The most important thing
▶ Buddha Nature ☮ Wisdom of the Dharma – YouTube.
“The most important thing is to find out what is the most important thing.”
~ Shunryu Suzuki.
Tao & Zen
The walking (or dancing) itself is the meditation
The walking (or dancing) itself is the meditation…
~Alan Watts~
Humor allows us to see that ultimately things don’t make sense
“Humor allows us to see that ultimately things don’t make sense. The only thing that truly makes sense is letting go of of anything we continue to hold on to. Our ego-mind and emotions are a dramatic illusion. Of course, we all feel that they’re real: my drama, your drama, our confrontations. We create these elaborate scenarios and then react to them. But there is nothing really happening outside our mind! This is karma’s cosmic joke. You can laugh about the irony of this, or you can stick with your scenario. It’s your choice.”
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The biggest tragedy
“From the Buddhist point of view, there is a really big tragedy that is happening all the time.The fact that all beings, like you and me, you know, sentient beings, even so they are adorned with an enlightened-nature – wherever they go, enlightened-nature goes – they just miss it all the time. That is the biggest tragedy. It is so near, it is just so close, it is right here in front, even closer than in front of you. But most of us, we miss it. That is the biggest tragedy.”
Beginner’s mind
“The most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner’s mind. There is no need to have a deep understanding of Zen. Even though you read much Zen literature, you must read each sentence with a fresh mind. You should not say, “I know what Zen is,” or “I have attained enlightenment.” This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner. Be very very careful about this point. If you start to practice zazen [meditation], you will begin to appreciate your beginner’s mind. It is the secret of Zen practice.”
~Shunryu Suzuki~
Tao & Zen
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
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The path of awakening
I found that interesting. In Buddhism we usually say it doesn’t matter what we do, it matters how aware we are. It shows that the outer and inner are totally inseparable. It is what we are that counts, but that is what we do, actually. Our inner state shows up in our behavior…
If we practice this path, we experience the fruits, the results. Each of us innately has that Buddha potential or Buddha-nature, enlightened perfect nature.
Not just in us, like a needle in a haystack, so hard to find; rather, it is us, just waiting to be realized fully, or actualized. So this path of meditative practice, of self-inquiry, of cultivation of awareness is a practice path that we travel ourselves. Not a dogma we need to believe.
This meditative practice is like a mirror to help us see ourselves, to better know ourselves, thoroughly — our true selves, not just our superficial personalities and conditioned social selves, our persona, but our true nature, our true selves. To unfold and realize that is possible. That’s what we call awakening the Buddha within.
An ancient rabbi, Hillel I think, said, “If not you, then who? And if not now, when?” If you are not the Bodhisattva, a selfless spiritual activist or hero serving the welfare of beings, who will be?
And if not now, when? This is a call to action–not just worldly, compulsive busy-body-like activity, but a call to Buddha-activity, enlightened activity, enlightened living… Not just living wisdom from the eyebrows up, totally cerebral and intellectual. Rather, embodying truth and living it.
~ Lama Surya Das ~
Excerpts from Dharma Talk
October 24, 1994; Cambridge, MA.
Zen and the art of keeping the NHS bill under control
Dear friends, this is an unusual post for this blog but I feel this is an important story on Zen and politics and social policy. Lou
Zen and the art of keeping the NHS bill under control | Life and style | The Guardian.
Jon Kabat-Zinn is widely credited as the man who brought Zen Buddhism to the masses. Now he’s bringing it to Downing Street
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- The Guardian,
- Sunday 7 April 2013
“The find it, fix it model of medicine doesn’t work any more. The US healthcare system is bankrupting the country, bankrolling the insurance companies and exhausting healthcare staff,” says Kabat-Zinn. “And despite all that, we are ranked 50th in the world for life expectancy.”
Back in 1965, a grad student in molecular biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology stumbled across a class of five people on Zen Buddhism. He’d never heard of Zen and knew nothing of Buddhism. Nearly half a century later, that grad student, Jon Kabat-Zinn, has arguably done more than any other individual to put Buddhism into the mainstream, not just in America, but in dozens of countries around the world. Now, Downing Street policymakers are keen to hear more.
“That first class took the top off my head. I found a sense of largeness beyond my little preoccupations of what would happen to my future, or my relationships,” says Kabat-Zinn. “It opened up a new dimension of being which could offer more meaning and enable me to interface more effectively with society in a way which could be healing and transformative.”
Kabat-Zinn’s enthusiasm for that dramatic breakthrough is still palpable as he talks of how as a scientist he resolved to find a way to bring those benefits to millions of others. What he evolved over the next 15 years was the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme; an eight-week set of meditation and yoga practices in classes and at home, which instil the basics of paying close attention to the current moment.
“I was teaching molecular biology of muscle development in medical school at the time, and began to ask doctors: ‘What percentage of your patients do you help?’ They thought it was about 15% to 20%.”
So Kabat-Zinn set up a clinic to help the untreatable majority. “Patients turned up with all kinds of conditions: hypertension, cancer, anxiety.”
As a scientist, Kabat-Zinn knew he needed evidence; anecdotes and testimony were not going to be enough to persuade the American health establishment. “I wrote up the chronic pain results first because they were astonishing.” Since then, a steady stream of academic papers, books and, more recently, randomised control trials, have helped pave the way for hundreds of MBSR programmes in hospitals and medical centres across the US.
Kabat-Zinn’s work has spawned a cluster of different applications of mindfulness training, including for addiction, the elderly and parenting. In the past couple of decades, Kabat-Zinn has collaborated with psychologists in the UK who have adapted his work for Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which has won recognition from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), as a treatment for depression.
All of which explains why our interview is happening in Westminster, where Kabat-Zinn has a string of meetings with senior politicians before he heads to Downing Street for a session with policy advisers. There are good reasons for the policymakers to be listening closely, as Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues have a compelling proposition: mindfulness has unlimited applicability to almost every healthcare issue we now face – and it’s cheap.
“The find it, fix it model of medicine doesn’t work any more. The US healthcare system is bankrupting the country, bankrolling the insurance companies and exhausting healthcare staff,” says Kabat-Zinn. “And despite all that, we are ranked 50th in the world for life expectancy.”
The UK has huge challenges in healthcare, with an explosion in mental illness and an ageing population, he points out, adding that mindfulness is relevant to the debate about how to instil compassion and attentive care in healthcare workers to avoid a repeat of the Mid Staffordshire scandal. Mindfulness training inspires compassion, he argues. Just the act of being in the moment and paying attention to that moment allows the innate compassion within us all to emerge.
“It’s all about training what you pay attention to,” he says, admitting that this goes against the grain of a culture that trains us to privilege thinking and which offers endless opportunities for constant distraction from the present moment. “It’s common sense. It’s not about cures, it’s about over time developing a different relationship with one’s experiences, whether that’s anxiety, pain, stress or depression. We know that changes the shape of the brain, it affects the behaviour of cells.”
Kabat-Zinn has been one of the leaders of the dialogue between science and Buddhism, in which the Dalai Lama has been an enthusiastic participant. But it is the insistence of a very practical approach that has perhaps been the key factor in his success. Kabat-Zinn wanted to translate the Buddha’s central insight, mindfulness, into a language that anyone could grasp. That’s why he stopped calling himself a Buddhist; this is about being human, he says.
He now believes that mindfulness is on a steep adoption curve. Given the benefits of mental clarity, insight and creativity that practitioners claim, the interest from corporations is wellestablished, particularly in Silicon Valley, where Kabat-Zinn is a regular speaker. Even the US military has adopted a version of mindfulness for training soldiers.
None of these applications faze Kabat-Zinn, although they are far from the ethos of his own work. Even if mindfulness is used by the banker or the soldier to improve their professional skills, he says, it will also nurture the innate compassion of their humanity.
“It is what makes us human, what distinguishes us from other animals. We can be aware of being aware.”
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Learning not to panic
“To stay with that shakiness — to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge — that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic — this is the spiritual path.”
~ Pema Chödron — with Babyloner Beiboot, Nora Cristina Marin and Shawn Shawn.
Zen Flash 
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