The Earth Element

Samadhi is often translated as concentration. But I like to expand upon this idea of what concentration is. It’s not strenuous practice that gives you a headache; it’s more like absorption—delicious absorption, enjoyment, even rapturous immersion in a subject. We may already be familiar with samadhi practice using the breath as the object. But there is a wide range of other meditation objects described in the suttas and, more extensively, in the commentaries. These objects are called kasinas. They are a kind of elemental, purified object that we can use to develop certain mental states. 

You might be familiar with the concept of the four elements: air, water, earth, and fire. These are all kasinas that we can use as objects of meditation. The Buddha pointed out that these four elements constitute the entire world, including our own human bodies. Humans are largely made up of water. We are more or less a bag of seawater—red seawater. Fortunately, we have some coral in this bag of seawater for stomping around on. That would be your bones, the solid earth element. And we have a heat element as well, which is very carefully set around 37 degrees Celsius, and a little internal heating system to maintain that temperature. This is the fire element, or the element of warmth.

As humans, we need food, which comes from the earth. Why do you need to eat the earth? Because you also are Earth. You are Earth, just as the planet is. The Earth in the body contains the Earth. You can go quite a long time without food, maybe even a month, and you might be able to go a few days without water, but you can’t go very long without the next breath. That air element is very important! And if your heat is inadequate, or too much, you die. 

We cannot treat these elements like they are something distant from us. The world around us is not something other than us. We are the world. We eat the world, we breathe the world, we drink the world, and then we return our breaths and fluids and the solids back to the world. We are just a whirlpool, basically, within a river of these elements, these events. 

When you start to feel and think like this, you return to home. When you get the idea that you’re somehow separate from the river of events, you are in a state of delusion and you have misidentified yourself, and you will feel alienated from the world around you. You will feel not at home in the world around you, which is ludicrous, because you are made from the world around you. Everything in the world around you is within you, and whatever is within you is without you.

This is full immersion into the truth of who you are, and if you experience it, you will recognize it as a truth. I’m not talking about mathematical truth or scientific truth, I’m talking about truth that you confirm in your very being—a profound, meaningful truth that is undeniable to you. A truth like love. Love is a truth that confirms itself undeniably. Or a great piece of music. When you hear a great piece of music that moves you, it’s a truth that confirms itself undeniably. You don’t have to ask anybody, Is this true? You don’t have to examine the material behind it. It is right there, in-your-face true.

This is how we want to experience the four elements. We want to extract the truth, let it move you and change you, and recognize it as something that emerges from you—something that you knew already but forgot that you knew.

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ow I’ll cover some basics so that you can get an idea of how to practice using the elements as a kasina. But keep in mind that this is a very, very deep practice and would typically take weeks, months, or years of commitment.

It can produce several benefits, including enhancing one’s ability to sustain focused, clear attention. Of course, sustained attention is important in all aspects of life, but this particular exercise serves a higher purpose. We’re not increasing our attention simply so that we can function better in society or do better at work. Those may indeed be side benefits, but, ultimately, our purpose is liberation through clarity and wisdom. Clarity and wisdom are the purposes of this practice, and in the meantime, we are rewarded with a mind uncluttered of hindrances.

We are going to practice first with the earth element. There are two ways of doing this. One is using raw earth itself, which you can simply apprehend in a field of soil, or even a garden of soil. Of course, the earth itself has stones and all kinds of other aspects, but what you want to focus on is the essence of earth, which is easier noticed in soil. One of the things we want to avoid is strong coloration of the earth. So if you’re standing on a grassy field, the green of the grass and so forth is going to mix into your perceptions. 

We can also use a refined earth kasina as an object of meditation. And this is perhaps how you’re going to do it in your condo in downtown Manhattan or in Berlin or wherever you may be. If you don’t have easy access to open farmland, what you can do is get yourself a disk of clay. The commentaries actually describe how a monk would make this disk. He gets some earth and extracts the pebbles and the grass from it, and then he smooths it out, mixes it with water, and puts it into a form: a little circle, maybe ten inches in diameter, preferably without much coloration.

Nowadays, you can just go to your local crafts store and get some raw clay to do this, which is very convenient. Or you can use something premade—anything made of neutral gray clay and circular in form. The point is that it is minimalist and provides little distraction—just a neutral color and a simple geometric shape. 

Once you have a suitable disk, we’re going to use it as a visual aid. So to begin practicing with the earth element, find yourself a comfortable meditation posture and simply stare at your earth kasina. In your head, you might repeat the word earth, earth, or soil, soil. Or if your primary language is something other than English, use whatever word in your primary language resonates with this element of earth. 

What makes life interesting? It’s not variety—it’s interest itself.

As you stare at this earth kasina, try to visually absorb its essence. Contemplate the nature of the earth element. Earth is the element of solidity, of solid materiality. It is the solid buildings we live in, the solid ground we walk on. Our body, our bones, are also the earth element. And we contact the earth element with our body. When we walk on sand on a beach and our feet sink into the sand, the earth within our body becomes integrated with the earth below us. 

Think about how vital earth is to human beings from an evolutionary standpoint. We sought out places with rich and abundant soil, where all kinds of things can grow and feed us. We are naturally tuned in to this aspect of soil, of earth. Our bodies are nothing other than the Earth. The Earth enters our body remains, then flows back to the earth in a continuous process of interdependence.

Try to contemplate the object of your meditation as if you were encountering it for the first time. Have you seen toddlers or babies encounter a solid object? They’re wide-eyed, fascinated. Sometimes they try to put it in their mouths, or they just feel it, touch it, move it. We want to come back to this childlike hyperappreciation of this quality of the earth element. Our bodies are nothing other than the Earth. The Earth enters our body remains, then flows back to the earth.

Eventually, you should internalize the essence of the earth kasina. You should develop the ability to recall the image of your kasina in your mind without actually seeing it, so that after you close your eyes, a kind of an afterimage of this kasina disk remains. To be clear, it’s not the kind of afterimage where somebody takes a flash photo of you and you see a blue light for a couple of seconds afterward. We’re talking about a stable image that you pick up and reproduce in your mind.

This may be difficult, especially if you are not very visually inclined. It can take some time! This is a process that demands a lot of attention. You’re just staring at a simple clay disk that’s not very interesting. So you have to try to create interest. If you can focus your full attention on this disk, suddenly you will be interested. And with this interest comes joy. The body will relax and be at ease.

This is the by-product of attention itself. What makes things interesting in life is that you are interested in them. Normally, we require lots of colors and dancing clowns and balloons—this makes us interested, and we delight in this. But it’s not the clowns or the balloons that are delightful at all. It is the fact that you are paying attention that is delightful.

So this little bit of magic is something to contemplate as well: What makes life interesting? It’s not variety—it’s interest itself. To be interested is to find joy of mind and ease of body. Think about your interests or hobbies. When you find delight—perhaps in music or art, or in nature, or another person, or in literature—the reason you are delighted is that you’re interested. Something has caught your interest. None of those things is the important part. What’s important is the interest itself. Your mind itself is the source of that magic. What makes life interesting? It’s not variety—it’s interest itself.

We want to utilize that magic of interest with our earth kasina. We want to swallow the world. We want to internalize it so that when we close our eyes and let the kasina go, there it is in our visual imagination. If your mind is not focused, the image has flaws in it. It falls away, you drift. It comes in and out of your attention. But when your mind is fully attentive and engaged, it produces the essence of the object. We call this a counterimage, or nimitta. It is a mind-made, perfect substitute for the external object, which has faults and flaws in it. So once you see that mind-made image, you try to make it clearer.

There’s no tension in it. We are not concentrating; we are clarifying, focusing. It’s like adjusting a camera to get a clear picture—you move the lens back and forth, and, eventually, it comes into vivid clarity and then you know you’ve got the right focus. This is just what the mind is going to do. You focus your inner camera on this object until it is vividly lucid, hyperlit. You’ve probably seen art like this that is not only real but hyperreal. The colors of hyperreal art are beyond ordinary colors. Shapes are ultracrisp, ultraclear. That is what the mind can do when it comes fully into complete absorption and attention: A mind-made object appears, and the mind-made object is no other than your attention purified.

In this practice, this is the sign of success. You will know it when your inner experience, your imagination, your ability to focus becomes much more vivid than you can find in reality simply by looking through your eyes, because now you’re looking through the eyes of the mind.

At this point, your sense of time may drop away, as it does when you’re absolutely enraptured. Think about reading a great book. The book itself is just a bunch of squiggles on a page, isn’t it? But as you read this book, something happens. As you read, you become interested, and then you get a vision and you start to enter a world. I would describe this practice as something like the vivid world that  emerges from a book. The book is simply abstract knowledge, abstract signs on a page, but a world appears in your mind. This is the magic of the mind, and when that happens with a book, you lose track of time. You lose the sense of your body. Sometimes three hours can go by when you meant to read for only thirty minutes.

Our bodies are nothing other than the Earth. The Earth enters our body remains, then flows back to the earth.

This is the intensity of absorption. The mind, in this case, is absorbed in a story, something that is meaningful and interesting to you. What we’re going to do with this kasina practice is eliminate the story, and we’re going to eliminate the sequence of ideas, and we’re going to eliminate words themselves. We’re going into another state of rapturous attention, which does not require language. We are reducing our inner activity, reducing that inner voice that is plaguing us all the time. 

You’re not thinking anymore, you’re not remembering, you’re not planning, you’re not focusing on the outside world whatsoever. You have withdrawn your senses into your internal world. The body drops into the background. All that is left is the mind-made image of the earth. You merge into this object. No thought of time, no thought of the outside world, just this. 

This is a refreshment for the mind and the body, a strengthening of the faculty of attention, which will benefit us in many ways. It’s this focus and attention that ultimately allows us to see deep truths about reality. Without this focus and clarity, we cannot gain wisdom. This is a strengthening exercise for the mind. If we succeed at it, it will also be a treasured respite for the mind, a refuge from the world, a restorative cleansing. The heart will react in a very positive way. Energy increases, clarity increases, awareness increases, wisdom increases, and confidence increases. All these positive things that we appreciate all increase with this simple, profound exercise, with the support of the earth element kasina.

Now you can experiment with this yourself. Practice it over a long sustained period of time to see if it works for you. Don’t expect this to be twenty minutes and done. This is a supernormal activity—if you manage to do this, it’s not normal. You wouldn’t sit down and expect to learn to play the piano in twenty minutes. People devote hours and hours every single day to master skills! Or even golf. I think if I described golf to a 5th-century meditator, they would say, Man, I don’t know what religion you are, but I wouldn’t want to try that; that sounds too obscure to me. But people spend hours, weeks, months, and lots of money in their lives pursuing golf. Why? Because they like it. It captures their interest.

But if you can put your time and interest in meditation, in cultivating samadhi, trust me—it’s better than golf, which is not saying much. It’s better than sports, better than movies. Nt a large portion of the population is going to do this, and not everybody is suitable for this, but if you can do it, it has great rewards. Again, the purpose of this practice is to cultivate samadhi and overcome your psychic irritants, the five hindrances. One of the most beautiful experiences that a human can have is true emotional and psychic health, free from the harassments and irritabilities of the hindrances. So this is a worthy pursuit, a deliverance unto itself. 

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Adapted from Ajahn Sona’s YouTube series The Natural Elements in Meditation. Visit his channel for additional kasina practices using the other three elements.