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 nicely. 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 via mastering a physique of knowledge or ascending a hierarchy, however via direct experience of actuality, unmediated by ideas, unwarped by needs, and undivided by the classification schemes that sepafee one factor from another. That’s easier stated than accomplished, after all, 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 position 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 fashionready the supposed concordances between superior physical and Buddhist truths — exhaustingly prepared him for the rigors of the temple.
“I entered a job completely oppowebsite 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 had been born.
Suggested by his master to cease striveing to realize knowledge, expertise, and beneathstanding, the frustrated Yodo Kono started to actualize that “Zen is eachfactor,” the important thing question being “the way to reside 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 achieve this. This leaves us no alternative however to relinquish our notions of control over actuality. In daily life, he explains in the clip just above (additionally from the documalestary Freedom From Suffering, in regards to the varieties of Buddhism), one should have the ability 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, after all, but additionally not without receiveddering, once in a while, if we will ever know permanent satisfaction.
Related content:
A 6‑Step Guide to Zen Buddhism, Presented by Psychiatrist-Zen Master Robert Waldinger
What Is a Zen Koan? An Animated Introduction to Eastern Philosophical Thought Experiments
Exercise Extreme Mindfulness with These Calming Zen Rock Garden Videos
A Beatboxing Buddhist Monk Creates Music for Meditation
Buddhism 101: A Short Introductory Lecture by Jorge Luis Borges
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e-book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly generally known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.