Watching Experience: Early Buddhism and Theravāda
Ānāpānasati · Satipaṭṭhāna · vipassanā · jhāna · maraṇasati
Huayan wants infinite recursion, mirrors and mutual containment. The early texts and Theravāda meditation run nearly the other way: take an apparently continuous experience and resolve it, step by step, into breath, sensation, feeling, mind-states, conditions, arising and ceasing. Twenty-five visualizations follow, grouped by practice, from the sixteen steps of breathing to the ten kasiṇas and the contemplation of death. Several are deliberately abstract, and the ones about jhāna, nimitta and moments of insight are marked as illustrations, since accounts of those vary between teachers.
Classical. The image or teaching comes from the early texts or their commentaries.
Classical, modern rendering. The idea is in the sources and the drawing is ours.
Modern analogy. Our own comparison, which the tradition does not teach.