Araya: Buddhist Meditation

There are many meditation apps. But Buddhism explained why meditation works a very long time ago.

Araya is an app for learning, sitting with, and growing into the two great ideas of Mahayana Buddhism: emptiness and consciousness-only (Yogacara).

■ Sit — contemplations that meditate on the teaching itself

• Four contemplations on emptiness: Observing the Five Aggregates / Contemplating Dependent Origination / Analyzing the Absence of Own-Being / The Form-and-Emptiness Breath
• Four Yogacara contemplations: Labeling the Eight Consciousnesses / Watching the Manas / Turning the Three Natures / The Dream Contemplation
• Three minutes each, with a spoken guide. Choose the voice, its pitch and its speed.
• 4-7-8 breathing, with the longest out-breath. Follow in, hold and out by ear with one of four sounds: Zen temple (singing bowl, wooden fish, temple bell), shakuhachi, waves, or a voice.
• Keeps playing with the screen off, so you can sit with your eyes closed.

■ Garden — build a temple of your own

• Yogacara teaches that every act is sown as a seed in the depths of the mind, and sprouts in time.
• The more you meditate and study, the more a ruined chapel grows into a great temple.
• Raise the seven halls one by one: main hall, mountain gate, bell tower, garden, purification pavilion, kuri and lecture hall.
• Move buildings freely on the grid, and adorn the grounds with paving stones, stone lanterns, Jizo statues, pines and a pond.
• Pilgrims walk from the gate to the alms box, and offerings gather over time.
• Clear the wilderness to widen the grounds, all the way to a five-storied pagoda.
• Every sitting or lesson advances construction. Your practice is the temple's strength.

■ Monk — raise a monk

• Your monk climbs a real path of practice, the path to arhatship: from ordinary being, through the Three Worthies and the Four Roots of Merit, to stream-enterer, once-returner, non-returner, and arhat.
• Promotion depends on the wholesome seeds stored in the alaya-vijnana.
• Six stages of growth, from a rough novice to the face of a sage.
• Attributes are the six paramitas: generosity, discipline, patience, effort, meditation and wisdom.
• A broken streak is fine. Coming back counts as patience.

■ Study — a real course in Mahayana Buddhism

• From the Four Truths and dependent origination to the Perfection of Wisdom sutras, Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka, Yogacara and Buddha-nature.
• Five-minute lessons with the original verse, a quiz, and Sanskrit terms alongside the Japanese.

■ Japanese, English and Hindi

• Switch any time in Settings. Every lesson, contemplation and hall description is translated.

Free, with no ads. All data stays on your device; no account needed. Optional offerings (in-app purchases) support development and do not affect the game.

Playing the game is itself a textbook of Yogacara. One seed today, for your alaya-vijnana.