In the Surangama Sutra, twenty five indivivuals report on how they attained samadhi.

Three of the highest Bodhisattvas — Kuan Yin, Manjushri and Samantabhadra, extolled hearing or listening in one form or another as a way to enter into the Tao. When I asked my own teacher the best method for beings in this world, he also mentioned this entry way, as well as the use of breathing methods using the nose.

However, you can find countless other methods in the Surangama Sutra. One such meditation method was reported by Ucchushma to Buddha and his assembly when Buddha asked his great students what cultivation or meditation technique they had used to achieve samadhi. The record of Ucchushma's report runs:

Ucchushma came before the Buddha, put his palms together, bowed at the Buddha’s feet, and said to the Buddha, “I can still remember how many kalpas ago I was filled with excessive greed and desire. There was a Buddha in the world named King of Emptiness. He said that people with too much desire turn into a raging mass of fire. He taught me to contemplate the coolness and warmth throughout my entire body.

“A spiritual light coalesced inside and transformed my thoughts of excessive lust into the fire of wisdom. After that, when any of the Buddhas summoned me, they used the name ‘fire-head.’ “From the strength of the fire-light samadhi, I accomplished Arhatship. I made a great vow that when each of the Buddhas accomplishes the way, I will be a powerful knight and in person subdue the demons’ hatred.

When each of the thousand Buddhas of the Worthy Aeon accomplishes the Way, I will be a powerful and great Vajra Lord – a big Dharma Protector – and tame all the demons and enemies.”

“The Buddha asks about perfect penetration. I used attentive contemplation of the effects of heat in my body and mind, until it became unobstructed and penetrating and all my outflows were consumed. I produced a blazing brilliance and ascended to enlightenment. This is the foremost method.”

Whenever anyone starts to really open the chi chi channels in the body from meditation practice and meditation techniques, especially from breathing exercises, they will begin to feel the uneven warm and cold chi currents in the  body. This is a stage of initial chi transformation, and that's why there is an unevenness in feeling cold chi along with warm and hot chi. Eventually this transforms as the chi becomes purified, and chi transforms into shen.

As I point out in the free Stages download, when chi masses you will see a light within the body; when jing changes to chi like this you can enter into samadhi. Shakyamuni Buddha also recommended people watch the cool and warm breath as a meditation technique when doing breathing exercises, and he was talking about this experience of Ucchushma's as well. Everyone goes through it. People think Buddha was talking about the coarse breath or external breathing of the lungs, but he was talking of the wind element within the body, the chi. Anyone who cultivates sufficiently quickly recognizes this, but those who haven't opened up their chi channels yet think it's all about the respiratory process.

Are you cultivating enough meditation that you can feel your chi yet? This is just the gong-fu results of the rudimentary stages of meditation practice. But you have to conserve your jing and meditate, and experience the massing of chi and the internal light being born within the body — the initiation of kundalini — to enter into the true spiritual way. Regardless of your religion, this is the pathway that must be travelled.

Are you working on that, or just reading articles?