Zen (禅)

  Zen is a branch of Mahayana Buddhism which strongly emphasizes the practice of moment-by-moment awareness and of 'seeing deeply into the nature of things' by direct experience. Zen emerged as a distinct school in China and spread to Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and, in modern times, the rest of the world.



  Zen sitting meditation, the core of zen practice, is called Zazen (座禅). During zazen, practitioners usually assume a sitting position such as the lotus, half-lotus, Burmese, or seiza (正座) postures. Awareness is directed towards one's posture and breathing. Often, a square or round cushion (zafu) placed on a padded mat (zabuton) is used to sit on; in some cases, a chair may be used. In Rinzai Zen, practitioners typically sit facing the center of the room; while Soto practitioners traditionally sit facing a wall.

  In Soto Zen, shikantaza meditation ("just-sitting") that is, a meditation with no objects, anchors, or content, is the primary form of practice. Considerable textual, philosophical, and phenomenological justification of this practice can be found in Dogen's Shobogenzo. Rinzai Zen, instead, emphasizes attention to the breath and koan practice (q.v.).

  The amount of time spent daily in zazen by practitioners varies. Dogen recommends that 5 minutes or more daily is beneficial for householders. The key is daily regularity, as Zen teaches that the ego will naturally resist, and the discipline of regularity is essential. Practicing Zen monks may perform four to six periods of zazen during a normal day, with each period lasting thirty to forty minutes. Normally, a monastery will hold a monthly retreat period (sesshin), lasting between one and seven days. During this time, zazen is practiced more intensively: monks may spend four to eight hours in meditation each day, sometimes supplemented by further rounds of zazen late at night.

  Dogen's teacher Rujing was said to sleep fewer than four hours each night, spending the balance in zazen. However, in practice, it is not uncommon for monks to actually sleep during zazen. Some meditation researchers have theorized that Zen adepts who are able to achieve the deeper levels of samadhi in meditation are actually fulfilling the same need as REM sleep, so that when zazen time is added to actual sleep time, they are in effect still getting the normal amount of daily sleep that the brain requires. However, such ability to enter into deep samadhi during zazen is apparently fairly rare, and may not arise even after decades of meditation.

  Meditation as a practice can be applied to any posture. Walking meditation is called kinhin. Successive periods of zazen are usually interleaved with brief periods of walking meditation to relieve the legs.



  Some Zen Buddhists practice meditation on koans during zazen. A koan (公案) is a story or dialog, generally related to Zen or other Buddhist history; the most typical form is an anecdote involving early Chinese Zen masters. Koan practice is particularly emphasized by the Japanese Rinzai schools, but it also occurs in other forms of Zen.

  In some sense, a koan embodies a realized principle, or law of reality. Koans often appear paradoxical or linguistically meaningless dialogs or questions. The 'answer' to the koan involves a transformation of perspective or consciousness, which may be either radical or subtle, possibly akin to the experience of metanoia in Christianity. They are a tool to allow the student to approach enlightenment by essentially 'short-circuiting' the logical way we order the world. In order to try to answer these often unanswerable problems, the thinker may be forced to create new mental pathways. Those pathways then may be useful for other problems, thus producing a "mind expansion" effect.

  The Zen student's mastery of a given koan is presented to the teacher in a private interview, referred to as dokusan (独参), daisan (代参), or sanzen (参禅). Zen teachers advise that the problem posed by a koan is to be taken quite seriously, and to be approached as literally a matter of life and death. Koans do not have "no answer". There is a sharp distinction between right and wrong ways of answering a koan—although there may be many "right answers", practitioners are expected to demonstrate their understanding of the koan and of Zen through their answers.

  While there is no single correct answer for any given koan, there are compilations of accepted answers to koans that serve as references for teachers. These collections are of great value to modern scholarship on the subject.


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