Regardless of developing in Asia, because the Chinese type of a religion originally introduced over from India and later refined in Japan, Zen Buddhism has lengthy appealed to Westerners as properly. A few of that owes to the spare, elegant aesthetics with which popular culture associates it, and extra to the promise it holds out: freedom from stress, anxiety, and certainly suffering of all types. Within theory, the Zen practitioner attains that freedom not by way of mastering a physique of knowledge or ascending a hierarchy, however by way of direct experience of actuality, unmediated by ideas, unwarped by needs, and undivided by the classification schemes that sepaprice one factor from another. That’s easier mentioned than executed, in fact, and for some, not even a lifetime of meditation does the trick.
In the interview clip above, Rinzai zen monk Yodo Kono explains how he arrived on the planet of Zen. Having come from a line of monks, he inherited the function after the deaths of his grandfather and his father. Already in his late twenties, he’d been working as a physics instructor, an occupation that — however fashionin a position the supposed concordances between superior physical and Buddhist truths — arduously prepared him for the rigors of the temple.
“I entered a task completely oppoweb site to logic,” he remembers, “a world the place logic doesn’t exist.” Consider the Zen kōans we’ve all heard, which demand appearingly impossible solutions in regards to the sound of 1 hand clapping, or the seemance of your face earlier than your parents have been born.
Suggested by his master to cease attempting to achieve knowledge, expertise, and belowstanding, the frustrated Yodo Kono started to actualize that “Zen is eachfactor,” the important thing question being “how you can stay without worries within Zen.” That may’t be realized from any quantity of research, however experience alone. Solely directly can one really feel how we create our personal suffering in our minds, and likewise that we will’t assist however accomplish that. This leaves us no alternative however to relinquish our notions of control over actuality. In daily life, he explains in the clip simply above (additionally from the documalestary Freedom From Suffering, in regards to the varieties of Buddhism), one should be capable to transfer freely between “the undivided Zen world and the divided world,” the latter being the place close toly all of us already spend our days: not without our pleasures, in fact, but in addition not without gaineddering, occasionally, if we will ever know permanent satisfaction.
Related content:
What Is a Zen Koan? An Animated Introduction to Eastern Philosophical Thought Experiments
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A Beatfielding Buddhist Monk Creates Music for Meditation
Buddhism 101: A Brief Introductory Lecture by Jorge Luis Borges
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the ebook The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly referred to as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
