Zen is about breaking out of your ideas and experiencing life and not ideas.
Nothing is any particular way. It’s your state of mind that creates reality.
Zen is a very quick path. Zen is the path of meditation. The word Zen means emptiness or fullness, meditation. Meditation is the quickest path to enlightenment.
Zen was a reaction. Just as Buddha came into the world and spoke against the fall of Vedanta, so Buddhism lost its essence and became ritual. Zen was a reaction to that.
Zen was an attempt to get back to the purest teachings of the Buddha -enlightenment without strings.
In the old days, Zen was not really practiced so much in a monastery. The Zen Master usually lived up on a top of the mountain or the hill or in the forest or sometimes in the village.
He would usually study with a small group of students, men and women.
They would spend a lot of their time simply walking around in the woods or in the cities, or they would come over to his house and he would teach them with a great deal of humor and laughter about the nature of existence.
According to Zen Buddhist cosmology there are ten thousand different states of mind to view and understand life through.
In Zen we classify ten thousand different states of mind, different ways of seeing life. There is something beyond the ten thousand states of mind that we call nirvana.
Each of the ten thousand states of mind presents you with a different view of essence and experience.
Opportunities, creative ideas or the lack of them, happiness, frustration, brilliance, talent, success and failure – all are determined by the state of mind that you’re in.
Most persons spend their lives stuck in relatively low states of mind. In these states of mind their views of themselves and the world around them are often severely limited.
If you are around a lot of human beings who are filled with jealousy and anger and rage and desire, it filters into the mind. Zen is writing a new program to run in the mind.
Through the study of Zen you can learn to move from lower to higher states of mind at will. Higher states of mind offer you a much more accurate picture of reality.
In advanced Zen a person comes to realize that the existence of things and their ability to perceive them correctly is completely dependent upon their state of mind.
Zen is the study of mind in all of its manifestations. The purpose of Zen is to be happy.
There is a beautiful flow to the study of Zen. If it is not making you happier, then you are not practicing correctly.
Zen is meditation, the actual experience of life directly, immediately with no buffers.
According to Zen philosophy each human being has two minds, a finite mind and an infinite mind.