Prayer and living by zazen (Zazen and Christianity) August, 2021

The book has a delightful list of Bible verses such as Psalm 46:10 Be still and know that I am God. "Zazen certainly actualizes this in the purest way." Luke 17: 20 - 21 The kingdom of God comes not from observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or Lo there! For, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

For Matthew 6:5-7, he writes, "There is no purer way of expressing this attitude toward prayer than zazen."

Chapter 7 - Living Wide Awake: Section - Zazen as Religion, page 111-112, Opening the Hand of Thought by Zosho Uchiyama

I found the Chapter 7 - Living Wide Awake: Section - Vow and Repentance, (page 112) to be very helpful in highlighting some of the similarities and differences with Christianity. Here are a few quotes:

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Doing zazen is letting go of clinging to human thought, and this means letting go, or throwing out, human arrogance. With that we become, as the Bible says, "as God wills," and then "the works of God will be manifest" (John 9:3).

Living by zazen as religion is found in our functioning day-to-day as a person, a role that is itself the personified union of this moment and eternity. Living everyday by surrendering to zazen, being protected and guided by zazen, means to live having a direction - that is, living without being pulled around by the thoughts and emotions rampaging inside us. This means to live aiming at enacting the unity of the present and the eternal. 

Taking as reality what precedes division, we will not conjure up objects of desire, opponents, competitors, and so on. As long as we are walking in this direction we will not labor under the burdens of greed, impatience, and envy; we will not go around cheating, deceiving, wounding, and killing one another. Rather, as true self that is only true self, we possess absolute peace within us at the same time, since we are aiming at manifesting the vigorous self that is here and now, and is simultaneously one with eternity, we need to make a ceasing effort.

In other words, for the person who sits zazen, vow is nothing other than the practitioner's own life. We take all encounters - with things, situations, people, society - as nothing but our own life, and we act with a spirit of looking after everything as our own life. Therefore, like the mother's caring for her child, we aim to function unconditionally and tirelessly and, moreover, to do so without expecting any reward.

It is not to profit personally or to become famous that we take good care of things, devote ourselves to our work, love those whom we encounter, or demonstrate our concern for social problems. When I take care of my own life, I take care of the world as my own life. I do this moment by moment, and each situation I enable the flower of my life to bloom, working solely that the light of buddha may shine.

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I was just thinking yesterday, before I read this section of this chapter of how I used to think "Well, Christianity is an organized way of living ones life that is followed by millions of people." With my limited knowledge of Buddhism, I only knew American Zen as a fringe group with ideas that were very hard to understand and comprehend. Yesterday, I realized these views have reversed. I see mainstream Christianity has a confusing mishmash of "mysteries" that are difficult to explain. While theologians have written endless volumes, I don't think the average Christian understands or believes most of this. In fact, I would wager that most Christians hold heretical beliefs that the church over the years has fought wars over. I mean this for the individual Christians within each of the denominations that are divided also over the true faith. As a teacher of Sunday School, I particularly noticed the lack of depth in theology while these people have a deep faith that really impressed me. So the benefits of the faith did not come from having the true tenets of the faith but from a deep faith that comes out of the human spirit.

It's strange also that theology is about Jesus rather than being what Jesus taught. Original sin, Triune God; That's not what Jesus talked about. The apostle Paul developed a lot of the theology along with the extensive gospel of John that puts so many words in the mouth of a crazy, verbose Jesus. 

Like 4:16-21 Then [Jesus] came to Nazareth where he had been brought up and, according to his custom, went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day. He stood up to read the scriptures and the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. He opened the book and found the place where these words are written—‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord’. Then he shut the book, handed it back to the attendant and resumed his seat. Every eye in the synagogue was fixed upon him and he began to tell them, “This very day this scripture has been fulfilled, while you were listening to it!”

See this blog sentry also. And this one. Another.

Peace of mind

"Since Buddhism is a religion that does not raise the question of god, what is its basis for peace of mind? In contrast to a posture of bowing down before the God of Christianity or some god of another religion, the fundamental posture of Buddhism is the true self settling on the true self. This fundamental posture is to settle upon our undeniable, immovable self without being dragged about by our unstable thoughts."

Chapter 6 - The World of Self Unfolds: Section - Self Settling on Itself page 93 Opening the Hand of Thought by Zosho Uchiyama

We try to please and protect the entity called Self

Dynamic stream of consciousness that experiences moment after moment. Accumulation of that experience makes our personal history. That is why we can say there's a person, a continuum of experience that is different from someone else's continuum of experience so it is legitimate to distinguish two streams of experience as to persons. We also have the instant feeling of I when I say "I am hungry", "I am thirsty" or when we awake in the morning, I exist, I am awake. This is a very momentary experience of being there yet we believe there's a enity that remains throughout this experience. Unitary, autonomous. No localization within our mind, it is just a concept. A label that we attach, and that's okay. This stream of consciousness can be called by my name. River is constantly changing but there is a continuity that allows us to call it by name. Bit there's no such entity as the Mississippi that's popping up and saying, I am the Mississippi.

Rough quotes from listening to Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill by Matthieu Ricard

"We all have eyes to see, but if we close them and say that the world is in darkness, how can we say that we are living out the true reality of life? If we open our eyes we see the sun is shining brilliantly. In the same way, when we live open-eyed and awake to life, we discover that we are living in the rigorous light of life. All the ideas of our small self are clouds that make the light of the universal self foggy and dull. Doing zazen, we let go of these ideas and open our eyes to the clarity of the vital life of universal self."

Chapter 5 - Zazen and the True Self: Section - The Activity of the Reality of Life, page 83 Opening the Hand of Thought by Zosho Uchiyama

The following are a few quotes from Chapter 6 - The World of Self Unfolds: Section - Interdependence and the Middle Way, page 97 Opening the Hand of Thought by Zosho Uchiyama. This section has helped me understand  Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill by Matthieu Ricard. I have listen to it many times. Reading this section that explains the same thing in a different way has really helped my understanding of no self.

To look more deeply into the Buddhist notion of life, we have to take up the teachings of interdependence and the Middle Way. Buddhist teachings explain self as life, and they explain the vivid world self lives in as interdependence, or the Middle Way.

The view that all things exist is one extreme; the view that nothing exists is the other extreme. Being apart from these two extremes, the Tathagata teaches the dharma of the Middle Way: because this exists, that exists; because this arises, that arises. ... Accordingly, what is being said here is that there are no independent substantial entities-that is, no things exist by themselves.

Usually we think of our "self" as an individual independent substance, an enduring existence. ... Not only the appearance of the body, but the inside as well, is gradually being regenerated and transformed; so what does not appear in photographs is also undergoing change. Moreover, the content of my thoughts, which I refer to as I, has also been radically changing, from infancy to childhood, adolescent, maturity, and now in old age. Not just that - even this present I is an unceasing stream of consciousness. Yet, taking momentarily at a given time, we grasp the stream of consciousness as a fixed thing and call it I.

We are as selves quite like the flame of a candle. As wax melts near a lit wick and burns it emits light near the tip of the candle that appears as a more-or-less fixed shape. It is the seemingly unchanging shape that we refer to as flame. What we call I is similar to the flame. Although both body and mind are an unceasing flow, since they preserve what seems to be a constant form we refer to them as I. Actually there is no I existing as some substantial thing; there is only the ceaseless flow. This is true not only of me, it is true of all things. In Buddhism, this truth is expressed as shogyō mujō, the first undeniable reality, that all things are flowing and changing, and shogyō muja, the third undeniable reality, that all things are insubstantial.

Impermanence is ungraspable, but this never implies non-existence. We live within the flow of impermanence, maintaining a temporary form similar to an eddy in the flow of a river. Though the water is always flowing, the eddy, like the flame of the candle, arises out of various conditions as a form that seems to be fixed. That there is this seemingly fixed form that is based on various conditions is interdependence.

Great Vows For All

Great Vows For All

The many beings are numberless

I vow to end their suffering.

Greed hatred and ignorance rise endlessly

I vow to abandon them.

Dharmas are countless

I vow to wake to them.

Buddha’s way is beyond attainment

I vow to embody it fully.

The Four Brahmaviharas

The four brahmaviharas are:

Loving-kindness (Pali: metta)

Compassion (karuna)

Sympathetic joy (mudita)

Equanimity (upekkha).

The late Buddhist teacher Ayya Khema described the brahmaviharas as “the only emotions worth having.” By cultivating the four immeasurables, you not only develop limitless love but undo what the Buddha called their “near enemies”: indifference, pity, envy, and jealousy.

What Are the Four Brahmaviharas?

Lion's Roar Staff

The Scenery of Life

If we lead this sort of life and sit zazen, at whatever age, there is no doubt that we will come to have a commanding view of who we are. When we live this way, not only zazen, but daily life itself, is such that we cannot find the value of our existence in what other people say or in things that we want. It is a life that is unbearable unless we discover the value of our existence within ourself. 

What is essential is for us to live out the reality of our true self, whether we are doing one period of Zazen, a five-day sesshin, or practicing for ten years or more.

The Scenery of Life

page 73-74 Opening the Hand of Thought by Zosho Uchiyama

Before Time and "I" Effort

When we transcend time, or forget time, we actually meet the fresh reality of life. Time exists for us because we compare one moment with another, and in the welter of perception we feel time flowing swiftly. When we no longer compare, and just be that self which is nothing but self, then we are able to transcend this swiftness or comparison that we call time. Those who continue sitting sesshin no longer recall time.

Before Time and "I" Effort

page 65-66 Opening the Hand of Thought by Zosho Uchiyama

Fear is part of the journey.

Contemplation

Fear is part of the journey.

Fear is happening everywhere

The ground has always been shaky

No one is coming to save you: Pema Chödrön

Pema Chödrön: "Personally, I work with aspiration. The classic aspiration is “Sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them.” That means that I aspire to end suffering for all creatures, but at the same time I stay with the immediacy of the situation I’m in. I give up both the hope that something is going to change and the fear that it isn’t. We may long to end suffering but somehow it paralyzes us if we’re too goal-oriented. Do you see the balance there? It’s like the teaching that Don Juan gave to Carlos Castaneda, where he says that you do everything with your whole heart, as if nothing else matters. You do it impeccably and with your whole heart, but all the while knowing that it actually doesn’t matter at all."

What are the Five Hindrances?

These are the Five Hindrances as classically presented: sensual desire, ill will, sloth and drowsiness, restlessness and anxiety, and uncertainty.

Practicing with the Five Hindrances

Looking at the fresh and vivid reality of life with our own eyes

One time I went to a place in the country, I could see from a distance a thick forest on the side of the mountain and I was able to make out the roof of a large temple hidden among the trees. I asked a local villager about it, and he told me that this temple used to be much larger, but it burned down and the present building was put up on a much smaller scale. Guided by the villager, I climbed up a long stone stairway. When I finally reached the top and had a look around, the temple, far from being small, was a magnificent structure that didn't seem to have been built at all recently. I began to wonder but what my guide had said, and I asked him just when the temple had burned down. He told me it happened during the Kamakura period in the thirteenth century! I burst out laughing, because his aggrieved tone of voice had implied that the temple had burned down recently, certainly during his lifetime. These villagers handed down to each successive generation a sense of personal loss about something that had happened hundreds of years before. Living near this handsome imposing temple, they didn't really enjoy it because they were busy lamenting it wasn't some other way.

On second thought, a thing that happened seven hundred years ago as undoubtedly a recent event for many people. Most religions encourage believers to "remember" events written in their holy books, events that may have happened thousands of years ago, and to act as if these things happen to them personally. On the basis of these "memories" they wage wars and kill each other in masse. This is not limited to mythological or sectarian religions, either. It is exactly the same among all the many doctrines and ways of thought. Instead of looking at the fresh and vivid reality of life with their own eyes, people end up stifling that reality in the name of justice, or peace, or some fixed dogma.

page 37-38 Opening the Hand of Thought by Zosho Uchiyama

"Whole," "true," or "universal" self

Our whole self is the force or quality of life that enables conscious thought to arise, and it includes that personal, conscious self, but it also includes the force that functions beyond any conscious thought. The whole or universal self is the force that functions to make the heart continue beating and the lungs continue breathing, and it is also the source of what is referred to as the subconscious. 

This inclusive self is at heart the creative power of life. It is related to what the Judeo-Christian tradition calls the creative power of God. That power - what is immediately alive and also what is created - that is self too. If you want to use God as your referent, it is crucial to receive God as a pure creative power, as being fresh and alive and working in and through yourself: no matter what I do or think, God is in all things and is working through me.

Whatever is alive - that is jiko, or universal self. All of this - thoughts and feelings, desires, the subconscious and the beating heart, the effort that enables other lives to function and the creative power of life itself - is what I mean by the self. Saying "whole" or "true" or "universal" self is a way to try to include all the actual reality of life and what I am saying here is that the actual reality of life is not something separate from the actual reality of your own life.

page 29 Opening the hand of Thought by Zosho Uchiyama

Zen Mysticism

The mystical side of Zen is not something supernatural. The mystical side is a sense of intimacy with life as it is. Intimacy with nature. He intimacy with joy. The intimacy with sorrow. The intimacy of relationships, of being fully human. It brings out that warmth, connection, and closeness to life. One of the things it's important to look at as a Zen practitioner is how we may distort reality. From a Buddhist Dharma point of view we distort our reality grasping onto things, avoiding things, and being ignorant of the way things are.

If our life is based on what is truly there, we are more likely to make wise decisions based on that.

Dogen Mystical Realism: The Ordinary Mind Zen School Sydney podcast: Dharma talks given by Geoff Dawson.

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When we let go of our conceptions, there is no other possible reality then what is right now; In that sense, what is right now and here is absolute, it's undeniable. Not only that, this undeniable reality is at the same time the reality of life that is fundamentally connected to everything in the universe. This is the undeniable reality. The truth to be derived from this is that right now is all important. 

Dwelling here and now in this reality, letting go of all accidental things that arise in our minds, is what I mean by " opening the hand of thought. "

When we think of "now" in the ordinary sense, we assume that there was a linear flow of time from the past into the present and forward into the future. Actually, it isn't that way at all. Actually, all that there really is, is now as the scenery of the present, however, there is a past, present, and future. Let me say that again: within the present, there is a past, a present, and a future. The past and the future are real and alive only in the present. This concept of time in the Buddhist thought is very important.

page 12 Opening the Hand of Thought by Zosho Uchiyama

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"When we live from pure awareness, we are not affected by our past, our present, are our future."

"Practice is about developing our uncovering a simple mind. For example, I often hear people complain that they feel overwhelmed by their lives. To be overwhelmed is to be caught by all the objects, the thoughts, the events of life, and to be affected emotionally by them, so that we feel angry and upset. When we feel like that, we may do and say things that hurt ourselves or other people. Unlike the simple mind of pure awareness, we are confused by the multiplicity of the external environment. Then we can't see that everything external is us."

"Within this simplicity, this awareness, we understand past, present, and future, and we begin to be less affected by the barrage of experiences. We can live our life with appreciation and some compassion."

"The longer we sit, the more we have periods -  at first brief, and then longer - when we sense that we don't need to be opposed to others, even when they are difficult. Instead of seeing them as problems, we begin to enjoy their foibles, without having to fix them. For example, we can enjoy the fact that they're too silent, or that they talk too much, or they put on too much makeup. To enjoy the world without judgment is what a realized life is like. It takes years and years and years of practice. Even then, I don't mean that every problem can be experienced without reaction; still, a shift occurs, and we move away from a purely reactive life, and which everything that happens can trigger our favorite defense. 

A simple mind is not mysterious. In a simple mind, awareness just is. It's open, transparent. There's nothing complicated about it. For most of us most of the time, however, it is largely unavailable. But the more we have contact with a simple mind, the more we sense that everything is ourselves, and the more we feel responsibility for everything. When we sense our connectedness, we have to act differently."

"When we maintain awareness, whether we know it or not, healing is taking place. If we practice long enough we begin to sense the truth: we come to understand that the now embraces the past and future and the present. When we can sit with a simple mind, not being caught by our own thoughts, something slowly dawns, and a door that has been shut begins to open. For that to occur, we have to work with our anger, our upset, our judgments, our self-pity, our ideas that the past determines the present. As for the door opens, we see that the present is absolute and that, in a sense, the whole universe begins right now, in every second. And the healing of life is in that second of simple awareness."

Simple Mind page 255 - 257 Nothing Special by Charlotte Joko Beck

Undeniable realities and Zazen

The first undeniable is that every living thing dies, and the second undeniable reality is that we suffer throughout our lives because we don't understand death. The truth derived from these two points is the importance of clarifying the matter of birth and death. The third undeniable reality is that all the thoughts and feelings that arise in my head simply arise haphazardly, by chance. And the conclusion we can derive from that is not to hold on to all that comes up in our head. That is what we are doing when we sit zazen. 

What we call "I" or "ego" arises by chance or accident, so we just let go instead of grasping thoughts and "I." When we let go of all our notions about things, everything becomes really true. This is the fourth undeniable reality, complete tranquility, ... It is also described as " all things as they really are, " ...  Therefore, when we let go of everything, we do not create artificial attachments and connections. Everything is as it is. Everything exists in one accidental way or another. This is the present reality of life. It is the reality of that which cannot be grasped, the reality about which nothing can be said. This very ungraspability is what is absolutely real about things. Things being just as they are is also known as the suchness of things (tathata in Sanskrit).

 pages11-12 Opening the Hand of Thought by Zosho Uchiyama

What is Zen Buddhism?

Zen Buddhism is a mixture of Indian Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism. It began in China, spread to Korea and Japan, and became very popular in the West from the mid 20th century.

The essence of Zen is attempting to understand the meaning of life directly, without being misled by logical thought or language.

Zen techniques are compatible with other faiths and are often used, for example, by Christians seeking a mystical understanding of their faith. BBC 2002

Zen is the Japanese name for a Buddhist tradition practiced by millions of people across the world. When Buddhism came to China from India some 2,000 years ago, it encountered Daoism and Confucianism, absorbing some elements of both while rejecting others. Chan is the tradition that emerged. In this context, Chan refers to the quality of mind cultivated through sitting meditation, known as zazen in Japanese, which many Zen Buddhists consider to be the tradition’s most important practice. 

Zen is as diverse as its practitioners, but common features include an emphasis on simplicity and the teachings of nonduality and nonconceptual understanding. Nonduality is sometimes described as “not one not two,” meaning that things are neither entirely unified nor are they entirely distinct from one another. Zen recognizes, for example, that the body and mind are interconnected: they are neither the same nor completely separate. Nonconceptual understanding refers to insight into “things as they are” that cannot be expressed in words.

Like all schools of Buddhism, Zen begins with an understanding that human beings suffer, and it offers a solution to this suffering through recognizing the interconnectedness of all beings and learning to live in a way that aligns with this truth.

What is Zen Buddhism? Tricycle magazine

What will all this effort do for you? Everything and nothing. You will become a Zen student, devoted to your ongoing practice, to kindness and peacefulness, and to the ongoing endless effort to understand the meaning of time, the meaning of your existence, the reason why you were born and will die. You will still have plenty of challenges in your life, you will still feel emotion, possibly more now than ever, but the emotion will be sweet, even if it is grief or sadness. Many things, good and bad, happen in a lifetime, but you won’t mind. You will see your life and your death as a gift, a possibility. This is the essential point of Zen Buddhism.

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Through the centuries, India, the first Buddhist country, gradually spawned hundreds of sects and sub-sects, and thousands of scriptures, and tens of thousands of commentaries on those scriptures. When Buddhism spread over Central Asian trade routes to China, all this material came at once. The Chinese had long cherished their own twin traditions of Confucianism and Taoism and were resistant to ideologies introduced by barbarians from beyond the borders of the “Middle Kingdom.”

Gradually, Indian and Central Asian Buddhism began to be reshaped by its encounter with Chinese culture. This reshaping eventually led to the creation of Zen, an entirely new school of Buddhism, which eventually became by far the most successful school of Buddhism in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam.

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. In China, Zen eventually became the only Buddhist school, inclusive of all the others, so contemporary Ch’an includes many faith-based Mahayana practices that existed initially in other Buddhist schools, ... 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.

A Zen wave broke on North American shores in the middle of the twentieth century. It probably didn’t begin as a Zen wave at all, but rather as a reflex to the unprecedented violence the first part of the century had seen. In the early 1950’s, D.T. Suzuki, the great Japanese Zen scholar and practitioner, arrived at Columbia University in New York to teach about Zen.

What Is Zen Buddhism and How Do You Practice It? Norman Fischer, Lion's Roar

Zen is one long inquiry into how to live a truly full life

"Zen is one long inquiry into how to live a truly full life. Life is universal, yet we feel separate from it and from each other. Taking what we need, discarding and preserving, enjoying and suffering, our life seems to be all about us. Uchiyama looks at what a person is, what a self is, how to develop a true self not separate from all things, one that can settle in peace in the midst of life."

Preface to Opening the Hand of Thought by Zosho Uchiyama

Non-believer and the Train

I used to wonder what it was like for an organist employed at a church where they did not to believe in the church's teaching. I now find myself in a similar situation as one of the leading members of a congregation where I no longer hold to the standard orthodoxy. As documented elsewhere in this blog, Jesus did not die for my sins. I am becoming more and more entrenched in Zen Buddhist teachings and philosophy. I find less and less meaning in the basic Christian beliefs or in the need to believe certain things. Christianity talks s lot about the mystery as a way of dealing, in my opinion, with all the contradictions and hard to reconcile beliefs. I like the stripped down nature of Zen Buddhism in living in the moment and observing one's experience. 

I find the Buddhist emphasis on compassion to be more convincing and direct than the way compassion comes about in Christianity. I continue to be involved in the life of my church congregation and appreciate the compassion coming out of an examination of the life of Jesus. I don't see any value in framing the death of Jesus as forgiveness of our sins though. Either the natural world somehow needs us to be forgiven or the belief is in some strange God that demands sacrifices. I've never heard a good explanation of where that comes from except that it is "necessary". It has just seemed to me over the years that the things I like in Christianity are basic tenets in much of Buddhism. This can also be seen in some of the influential figures such as Thomas Merton or even the posts of . I feel a real evolution in my faith journey. Maybe it's my age but I feel more confidence in the path I am on. I think I've always been interested in the meaning of life and I think Zen Buddhism has helped me to understand and frame that question. Using the image of waiting for a train as wanting to be enlightened, Charlotte Joko Beck describes it this way in her last chapter of Everyday Zen:

"He realized that from the very beginning he had been on the Train. In fact he was the Train itself. There was no need to catch the Train. Nothing to realize. Nowhere to go. Just the wholeness of life itself. All the ancient questions that were no questions answered themselves."

Thomas Merton: ‘In prayer we discover what we already have. You start where you are and you deepen what you already have, and you realize that you are already there.’  

Sitting

"Since daily life moves quickly, we don't always have clear awareness of what's happening. But when we sit still we can observe and experience our disappointment. Daily sitting is our bread and butter, the basic stuff of Dharma. Without it we tend to be confused."

No Exchange, Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck

Sesshin

I've often thought that I would like to go to a sesshin. I thought I would be a bit frustrated though because I would like a comfortable retreat, then I read this: 

"And sesshin is simply a refusal to meet our expectations! From beginning to end a sesshin is designed to frustrate us! Inevitably, it gives us some pain, mental or physical. It's a prolonged experience of 'It's not the way I want it!' When we sit with that, there's always a residue of change left in us. In some cases it's very obvious. But the people who do the best in sesshin are usually the ones who have not sat many sesshins. The oldtimers can avoid sesshin even as they do it! They know how to avoid leg pain so that doesn't get too bad; they know many subtle tricks to avoid the whole thing. Because newcomers are less skilled, sesshin hits them harder and there's often an obvious change."

No Exchange, Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck

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Zen practice is hard, both emotionally physically. In addition to a regular daily meditation practice, Zen students traditionally attend intensive week-long sesshins, which demand 12 or more hours a day of often painful motionless sitting. Clearly, the rigors of Zen should not be confused with any sort of relaxation technique or meditation that aims at simply quieting the mind or becoming calm. Often the sheer physical difficulty of Zen practice has been emphasized as what sets it apart from other meditation practices, as much as its storied promise of sudden great and enlightenment or kensho. The beginning student may not have a clue as to what enlightenment really means, but he or she all too quickly learns what it means to sit with excruciatingly painful knees. Mastering one's reaction to pain may be the new students first challenge, as if Zen were primarily a matter of cultivating toughness and endurance. (He goes on to talk about a Japanese teacher who undoubtedly taught a valuable, rigorous, authentic Zen, one that has no qualms about its elitism and that contained a perceptible contempt for those who couldn't keep up.)

Ordinary Mind by Barry Magid Introduction page 10