Single Pointed Meditation: How to Do NOTHING in ZEN

Описание: Some of the best advice we get in Zen can often seem like the most contradictory. We are told to "do nothing" on the cushion, to "manifest no mind." "No stinking thinking!!" is how one monk used to put it to me. (A monk for whom, btw, ahem, thinking too much wasn't a problem.)

So. How do we "do nothing"?

In the Rinzai Zen tradition, "doing nothing" is impossible, a contradiction in terms, it's like being a teetotalling party animal or a virginal bad boy. You can't do it!

BUT! Despair not! The term Zen comes from the term Chan which comes from the term Dhyana which means focus or "single pointed concentration." This is key. In Zen, you don't try to "do nothing." Rather, you do one thing so completely that your thinking/perseverating/hyper-self-conscious mind evaporates and you dissolve into the activity. Then nothing manifests by itself, and the nothing is YOU.

Sitting meditation or Zazen is just doing the simplest thing possible, posture and breath, with as much sincerity and focus as possible. But there are ultimately as many different kinds of "Zen" as there are activities on planet earth. We are always involved in some kind of activity, and the practice is to give ourselves to these activities completely. To get OUT of our heads and INTO the world around us.

Oh, this video features a brief digression on the horse, and the horsegirl, that clomped through the forest while I was shooting it.

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