Meditation instructions are famously short. A practice that occupies people for decades is often conveyed in two or three sentences, and the compression is a design decision rather than an omission.
Elaboration supplies material for thinking
A detailed instruction gives the practitioner something to remember, compare against and evaluate their performance by.
All of that is thinking, and thinking is the activity the practice is trying to observe rather than to add to.
A minimal instruction leaves less to hold, which is why traditional teaching reduces rather than expands as a student progresses.
The instruction is a pointer, not a description
Phrases such as attending to the breath or resting in awareness are not attempting to describe an experience comprehensively.
They function as directions towards something the practitioner has to locate themselves, in the way that a description of a taste cannot substitute for tasting.
Practitioners frequently report that an instruction heard many times becomes meaningful only after the corresponding experience occurs, which is what a pointer is for.
An instruction written to be fully understood on first reading would have to describe the experience, and a description is exactly the thing the practitioner would then go looking for instead of looking at what is actually present.
Detail invites performance rather than practice
Given precise criteria, most people begin monitoring whether they are meeting them, which introduces an evaluating observer into the session.
That observer is the main obstacle beginners encounter, and it is generated by exactly the specificity they asked for.
Teachers withholding detail are frequently trying to avoid installing it, though the withholding is often experienced as unhelpful vagueness.
The tradition assumed a teacher was present
Terse instructions worked historically because they were accompanied by an ongoing relationship in which questions could be answered as they arose.
What was withheld initially was supplied later, at the point where the student's own experience made it useful.
Removing the teacher, as recorded and app-based instruction does, removes that adjustment, which is why modern secular instruction is considerably more detailed than traditional forms.
Modern programmes make a different trade
Clinical and app-based courses front-load detail because they must be self-sufficient and because participants have no one to ask.
This makes the practice accessible to far more people at the cost of the responsiveness that made brevity workable.
Neither approach is complete on its own, which is why many people who begin with recorded instruction eventually seek out a teacher, and why many taught traditionally find written explanation clarifying.