A Japanese Zen Monk Explains What Zen Is Actually About
Regardless of developing in Asia, because the Chinese type of a religion originally introduced over from India and later refined in Japan, Zen Buddhism has lengthy appealed to Westerners as nicely. A few of that owes to the spare, elegant aesthetics with which popular culture associates it, and extra to the promise it holds out: freedom from stress, anxiety, and certainly suffering of every kind. Within theory, the Zen practitioner attains that freedom not by mastering a physique of knowledge or ascending a hierarchy, however by direct experience of actuality, unmediated by ideas, unwarped by needs, and undivided by the classification schemes that sepafee one factor from another. That’s easier stated than finished, in fact, and for some, not even a lifetime of meditation does the trick.
In the interview clip above, Rinzai zen monk Yodo Kono explains how he arrived on this planet of Zen. Having come from a line of monks, he inherited the function after the deaths of his grandfather and his father. Already in his late twenties, he’d been working as a physics trainer, an occupation that — however fashionin a position the supposed concordances between superior physical and Buddhist truths — onerously prepared him for the rigors of the temple.
“I entered a job completely oppoweb site to logic,” he remembers, “a world the place logic doesn’t exist.” Consider the Zen kōans we’ve all heard, which demand appearingly impossible solutions concerning the sound of 1 hand clapping, or the seemance of your face earlier than your parents have been born.
Suggested by his master to cease striveing to realize knowledge, abilities, and belowstanding, the frustrated Yodo Kono started to actualize that “Zen is eachfactor,” the important thing question being “ dwell without worries within Zen.” That may’t be discovered from any quantity of examine, however experience alone. Solely directly can one really feel how we create our personal suffering in our minds, and in addition that we are able to’t assist however achieve this. This leaves us no selection however to relinquish our notions of control over actuality. In daily life, he explains in the clip simply above (additionally from the documalestary Freedom From Suffering, concerning the varieties of Buddhism), one should be capable of transfer freely between “the undivided Zen world and the divided world,” the latter being the place close toly all of us already spend our days: not without our pleasures, in fact, but in addition not without gaineddering, sometimes, if we are able to ever know permanent satisfaction.
Related content:
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Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly often known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
