Two teachers can give opposite instructions and both be describing meditation accurately. The divergence follows from what each tradition takes the practice to be for, rather than from any disagreement about technique.
The intended end determines the method
A practice aimed at steadying attention narrows the field deliberately, holding a single object and returning to it whenever the mind drifts. Everything outside that object is treated as distraction.
A practice aimed at examining how experience arises does close to the opposite, widening the field so that whatever appears becomes the object. Nothing is excluded, because exclusion would conceal the thing being studied.
Both are meditation, and each is internally consistent. They conflict only if a student assumes there is one underlying activity that the schools happen to describe in different words.
Concentration schools narrow on purpose
Where absorption is the goal, the object is usually simple and unchanging, and the instruction is repetitive by design. Complexity in the object would give attention somewhere else to go.
Progress in these systems is described in terms of stability and depth. The reports concern how long attention holds and how completely other content falls away.
This is why such instructions sound austere. The teacher is not withholding richness; richness is the specific thing the method is trying to reduce.
Insight schools widen on purpose
Traditions concerned with the nature of experience ask the practitioner to observe sensation, thought and mood as they change. The instruction is to notice rather than to fix attention.
Here a wandering mind is not simply failure. Wandering is itself data about how attention behaves, and the practice includes watching it happen.
A student trained in narrow concentration often finds this permissive to the point of confusion. The looseness is deliberate and follows from what the method is examining.
Devotional meditation keeps a meaningful object
In devotional settings the object carries content: a name, a phrase, an image, a passage. The relationship to that object is part of the practice rather than an obstacle to it.
Emotional response is welcomed in these traditions, where a bare-attention school might treat it as one more passing event. The difference is about the role feeling plays.
Practitioners in these traditions often describe the practice in relational language. That vocabulary is not imprecision; it reflects what the method is understood to be doing.
Comparing schools by technique misleads
Techniques look similar from outside. Sitting still with closed eyes covers systems whose aims have almost nothing in common with one another.
A more useful question is what each tradition counts as progress, since that answer explains the instructions and predicts which corrections a teacher will make.
Read that way, the apparent contradictions dissolve into a set of coherent projects. The instructions differ because the destinations were never the same.