Quotes from Bret W Davis

The Wheel of Life is painted on the outside walls of many Tibetan and Bhutanese monasteries in order to educate people in the basics of Buddhism. Yet it is not often found in Japan. In fact, Japanese Buddhists don't think or talk much at all about rebirth in the Six Realms. When they do talk about the afterlife, they tend to speak of becoming a Buddha, attaining Nirvana, or going to the Pure Land—expressions that they often use rather vaguely to mean roughly the same thing.

Changes can be looked at from the perspective of discontinuity or from the perspective of continuity. If we focus on the greatest ruptures of discontinuity, we can speak of physical, psychological, or spiritual "death." If we turn our attention to their aspects of complementary continuity, we can also speak of "rebirth.

Tibetan Buddhists talk a lot about rebirth, both the rebirth of normal unenlightened people and that of enlightened beings such as the Dalai Lama, who is thought to be a reincarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion. By contrast, Zen Buddhists rarely talk in detail or in literal terms about rebirth or reincarnation.

When Confucius was asked about death, he replied: "We do not yet understand life how could we possibly understand death?" Analogously, when asked questions about death, Zen masters are likely to turn the questioner's attention back to life.

In Zen, resolving the great matter of life and death requires facing up to mortality. In order to truly live, we have to come to terms with the termination of life as we know it.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." According to Dante, these lines are written over the gates of Hell. Zen masters, by contrast, have high hopes for going to Hell. For them, out of bottomless compassion, we should want to go to Hell. When asked by a college student in America if he thought people go to Heaven after they die, the modern Rinzai Zen master Fukushima Keid? replied: "Only the ego wants to go to Heaven!

The teachings of Zen have been deployed in opposition to both religious fundamentalism and anti religious secularism. They have also been used to critique consumerism, technological destruction of and alienation from nature, and other perceived ills of the dominant and domineering worldviews and lifestyles of the modern West. All of this is now part of the ongoing development of Zen as a living and increasingly cross-cultural tradition.

In the beginning, you will likely experience meditation as a struggle. It is a very odd struggle, since it is a struggle with yourself, a struggle between different parts of yourself, between the part of you that wants to meditate and the part of you that does not.

Whereas some schools of Buddhism distinguish more sharply between the preparatory practice of concentration and the liberating practice of insight, Zen views concentration and insight as two sides of the same coin: when the mind is cleared, settled, and focused, it naturally attains insight and manifests its innate wisdom.

Don't flee from boredom. Go all the way into it; go all the way through the bottom of boredom!

In general, the problem with secularized mindfulness techniques is that when they find it convenient, they abandon—or at least put out of sight on the sidelines— the crucial ethical and religious contexts in which these Buddhist meditative practices have traditionally been embedded.

Zen meditation is meant to bring an end to the delusory and destructive ego, not to serve it as a means for achieving its ends.

Zazen is by no means a "quick fix" panacea for all psychological ailments. While it does aim to uproot the core causes of our "normal" human spiritual dis-ease, any "abnormal" mental health issues should be addressed before one is ready to engage in the austere rigors of this spiritual discipline.

Something vital is lost when practices of mindfulness are transplanted from their original ethical and religious contexts into the contemporary context of neoliberal capitalism with its primary aim of profit based on maximizing productivity and consumption.

Our society has largely forgotten the importance of bodily posture for alertness, for digestion, and most importantly for one's psychophysical disposition. Zazen reminds the body, as well as the mind, of the beneficial effects of good posture. Moreover, zazen increases physical as well as mental flexibility, and in general it attunes our minds to the needs of the body, allowing the body to mindfully retune itself.

I recommend that you begin with short ten-minute meditation periods, once or twice a day, and over several weeks gradually lengthen your meditation periods to twenty-five minutes, even if you can only find time to do this once a day. Even for an experienced meditator, it often takes ten or fifteen minutes to really settle into a meditative state, and so it is not surprising that the minimum length of time for a meditation period in temples and monasteries is usually twenty-five minutes.

Keep in mind that meditation is a holistic discipline, and you are rehabilitating your posture and flexibility at the same time as you are training your mind—and, moreover, you are realizing how interconnected body and mind actually are.

In the Western imagination, "Zen" has connotations of hip and cool, liberal and progressive; it is thought to be a fashionable and easygoing spirituality with just the right touch of esoteric exoticism and none of the stuffy and constrictive baggage of dogmatic institutional religions. In Japan, by contrast, Zen is generally associated with the strict discipline of a rigorous spiritual practice and also with a traditional, ritualistic, and culturally conservative religious establishment.

To properly set out on the path to Zen, we must empty our cups—in other words, we need to open our minds.

Faith does play an important role in Buddhism, including in Zen: faith as preliminary trust and ultimately faith as true self-confidence.

Even if Zen is not currently undergoing the same kind of core doctrinal crisis as Christianity is for some, we should pay attention to suspicious critiques as well as to sympathetic interpretations of the Zen tradition.

The question is not whether but how Buddhism will change as it enters further into Western societies.

I study and practice Zen Buddhism because I experience it as illuminating and liberating. I remain personally engaged with this tradition because I continue to experience it as capable of leading me to truth and liberation, rather than, for example, because it is the tradition that I happen to have been raised in or the one that is most socially convenient for me to adhere to.

The injunction to know oneself can be found in many traditions, including the Western philosophical tradition that goes back to Socrates. According to Zen, however, to truly discover what the self is, we need a more direct path than mere intellectual reasoning.