Many Buddhists sit on a cushion every day, counting their exhalations.
Many Buddhists practice loving kindness meditation every day. And the sixteen mindfulness steps of the Anapanasati sutta.
Many Buddhists sit, just sit, every day.
Many Buddhists work on a koan every day.
And many Buddhists do all of the above, and much more, every day, while holding down full-time jobs and raising a family. These are acts of mental cultivation, also known as Buddhist practice or just plain practice.
We Buddhists have one belief: That mental cultivation is worthwhile. We have the discipline to do it every day. We’re not doing it to gain entrance into the heaven of some imaginary God or to avoid a place of punishment operated by that same imaginary thing.
(My Sunday school teacher taught that speaking disrespectfully of God was blasphemy, the one unforgiveable sin. But blasphemy is a victimless crime.)
Non-Buddhists enjoy their lives and avoid sitting on cushions and other such activities that they consider to be boring. They pursue happiness, which is commendable, and they avoid unpleasantness, which is entirely understandable.
But they never engage in mental cultivation and thus waste their lives on frivolity. They even brag that they never sit still and listen to the silence, the emptiness that is everything, the emptiness upon which all fullness depends.
It is indeed an amazing thing to brag that one lives one’s life incompetently.
So most people fill their lives with activity, making sure they never have to face themselves in a zendo on a meditation cushion.
When we sit in fearless stillness, we know that we are doing the right thing. We eventually begin to feel sorry for those who pass up life’s greatest treasure, bragging that they are free even though they are tightly bound in the chains of ignorance.
The mind can free itself with practice. Without practice, the mind deepens its delusions and eventually imprisons itself.
No, Buddhists are not nuts. But those who encounter the Buddha Dharma and refuse to begin cultivation for whatever reasons they can dream up are not fully alive. And those who scoff at the very idea of cultivation are crazy.
