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Zen Practice Difficult and Dangerous?
Interesting Article i came across, What are your thoughts?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-zesho-susan-oconnell/zen-practice-is-difficult-and-dangerous_b_973769.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-zesho-susan-oconnell/zen-practice-is-difficult-and-dangerous_b_973769.html
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Comments
-- Quote from article.
...And selflessness as well, I imagine.
Makes me want to shout, "Amen!", but that's my little country church upbringing.
I would love to have a discussion with her, because I'd point out that the problem is, most people don't want to be awakened. What they want is for their desires to be satisfied. They want to be satisfied all the time and that's not the same as letting go of our cravings.
The word I like to use is transformation, and that it requires diving into the deep end of Buddhism and coming out transformed. Some people are happy splashing around in the shallow end and that's OK. Zen will help you balance your mind and sort out your problems. But, whether it's called the "Clear Mind" of Kwan Um or the "Satori" of Rinzai, it's about transformation, not feeling better about yourself.
And I won't call it dangerous, but say that there is a price. Illusions are there to provide comfort, after all. To awaken is to give up dreaming. To comprehend emptiness is to see the world with a different set of eyes and view your own life and behavior without excuses.
So a hearty "Amen!" again!
It is about Bonsai and Haiku.
It is about having a calm mind, a beautiful body, staying healthy and having success; all on account of these lovely meditation-periods at the lake.
There’s nothing wrong in it but it is shallow.
In real life meditation hurts sometimes.
In real life our “transformations” aren’t always painless.
You could call that danger, I suppose.
“If you use your routine mind to produce routine views, you will never be able to enter the Tathagata’s great ocean of peaceful extinction.” It says.
You could call that difficult, I suppose.
As the old saying goes "Bad men do bad things, but it takes religion to make good men do bad things".
Any religion which encourages the believer to question, to take responsibility, to consider the wisdom of their actions, and emphasises compassion is unlikely to produce fanatics. Most of Buddhism (including Zen) is in this category, as are sects of Christianity, Islam and other religions.
However, it is not the gentle, moderates who cause so much havoc in the world today, but the extremists. Even here in UK, we have our share of fundamentalists (Christian and Muslim), sticking their ideological oars in government and the state. As a gay person, it makes me particularly nervous: such people are invariably homophobic and nasty with it.
If you meant my comment about Zen terrorists, that was a joke, an oxymoron (two words which don't fit together, like 'military intelligence').
I don't think so
Zen is difficult in the sense that it's a discipline, and discipline is difficult for people. The article didn't seem at all clear on where the dangerous part was, except for the supposed loss of sense of self. But this is open to interpretation. According to Stephen Batchelor, the goal isn't to completely lose one's sense of self. You need a sense of self to function in the world. The idea is to lose a fixed, static sense of self, to eliminate a fixed self-image and realize that you can always grow, change and reinvent yourself. Also, of course, the goal is to acquire humility for those who don't already have it, i.e. lose an overblown sense of self or self-importance.
But to the larger point, people get caught up in semantics. Quite frankly, it's impossible to "lose your sense of self" unless you have brain trauma or a tragic mental condition like severe schizophrenia. You are who you are. Your sense of self is the skandhas in action, the memories and habits and form and etc. You can change them to some extent with effort and time, but you can't lose your self any more than you can lose track of your body, because when you look in a mirror, there you are.
Oh, I've seen people and know the Zen satori is a transforming experience where, for want of a better way of saying it, the sense of self drops away. But eventually you get hungry, you have to take a crap, you realize you're cold, or something equally mundane that reminds you that there is a person standing or sitting there being "one with the universe". You might realize your self is one with the trees, but your self needs to eat, not suck up sunlight to live.