Because we live in a wicked and corrupt age, people aren’t able to follow the teachings of the Buddhas anymore.
Because Amida has done so much good over his past lifetimes, he’s able to let the people who trust in him be reborn in the Pure Land, where it’s easy to attain enlightenment, unlike this world, which is so full of suffering, temptation, and immorality.
It’s silly.
You should check out The Tao of Zen by Ray Brigg.
Well, they did return my e-mail - I’m calling for an appointment for an orientation session later today.
Since this appears to be simple expressions of opinion without actual witnessing and no debate, we’re sending it back to IMHO, (who will send it back here immediately, of course, if witnessing or debate break out).
[ /Modding ]
Why?
It all depends on how your brain works, to be honest. Some of us are born dissatisfied and our brains conspire to torture us at every waking moment. This is the kind of person Buddha was, I fully believe, because nothing other than acute psychological anguish would really drive a person to leave everything behind and spend years trying to resolve the problem of suffering.
My husband is one of the most well-adjusted people I know. He rarely gets angry and he just doesn’t get afraid of things. When he’s stressed, he just sort of rides it out without getting all caught up in the narrative of him being stressed. I find him fascinating because I am so unlike him that I can’t even imagine what it’s like to live life without some degree of fear or distress.
I don’t think he’s the sort of person Zen Buddhism is supposed to help. Zen Buddhism was made for people like me, people who overthink, who judge, who self-deride, who worry and vex and get caught up in the past, and above all, who find suffering to be the single most defining experience of life.
I’m curious, Chief, what you make of CBT and particularly Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. By Dr. Linehan’s own admission, the therapeutic constructs are based on Zen Buddhism. Considering I have practiced both Zen and DBT, and my husband is training for DBT as we speak, I feel qualified to confirm they are pretty damned similar.
From here.
CBT is a therapeutic practice well-grounded in the scientific literature. Because of it depression and anxiety are extremely treatable. DBT, which is a specific type of CBT, is the only empirically supported treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder, and the only treatment recommended by the American Psychological Association for BPD. It has been proven to be effective in over 11 randomized controlled trials not only for BPD but for sufferers of severe depression with drug/alcohol co-morbidity and a history of frequent suicide attempts. There is even mixed evidence that it works for adolescents with any recent history of suicidal ideation and has been identified as a promising treatment for Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
So your claim that the tenets of Zen can’t be scientifically tested is false. They have been systematically tested through controlled experiments and they have been proven to help people with severe mental health problems.
Emphasis mine. Yes, exactly. You must be one of those weird mentally healthy types if you find that distinction significant.
It was and I am.
It is not about the “good” of anything. It is about the being. It is not result oriented. It is “being” oriented. I once had a teacher explain that often we in the Western cultures need predicate nominatives in our lives to exist. In the East, things can just “be” and it suffices. I know it seems obtuse, but it works.
QFT. Unauthorized Cinnamon, you are nailing it in this thread in post after post.
Zen, and particularly the notion of observed impermanence, has helped me immensely in my personal life. It has taught me to experience the world in a more peaceful and realistic way. I like it a lot. I get that it’s not for everyone, but it’s subjective value in my experience has been immeasurable.
I think there may be a misunderstanding here. The goal of Zen is not to stop thinking rationally. Rational thought is pretty well-recognized in Buddhism as a practical necessity. The Dalai Lama himself said that if science were to disprove Buddhism, he would go with science (he’s a Tibetan Buddhist, not Zen, but still.)
The historical Buddha himself is famously quoted as having said “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” This was not a dogmatic man.
When we meditate, the goal is not to stop thinking. The goal is not to have certain kinds of thoughts. The goal is to pay attention. Even if your experience of sitting on that cushion is, ‘‘Shit, this sucks. I have so much to do. This is a complete waste of time,’’ well, that’s your experience. On top of that, saying, ‘‘Oh, I’m such a horrible Buddhist for having thoughts. Bad, bad thoughts’’ is really not going to help.
The premise of Zen is that there is something valuable to be gained from attending to the present moment without judgment, no matter how unpleasant or thought-filled that moment may be. The reason *shikantanza *means ‘‘just sitting’’ is because it’s literally that. There is no goal other than awareness. The best real-world comparison I could make is vigorous exercise. When you exercise, if you are anything like me, all you are is a physical being, all that exists is that moment. It goes beyond pleasant and unpleasant, it just is. You, the road, your feet on the pavement, the sound of your own breath. Racers call it the ‘‘runner’s high’’ for a reason – there’s something valuable there.
To answer Frylock’s question about meditation, I believe that the difference between meditating and not meditating is, ideally, nothing. The purpose of meditation is to achieve that same sense of awareness, compassion, and nonjudgment in every day life. One reason breathing is often so heavily emphasized in Buddhist meditation is that no matter where you go, whether you’re delivering a speech or stuck in traffic or having sex or whatever, you’ve got your breath. It’s a handy cue for times you get lost.
I fully admit a lot of older texts on Zen Buddhism, such as Moon in a Dewdrop by Zen Master Dogen, are really freaking obscure. I studied it in an [English translated] Japanese literature class and remember thinking it seemed rather deliberately obtuse. I believe this is partly a cultural thing and partly the fact that you can read about Zen for ten years trying to understand it or you can spend five minutes meditating and understand it immediately. Sort of how you can only learn a foreign language through total immersion, I don’t think this is a subject that lends itself well to pontification.
I’m happy to pontificate and pontificate on the pontification of others, of course. I’m just saying.
Oh, and for those who would like to read a bit about this in a very no-nonsense way, I strongly recommend the first understandable book on Zen that I ever read, Being Zen by Ezra Bayda. He has a beautiful sequel as well entitled At Home in the Muddy Water. Very straightforward, not confusing, not remotely woo-woo, and arguably the most important book on Buddhism I ever read (after No Death, No Fear, which is also excellent.)
It’s a direct quote from someone who studied Zen under Aiunken Hugo Makibi Enomiya-Lassalle and Yamada Koun Zenshin.
(But I could have submitted it in a way that didn’t sound like a smart-assy threadcrap.)
It’s not BS. All the dude’s saying is that since Zen is by definition about directly experiencing the present moment, trying to explain it is kind of pointless. The only way to really ‘‘get’’ Zen is to do it. I read a lot of books trying to understand. Once I actually sat down to meditate, I got it. I got it immediately. The books and conversations I think can be helpful for deepening practice, but they aren’t a substitute for practice.
Thanks for the compliment, olivesmarch4th!
Here is Sam Harris, notorious atheist, describing just what you are saying about needing to experience meditation first-hand, as well as the usefulness of this experience to decrease human suffering. (Relevant section starts at 23:23.)
Wow, I just watched all forty minutes of that, and it was pretty powerful. I’ve never seen anyone speak out publically on atheism before; it was kind of jarring. I kept wanting to scan the background for snipers.
I love that he was willing to push the envelope with his audience, and I love that this pushing involved being rational about the psychological significance of human religious experience to individual lives. Some of the points he raised could be a whole 'nother thread.
(I’d have to nitpick with him on his racism analogy though. There are indeed people who feel it necessary to identify as anti-racist, and I am one of them. We even have clubs, such as the Philadelphia-based Whites In Anti-Racist Solidarity (WIARS). But I digress.)
I do not claim Zen Buddhism is ineffective in assisting purely mental problems. I think it is. I also hold that many physical problems are secondary to crappy mental problems, and here too, I hold Zen Buddhism to be an effective approach.
I was referrring to the general philosophy of “why” it works, the discussion of which would rapidly degenerate to arguments over what it is, exactly. The general notion of discovering some sort of deep inner self, for example; nonsensical statements like seeing one’s own nature as a mechanism to see a Buddha. BS and meaningless, untestable assertions like that.
I also have a general criticism of elminating suffering by simply changing one’s mind about how to look at suffering rather than actually fixing the underlying problem. See my pinworms example in another Buddha thread…
Overall a little meditation and clearing of the mind is a good thing. Better than Prozac, even.
But, you can get exactly the same result from Ratio-Emotive Therapy. Which is not another name for Zen Buddhism.
I’m familiar with RET (Ellis’ brand anyway) and I think they have some similar constructs. Obviously I am not going to claim they are the exact same thing, but I think they dovetail nicely together. I love Ellis. I love CBT. I love Buddhism. There’s lots of room for lots of different ways to look at the problem of suffering. In my life, sometimes it makes more sense to apply CBT, other times it makes more sense to apply Buddhism, and other times I just need to get back to my existentialist roots. I realize some people need one guiding paradigm to provide all the answers to their burning questions, but I don’t. I’m interested in acquiring as many tools as possible for dealing practically with the problems I face in daily life. It just so happens that Buddhism has been a really consistent and effective one.
So what you want is a world without any pain in it. Fantastic, me too. I just don’t think it’s a rational goal. By all means, let’s pop our meds, become better scientists, devote our lives to reducing suffering in the world, and floss our teeth twice a day. But the reality is we can’t escape pain and decay. It is a fundamental part of the human condition. I find meaning in trying to end suffering–for real end suffering. But the question for me is, how do we choose to deal with the inevitability of pain?
I actually ran into some trouble with this in a social theory course I took, because I tend to agree with the radical law professor Derrick Bell that racism (and more generally, oppression) is a permanent part of American society. When I spoke up in class and said that no matter how hard we fight we are never going to eliminate oppression and marginalization, my classmates seemed uncomfortable with this idea. They heard me saying our efforts as social workers would be in vain and we might as well give up. But that’s not what I was trying to say. What I was trying to say is that regardless of our efforts to eliminate suffering, we can never remove pain from the human condition, therefore we must acknowledge the need for psychological if not actual liberation.
To me that’s what Buddhism is about. Facing the facts of life, recognizing that it hurts because hurting is a universal part of the human condition, and figuring out how to handle that hurt with minimal damage and make the best of the good stuff. We all view pain as undesirable, but tough shit. Life hurts. You either accept it or you make things worse for yourself.
I realize that’s an unsatisfying answer for a lot of people. I don’t even claim it’s completely satisfying for me. But it’s one of the best frameworks I’ve got for dealing with life’s shit.
I still say it’s BS.
Zen is notoriously difficult to explain, and teachers often speak in deliberately obscure and oblique ways. But to say that those who know don’t say is simply wrong.
There is a problem with false teachers. These people have no enlightenment but want fame, respect and followers. So they say alot. But to say that those who say don’t know is simply wrong.
Heck, the Dali Lama gives speaking engagements all over the world. Are you saying that since he says a lot, he doesn’t know?
In other news, today I was loaned Zen Questions by Robert Allen. So far, it seems to be about Zen rather than Zen Buddhism, some of the parables are repeats from ZFZB, and it seems to be a worthwhile book.
He’s not a Zen Buddhist.
But that being said, “Those who know, don’t say and those who say, don’t know” isn’t Buddhist teaching. It’s Taoist, from the Tao te Ching.
D’oh!
I stand by the rest of my post.