share our mantras. As it turned out, we each had the same mantra.

The TM experience is an enticing one. However, over time it became clear that continued practice was having negative effects. Follow-up sessions involving practice and discussion with teachers did not yield satisfactory answers to questions about difficulty concentrating, unsettling dreams, strange sensations involving auditory phenomena, etc.

As a student of Buddhism, specifically Zen (Soto), I came to appreciate the vast legacy of practical knowledge concerning the discipline of the mind. However, many of the practices aimed to empty the mind of attachments provided opportunity for obstacles of a subtler kind to invade. For all its charm, Buddhism of the Soto Zen variety, like its sister schools, is nothing less than a form of relativistic religion that distrusts all other systems and asserts its own absolutes. Which is the relativist anthem: there are no absolutes.

In Buddha’s final words to his disciples under the sala trees, he said, "Make of yourself a light. Rely upon yourself; do not rely upon anyone else. Make my teachings your light. Rely upon them; do not depend upon any other teaching." When the Fourth Evangelist described John the Baptist, he said, "He was not himself the light, but was to bear witness to the light" (John, 1:8). He continued by proclaiming that Christ "is the true light that enlightens every man who comes into the world" (John, 1:9). Christ, the "true light," did not teach His followers to extinguish their fires, such as is meaning of nirvana, but to illuminate the world with His love, and to reflect the light of His truth. - Anthony E. Clark and Carl E. Olson

Teachers of non-Christian eastern practices have borrowed from the Christian lexicon to describe practices which have little or nothing to do with the original Christian understanding. Words such as spirituality, meditation and contemplation are skewed away from their Christian origins. To learn the authentic Christian vocabulary of the spiritual life, one would do well to dip his or her toes in the deep waters of the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary. To discover the nexus between lectio, meditatio, oratio and contemplatio - words familiar to any devotee to Lectio Divina - a devotee of the Rosary learns the words that are expressions of the Word, enters into dialogue with the mysteries, receives formation in the form of the prayers and gives expression to the heart, and, God willing, has breathed into his or her soul the life of God by the Holy Ghost.

The Rosary orients one to a true object to assist one to unify his or her thoughts to a purpose that includes meditation, in the Christian sense, and which permits the person to dispose him/herself to the action of the Holy Ghost.

The Catholic Encyclopedia has the following (edited for context):

A word as to ordinary prayer, which comprises these four degrees:

1. vocal prayer;
2. meditation, also called methodical prayer, or prayer of reflection, in which may be included meditative reading;
3. affective prayer;
4. prayer of simplicity, or of simple gaze.

The last two degrees (also called prayers of the heart) border on the mystical states.

Mystical states are called, first, supernatural or infused, by which we mean manifestly supernatural or infused; secondly, extraordinary, indicating that the intellect operates in new way, one which our efforts cannot bring about; thirdly, passive, to show that the soul receives something and is conscious of receiving it. The exact term would be passivo-active, since our activity responds to this reception just as it does in the exercise of our bodily senses. By way of distinction ordinary prayer is called active. The word mystical has been much abused. It has at length come to be applied to all religious sentiments that are somewhat ardent and, indeed, even to simple poetic sentiments. The foregoing definition gives the restricted and theological sense of the word.

Praying the Rosary does not manufacture mystical experiences. Praying the Rosary disposes one to the movement of grace by grafting the heart and mind to the person of Jesus Christ and His Mother, to truth, goodness and beauty. The prayers of the Rosary are a means through which the meditator, the pray-er, becomes docile, but not empty-headed, oriented to (not away from) the Way, the Truth and the Life. Yes, it is all too easy to fabricate idols made in one's own image. Buddhism gets that mostly right. However, not making idols is not the same as not having any. One could be standing right outside the door behind which God is waiting for you to knock. Making oneself deaf to the voice of God is hardly a solution to ignorance. Replacing trust in God with trust in oneself is to solidify distrust into an idol.

Rather than merely negating obstacles to the Truth, praying the Rosary opens up avenues for grace to work on the person, avenues which negate dead ends. In Buddhism, one struggles to turn off or blow out the light, so-to-speak. Meanwhile, one wanders in the darkness of one's own making hoping the light will reveal itself. Catholics have a map. Buddhists would probably counter that there is no map. Who, then, is more likely to forge a path away from the Truth? A Catholic who knows the Truth has revealed Himself and has presented us with a way to life? Or, a Buddhist - a nihilist - who conforms himself through mental practices to a system that negates the possibility of revelation, which manages to retain noble truths that purport to represent a diagnosis of the human condition, and an eightfold path that purports to be a cure, yet merely relies upon a(n incomplete) diagnosis and a path for a wanderer who has been told there is no path? The Buddhist must confront a glaring contradiction in his system: does one snuff out the desire to snuff out all desire in order to be a good Buddhist? Is the desire to snuff out all desire a worthy desire?

The Rosary is Mary's psalter. It engages the imagination, the memory and the heart (which attaches itself to various intentions). It leads the mind into the mysteries of God and our salvation in Christ. It is a school of love into which we are registered and become students of the Divine. The Rosary helps us to shed sinful desires and retain and strengthen our orientation to the Love that created us.