What Is Zen? by What Is Zen (New World Library 2000)

Author:What Is Zen (New World Library, 2000)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Legal
ISBN: 1577311671
Publisher: New World Library
Published: 2019-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.

Through focusing on our breathing, and by understanding this concept, we can acquire the sense that our unconscious life is not unconscious at all, in the sense that it lacks consciousness; instead, it is the root of consciousness, the source from which consciousness comes. Just as the leavescome every year on the tree, so consciousness perpetually comes and goes out of the unconscious base, or what we could call the supra-conscious base.

In order to appreciate this, you don’t need to believe literally in reincarnation — the idea that you have an individual, enduring center or soul that is born into existence time after time after time. Zen practitioners are divided as to whether they think this is so or not. I’ve met masters who believe in reincarnation, and I’ve met masters who don’t believe in it at all.

When they talk of the continual reappearance of individuality and consciousness out of the base, what they mean is simply something all of us can see: We see human beings in all stages of life coming and going. We don’t see any continuity between them.

But that is only because we don’t see space. It is the interval between people — the space between lives — that constitutes the bond between them. This is very important — the philosophy of space — and we will get into it in more depth, but thepoint here is that through realizing this, those Zen monks had enormous nerve. They could look a samurai in the face and say, “Okay, cut my head off! What does it prove? ”

The samurai were amazed by this, and regarded those monks as sort of magical people. They asked the monks to teach them, because they felt if they had that kind of fearlessness, they could never be defeated by an enemy.

Zen is like a spring coming out of a mountain. It doesn’t flow out in order to quench the thirst of a traveler, but if the travelers want to help themselves to it, that’s fine. It’s up to you what you do with the water; the spring’s job is just to flow. Zen masters will teach anyone who has the tenacity to go after it, whoever they are. The samurai became grateful students of the Zen monks, and let them occupy the best land in town!

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