Despite the development in Asia, as the Chinese form of a religion was initially coming from India and then refined in Japan, Zen Buddhism has long called on Westerners. Part of this owes the aesthetics of spare and elegant with which popular culture associates it, and more with the promise it holds: the freedom of stress, anxiety, and even suffering of all kinds. In theory, the Zen practitioner reaches this freedom not by mastering a corpus of knowledge or by rising a hierarchy, but by the direct experience of reality, without mediation by thoughts, unprecedented by desires, and undivided by the classification patterns which separate one thing from another. It is easier to say than to do, of course, and for some, not even a meditation life does the trick.
In The interview clip aboveRinzai Zen Monk Yodo Kono explains how he arrived in the world of Zen. Having come from a line of monks, he inherited the role after the death of his grandfather and his father. Already at the end of the twenty, he worked as a professor of physics, an occupation which – also fashionable the supposed concordances between the physical truths and advanced Buddhists – barely prepared him for the rigters of the temple.
“I have entered a role completely opposed to logic,” he recalls, “a world where logic does not exist.” Think about Zen Kōans We have all heard, which require apparently impossible answers on the sound of an applauding hand, or the appearance of your face before your parents are born.
Advised by his master to stop trying to acquire knowledge, skills and understanding, the frustrated yodo kono began to realize that “Zen is all”, the key question being “how to live without worries in Zen”. This cannot be learned from a quantity of study, but from experience alone. We can directly directly the way we create our own suffering in our minds, and also that we cannot help but do it. This does not leave us the choice to give up our concepts of control over reality. In daily life, he explains The clip just above (Also documentary Freedom of sufferingOn the varieties of Buddhism), we must be able to move freely between “the individual Zen world and the divided world”, the latter being where almost all of us already spend our days: not without our pleasures, of course, but also not without asking each other, each often, if we can experience permanent satisfaction.
Related content:
A 6-step guide from Zen Buddhism, presented by Master Psychiatrist-Zen Robert Waldinger
What is a Zen Koan? An animated introduction to oriental philosophical thinking experiences
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A Beatboxing Buddhist monk creates music for meditation
Buddhism 101: A short introductory conference by Jorge Luis Borges
Based in Seoul, Colin MArshall Written and broadcastTS on cities, language and culture. His projects include the substack newsletter Books on cities And the book The stateless city: a walk through Los Angeles from the 21st century. Follow it on the social network formerly known as Twitter in @ColinmArshall.
