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Living Two Traditions: An interview with Gil Fronsdal
Invincible_summer
Heavy Metal DhammaWe(s)t coast, Canada Veteran
Link here.
For those of you who may not know, Gil Fronsdal is a teacher at the Insight Meditation Centre in Redwood City, California. He is also an ordained in the Soto Zen tradition.
I think this interview is interesting because many of us who are new (or even not-so-new!) to Buddhism often find it hard to choose a tradition, or balance traditions. Perhaps this will provide some insight (pun very much intended) into how one can carry that out.
An excerpt (emphasis mine):
For those of you who may not know, Gil Fronsdal is a teacher at the Insight Meditation Centre in Redwood City, California. He is also an ordained in the Soto Zen tradition.
I think this interview is interesting because many of us who are new (or even not-so-new!) to Buddhism often find it hard to choose a tradition, or balance traditions. Perhaps this will provide some insight (pun very much intended) into how one can carry that out.
An excerpt (emphasis mine):
I struggled a fair amount, trying to reconcile goal-less Zen practice—in which practice and realization are thought to occur together - with the goal-oriented Theravada tradition, in which you work toward later realization. Eventually I came to understand that these approaches not only complemented each other but could be seen as two sides of the same coin. Soto Zen taught me to emphasize the purity of the moment-to-moment process of sitting in meditation; Vipassana taught me how that process opens to greater freedom even when we don’t fixate on freedom as a goal. My Vipassana practice taught me that the radical acceptance of myself and of things-as-they-are that I learned in Zen included an innate, natural impulse toward liberation. I didn’t have to be goal-oriented as much as I needed to let go of any obstacles to this innate impulse...
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