Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy First published Wed Jun 28, 2006; substantive revision Fri Oct 8, 2010 Zen aims at a perfection of personhood. To this end, sitting meditation called ¡°za-zen¡± is employed as a foundational method of pr¨¡xis across the different schools of this Buddha-Way, through which the Zen practitioner attempts to embody non-discriminatory wisdom vis-¨¤-vis the meditational experience known as ¡°satori¡± (enlightenment).
A process of discovering wisdom culminates in the experiential dimension in which the equality of thing-events is apprehended in discerning them. The most distinguishing feature of this school of the Buddha-Way is seen in its contention that wisdom, accompanied by compassion, is expressed in the everyday ¡°life-world¡± when associating with one's self, people, and nature. The everyday ¡°life-world¡± for most people is an evanescent transforming stage in which living is consumed, philosophically speaking, by an either-or, ego-logical, dualistic paradigm of thinking with its attendant psychological states such as stress and anxiety. Zen demands an overcoming of this paradigm by practically achieving an holistic perspective in cognition, so that the Zen practitioner can celebrate, with a stillness of mind, a life of tending toward the concrete thing-events of everyday life and nature. For this reason, the Zen practitioner is required to embody freedom expressive of the original human nature. Generally speaking, Zen cherishes simplicity and straightforwardness in grasping reality and acting on it ¡°here and now,¡± for it believes that a thing-event that is immediately presencing before one's eyes or under one's foot is no other than an expression of suchness, i.e., it is such that it is showing its primordial mode of being. It also understands a specificity of thing-event to be a recapitulation of the whole; parts and the whole are to be lived in an inseparable relationship through an exercise of nondiscriminatory wisdom, without prioritizing the visible over the invisible, the explicit over the implicit, and vice versa. As such, Zen maintains a stance of ¡°not one¡± and ¡°not two,¡± i.e., ¡°positionless position,¡± where ¡°not two¡± signals a negation of the stance that divides the whole into two parts, i.e., dualism, while ¡°not one¡± designates a negation of this stance when the Zen practitioner dwells in the whole as one, while suspending judgment in meditation, i.e., non-dualism. Free, bilateral movement between ¡°not one¡± and ¡°not two¡± characterizes Zen's achievement of a personhood with a third perspective that cannot, however, be confined to either dualism or non-dualism (i.e., neither ¡°not one¡± nor ¡°not two¡±). " http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-zen/ <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-zen/> --- In [email protected], siska_cen@... wrote: > > Hi Ed, > > That is true, if non-dualism is an end point for us to arrive to :-) > > siska
