A few days ago I posted my initial thoughts on how you might approach building a practice base in meditation starting from scratch. For a typical week, I assumed practicing strict zazen (simple breath counting, but no guided meditations) for days 1-6, then experimenting a bit on day 7 with some form of guided or visualization meditation.
Mind you, I practice unleaded Zen myself and nothing else. I don’t find anything else really necessary or helpful for me. And no less an authority figure than the 13th century Zen pioneer Dogen said practices other than Zen were unnecessary. But then Dogen has a reputation as being not only a brilliant philosopher and highly original writer, but more than a little hardcore. And those of you new to meditation might not be so ready to commit to Zen — it’s not necessarily for everyone. Which is why I allowed some exploration on the seventh day of the week: to give you a chance to window shop, so to speak.
But feel free to use the seventh day as yet another day for zazen, if just sitting still and doing nothing is your thing. You don’t have to shop around if you’re already satisfied. And if you shop around and find guided meditation is more your thing, ditch the Zen and go with that.
Most of all, enjoy your sitting. It’s not some sort of mystic ritual, or ascetic sweat-lodge practice, or self-help seminar. It’s just sitting.
I’m playing around with how one might establish a formal “running Zen” practice, combining running and Zen into a practical, scalable regular training schedule. Perhaps in a week or so I’ll post a little more about that.
Great blog! I’ve been running since February, and it’s really sticking this time. I find ChiRunning very helpful, for both biomechanics and practice reasons.
I put a link to your blog on mine.
Keep up the good work.
Trevor.
Thanks Rev Trev! “Rev Trev,” I slay me. I’m always happy to reciprocate a link, so your quite interesting-looking blog is now part of my link family. Enjoy your running!
I really need to sit with the Austin bunch the next time I’m there …
I think it has to do with personality types. Some people do not want to try to hard at things. They are more layed back than all the training.
from Joseph Campbell….
This Buddhism comes to Japan in the twelvth century with the great teacher Honen and becomes the basis for the great Buddhism of most of the people of Japan now, Jodo and Shinshu.
Now, how do you serve the Buddha? How do you launch your ferry boat across to the yonder shore? You serve the Buddha simply by performing your life duties. No meditation necessary. No special going to church necessary. Your whole life is church. Your children are your enterprize through which you acheive your fulfillment. This is a lovely, wonderful thing. The whole world is turned into the sanctuary, you might say, of the discipline. And the discipline isn’t something that should make you anxious. It is something that you are doing simply by performing your life duties properly and peacefully.
Now there comes a resistance to this kind of thing on the part of the people who like effort. You know, there are people who feel things shouldn’t be too easy, and this way of high discipline is the way that is epitomized in what is called Zen. This word zen is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word ch’an, and the Chinese word is a mispronunciation of the Sanskrit word dhyana, which means contemplation. Contemplation normally is thought of as disciplined meditation. I have spoken about the kundalini yoga, a form of phychological and spiritual discipline that consists of bringing a serpent of energy up through the spine. In Zen, you seek to transform your mode of experience through just this kind of spiritual exercise so that you actually come to the illumination that the Buddha came to in the way the Buddha himself did, not just seated in a shrine being a little dragon mouth saying “Buddha, Buddha, Buddha,” then expecting to get somewhere. Here you are going to go to WORK.
When you read about Zen there is somethng rather confusing about it because the story of Hui-neng is told and told and told as the typical story of Zen. But then behind that there is Bodhidharma, the one who sat facing the wall for 9 years. Then go to Japan and go to a Zen monastery and what do you see? You see rows of austere little monks sitting in the most fantastically controlled meditational postures. What is all this about?
What group of people did Zen serve when it came to Japan? It was the Buddhism of the samurai, of the knights, of the warrior-monks. This gives you the clue to Zen. In contrast to the Chinese ch’an, Japanese Zen is the religion of knighthood, of atheletes, of highly disciplined action, of being in high form. In China, the ideal is really the old rogue, the old fellow who’s got wisdom in him, a kind of comical character through whom life just flows. The ideal in Japan, however, is this samurai discipline, the discipline of life in form.
Chana