Posts Tagged ‘Zen’

What you need:

• an open space or a closed space immersed in silence and tranquility
• a small rigid pillow or a zafu (a circular rigid pillow right for meditation), alternatively a a straight-backed chair
  

  Zafu (座蒲 in Japanese or 蒲团 in Chinese)

• comfortable clothing and if possible in natural fibers
• take off your shoes and (if not too cold) socks

At this point you can start with Increased Zazen Meditation:
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Zen Garden Wallpaper Download

Well versed in the Buddha way,
I go the non-Way
Without abandoning my
Ordinary person’s affairs.

The conditioned and
Name-and-form,
All are flowers in the sky.

Nameless and formless,
I leave birth-and-death.

Layman P’ang (740-808)

Zen Tao Stones in Balance Peace Wallpaper Download

“All created things perish”
He who knows and sees this becomes
passive in pain; this is the way to purity.

Download Zen Flower Wallpaper Meditation Relax

A good teacher is better than the most sacred books.
Books contain words, and Chan (the Zen) cannot be transmitted by mere words.

Zen Bamboo Relax Wallpaper

Those who see worldly life as an obstacle to Dharma
see no Dharma in everyday actions.
They have not yet discovered that
there are no everyday actions outside of Dharma.

Dogen

Note: Dharma is the Cosmic Law

Click here to DOWNLOAD the Zen Bamboo Wallpaper!

A beautiful girl in the village was pregnant. Her angry parents demanded to know who was the father. At first resistant to confess, the anxious and embarrassed girl finally pointed to Hakuin, the Zen master whom everyone previously revered for living such a pure life. When the outraged parents confronted Hakuin with their daughter’s accusation, he simply replied “Is that so?”

When the child was born, the parents brought it to the Hakuin, who now was viewed as a pariah by the whole village. They demanded that he take care of the child since it was his responsibility. “Is that so?” Hakuin said calmly as he accepted the child.

For many months he took very good care of the child until the daughter could no longer withstand the lie she had told. She confessed that the real father was a young man in the village whom she had tried to protect. The parents immediately went to Hakuin to see if he would return the baby. With profuse apologies they explained what had happened. “Is that so?” Hakuin said as he handed them the child.

With the first step i feel compassion for all living things.

Moving the second step i don’t cause more harm or damage to the universe.

Performing the third step i am free from the three poisons of the mind: illusion, desire and anger.

On the fourth step i begin to better discern what is truly right and what is really wrong.

The fifth step will teach me that every dichotomy is false and empty. Good and evil, the self and the outside world, the white and black, are all abstractions of the mind.

Moving the sixth step I forget greed and envy and i behave always with generosity, sense of justice and positive creativity.

With the seventh step i forget selfishness, pride and false humility to act with honor and true perennial generosity.

The eighth step will teach me that happiness is the maintenance of a dynamic equilibrium, with loving detachment.

The ninth step will teach me to fight against personal pain with non-attachment and to alleviate the suffering of others with a deep sincere and disinterested love.

With the tenth step I return to the whole, to revive again on the road to perfection, a path with no beginning and no end.
So i start to walk another path made of ten steps, always improving, to reach here, in the eternal everchanging present, the enlightment.

(Free adaptation of the “Vote of the 10 steps” of the followers of Ch’an Tao Chia)

Many scientist have explored the similarities between physics and oriental philosophies.
Fritjof Capra has written an interesting book: The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism.

One of the main ideas proposed by this book is about the so called “Holographic paradigm”.

The holographic paradigm is a theory based on the work of David Bohm and Karl Pribram and extrapolated from two ideas:

• That the universe is in some sense a holographic structure, proposed by David Bohm
• That consciousness is dependent on holographic structure, proposed by Karl Pribram

This paradigm posits that theories using holographic structures may lead to a unified understanding of consciousness and the universe.

One of the main points of this paradigm is about memory. Memory, and so consciousness, is not stored in single pieces of this universe.
Many scientific experiments shows that memory patterns, as in DNA RNA, human and animal mind, chemical properties and reactions, physical laws, are similar to intersections of many wave fronts that permeates the whole.

So what we think about the world, in the sense of real world, is just an illusion. There is not solid thing, 3 dimensional space and time.
There is a whole constituted by infinite waves (or strings if you like) that are playing together, in dynamic series of movements in this ever changing eternal present.

So our body, our mind and our consciousness are reflections, images and holograms of the real world we can not experience directly.

This idea seems crazy and strange, we are living, made of and experiencing an illusory level of reality, but latest experiments in physics and the best candidates as theories of the whole are figuring this scenario.

Some author simplify this idea suggesting that we are living in something similar to Matrix (the result of universal computer), but the real world is a little bit more complicated. Tao and Zen, are suggesting, more wisely, that we are only part of the whole and patterns capable to see and understand themselves in the mirror.
Tao, in particular, says that the whole is the only interesting thing, a cup full of energy in eternal movement. Scientifically: an ocean of interacting waves/strings/branes from which emerges levels and levels of sub realms.
We are living in one of them and we can just imagine how big is the real whole.

Dino Olivieri