Within the Sanlun understanding, meditation is regarded as important, yet it does not stand as the primary or sufficient means for realizing emptiness. Meditative practice is valued chiefly for its capacity to calm the mind, loosen attachment to discursive thought, and create the inner stillness in which insight can arise. However, this tranquility is seen as preparatory: without the guidance of correct view and rigorous analysis, meditative absorption can easily become another object of clinging. Sanlun thinkers therefore resist treating meditative states—no matter how profound—as a final ground or ultimate reality.

The decisive factor for understanding emptiness is prajñā, wisdom grounded in Madhyamaka reasoning and the careful study of the core treatises. Sanlun emphasizes a form of contemplative inquiry (guan) that analytically examines all dharmas as dependently arisen and devoid of self-nature. This contemplative analysis differs from mere concentration; it systematically undermines every fixed position, revealing that all conceptual constructions, including those about emptiness itself, lack inherent existence. In this way, dialectical reasoning and scriptural contemplation are given priority as the direct means of realizing emptiness.

Meditation, then, functions as an essential support rather than as wisdom itself. Calm and concentration stabilize the mind, while insight—shaped by the Madhyamaka method of refutation—discerns that both the meditating subject and the objects of meditation are empty. Even luminous or peaceful experiences are to be seen as dependently arisen and thus not to be reified as some enduring essence. By refusing to cling either to concepts or to meditative attainments, the Sanlun approach avoids both the extreme of eternalism, which would solidify some ultimate state, and the extreme of nihilism, which would deny the conventional reality of experience.

In practice, this yields a path in which meditation and reasoning are closely integrated but hierarchically ordered. Meditation quiets the turbulence of thought, making the mind supple and receptive, while the analytic contemplation of the three treatises provides the precise lens through which emptiness is discerned. Ultimately, even the notion of “attaining” emptiness through practice is exposed as empty, a skillful means that must itself be relinquished. The role of meditation is thus honored yet continually relativized, always subordinated to the liberating insight that no state, concept, or standpoint possesses any fixed, independent nature.