Don’t just sit there – do something! Conventional wisdom Don’t just do something – sit there! Buddhist wisdom This website is about practice; we try to minimize philosophy. As Red Pine says in his commentary on The Heart Sutra: Buddhism is better understood as a skill or an art to be practiced and perfected,… Continue reading Tranquil Wisdom Zen
Category: No self
Outflows, Inflows and Zen Practice
The irony of Zen is that more words have been written about it than any other branch of Buddhism although the central teaching of Zen is that it is a mind-to-mind transmission, outside of words, independent of scriptures. It’s way past time for Zen to get back to its roots, back to its silence. The… Continue reading Outflows, Inflows and Zen Practice
Mean Zen, Good Results
So Time magazine tells us that the U.S. Marines are into Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. My first reaction was that using MBSR to increase the efficiency of a killing machine was a bad idea. Meditation is not a self-improvement program; quite the opposite, it lowers the boundaries between people until the meditator realizes that there… Continue reading Mean Zen, Good Results
Zen, Mindfulness, and Ignorance
This week’s Time magazine’s cover story reports that mindfulness practice is becoming a mainstream practice despite its Buddhist origins. People who won’t listen to monks in robes will listen to scientists, the magazine reports. Obviously, it is the monks who should be listened to. They won’t teach mindfulness to Marines so that they can become… Continue reading Zen, Mindfulness, and Ignorance
Zen. the Self, and External Objects
People who have never given the teachings of the Buddha a second thought know all about subject and object. They know that cars, trees, bodies of water, the sun and all of that other stuff, including other people, is out there and the subject is the me who lives inside and perceives all that stuff. Jerry… Continue reading Zen. the Self, and External Objects
Zen And Thrill Seeking
All of us have seen the interview conducted by admiring journalists after someone has run up to a cliff and jumped off it into the abyss with nothing but a hang glider to hold onto. Or after jumping off that nine hundred feet high bridge in West Virginia on Bridge Day with a bungee cord tied to an ankle. And they say the same thing.… Continue reading Zen And Thrill Seeking
Zen, Christianity and No Self
The Buddhist doctrine of no self is often misunderstood even by some Buddhists. People with low self esteem are known to embrace it: See, it’s a good thing to have no self! But the doctrine does not mean that the self does not exist. It means that the self that does exist is a… Continue reading Zen, Christianity and No Self
Zen Practice And Enlightenment
The Buddha identified four stages of enlightenment: Stream Entry (sotapanna), the Once Returner (sakadagamin), the Non-Returner (anagamin), and Buddhahood. The Buddha taught that Stream Entry is attained when the first three of the ten fetters are overcome: Those first three fetters are: 1) Belief in an independent, unchangeable/permanent or everlasting self, called atman in the Vedas, which belief… Continue reading Zen Practice And Enlightenment
Meat, Murder, Tofu And Zen
The first fold of the Eightfold Path, Right View, is sometimes translated as Right Understanding and is explained by many commentators to mean that one has Right Understanding if one understands the Four Noble Truths. But that common explanation doesn’t jive with the Buddha’s words. He said the first fold of the Eightfold Path was… Continue reading Meat, Murder, Tofu And Zen
Zen, Words And Nirvana
Mahamati asked the Buddha: “What do you mean by ‘nirvana’?” The Buddha answered the question but he prefaced his answer with definitions of nirvana propounded by “followers of other paths.” These “wrong” answers are instructive because we can see that some of them seem to be correct! For followers of some paths, the Buddha said, nirvana is:… Continue reading Zen, Words And Nirvana