Become a member and get a subscription to The Middle Way and access to our events and online features. The Buddhist Society Patron: H. The Dalai Lama Founded This tradition emphasises: The practice of zazen meditation.
Living by the Buddhist Precepts. The teaching that all beings have Buddha Nature. Awakening the heart of compassion and expressing it through selfless activity. November Fundamentals of Zen Buddhism Monday, 15th November at pm Online classes for members and those who have completed the Introducing Buddhism Course or equivalent New members wishing to join the class are requested to email Library Catalogue Newsletter Join our mailing list to keep informed of the happenings at The Buddhist Society.
Subscribe Now. Join Us! Signup Now. Help Us! Make a donation to help us in the furtherance of our work. The disciple stood outside in the snow all night long. In the morning he presented Bodhidharma with his severed arm as a token of his seriousness. So, at least, the story goes. Zen schools are more or less divisible into those that emphasize a curriculum of verbal meditation objects — like koans — and those that do not.
Emphasizing daily life practice as zazen, Soto Zen centers generally do not work with a set koan curriculum and method, though koans are studied and contemplated.
Because of this, Soto Zen has sometimes been criticized by the koan schools the best-known of which is the Rinzai school of Japan as dull, overly precious, and quietistic, in contrast to the dynamic and lively engagement of the koan path. But the koan way also has its critics, who see the emphasis on words, meaning, and insight as working against real non-conceptual Zen living.
Koan training systems also have the disadvantage of fostering competition and obsession with advancement in the system. Zen Buddhism has had a long and varied history in several different Far Eastern cultures. Each culture has produced a tradition that is recognizable as Zen, but differs slightly from all the others.
Vietnamese Zen is the one most influenced by the Theravada tradition. It tends to be gentle in expression and method, to emphasize purity and carefulness, and to combine Zen with some Theravada teaching and methodology. Especially stylized, dramatic, and austere, Korean Zen includes prostration practice repeated, energetic full-to-the-floor bows of veneration and intensive chanting practice, and has a hermit tradition, something virtually unknown in Japanese Zen.
Within each of the Asian Zen traditions there are several schools, and within schools the styles of individual teachers often differ greatly. This uncanny fact — radical individuality within the context of shared understanding — seems to be an indelible feature of Zen. In the middle of the talk he paused and held up a flower. Everyone was silent. Only Mahakasyapa broke into a smile.
Not dependent on words, it is a special transmission outside tradition. I now entrust it to Mahakasyapa. This story, however historically unverifiable, represents the beginning of the Zen transmission, said to start directly with the Buddha.
The story tells us two things: first, although the Buddha taught many true and useful teachings and techniques, the essence of what he taught is simple and ineffable. Holding up a flower is one expression of this essence.
Second, the very simplicity and ineffability of this essential teaching requires that it be handed on in a lineage from master to disciple in mutual wordless understanding.
We are all familiar with the transformation that takes place in apprenticeship and mentorship relationships, processes that involve a wordless give and take between individuals, and in which something quite hard to define is passed on.
To be sure, respect for and confidence in the teacher is essential if one is to undergo the transformation in consciousness that Zen promises. But the Zen teacher is also an ordinary, conditioned human being, simply a person, however much they have realized of Zen. Through the relationship to the teacher, the student comes to embrace all beings, including himself or herself, in this way. It was typical in the early days of the transmission of Zen to the West for teachers of different lineages to be scornful of each other.
There were centuries of tradition behind this prodigious failure to communicate. Next post: Get to the Root of Work Stress. Letting Go Practices We can help dissolve these attachments with a few different practices: Meditation. In meditation, you practice letting go of these mini attachments, by noticing what your mind is doing and letting go, returning to the present moment. This happens again and again, and so you get good at it. You learn that whatever you were attached to is simply a story, a narrative, a dream.
In this meditation, you wish for an end to your suffering, or an end to the suffering of others. What happens is that this wish transforms you from being stuck in your attachment, to finding a warm heart to melt the attachment and find a way to ease it.
You become bigger than your story, when you wish for your own suffering to end. What happens is that your attachments and story become less important, not such a big deal, as you connect with others in this way. By hating a wrong-doer, we only perpetuate the cycle of suffering. We only make matters worse, both for ourselves and others. As long as we maintain an inability to accept one another, peace will remain an impossibility. My disgust at your violence is the same seed from which your aggression was sprouted.
And this is the death knell of peace—our ignorance. In other words, ignorance hates ignorance. Wisdom on the other hand, loves, accepts and forgives ignorance. Compassion is the cleansing agent that rids us of our common suffering. This unbound, unfettered love is always within us—it is our innate essence—we only need to discard our unruly and unaccepting thoughts that obscure it.
Observe your non-acceptance. Question it. Realize its true source is from your interior world, and not from the outside world. Accept your non-acceptance.
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