The Right Understanding of Zen

You are all on your way to discover an appropriate way of life, where there would be minimum disappointments and worries right?



So I say, even If you have no experience of what is that appropriate way or that glimpse of enlightenment. It is enough for you if you sit in the proper way and if you take care of the breathing. That is enough. But, you need to take care of two preliminary requisites. One is the right attitude.The other is the right understanding.


The right understanding is taking care of the ordinary day to day life you know which is our very practice. When you sit in Zazen, that is Zen meditation you will be relieved from your racing racing thoughts. So without that thought structure you are sitting there. Now you are a free, calm and quie living, breathing in the form of a human being. You may call it a glimpse of enlightenment. Call whatever you want, but we call it just practice. Our practice is not just sitting meditation it is the activity, the work of the whole day. We just concentrate on the activity we do in each moment. Our life sails moment by moment. So, you can say where there is this practice, there is enlightenment. That is it.


Mark it; where there is practice …there is enlightenment.


For us, enlightenment and practice are one and the same. Two sides of the same coin. One is Contained in the other. So, the way itself is the goal. We don’t have a separate goal. We don’t practice in order to attain enlightenment someday. The path to enlightenment is path itself. Be in the path that will take care of the rest of the things. This is called true understanding. That is why, instead of having an object of worship and aim to get blessings of the guru, instead of reading a lot or listening to spiritual lectures and trying the whole life to grasp the essence of the sacred texts, instead of all that we just concentrate on the activities of everyday life. All activities so, we put our full mind, intense attention and do the work on hand. That is all. That is all our practice. For example, we don’t say we need to prepare food for our children. No preparation for something. It is boiling milk, cutting vegetables, bringing water and cooking rice. The final aim, food for children, automatically meets us. If you walk on the road leading to the town, you will reach the town. So it is the way, the practice itself. The practice itself is enlightenment. You will experience it. You can’t talk about it. You can’t say it using pen and paper and words and a language. But, our inmost nature wants some media to express itself, so we structure our retreat through activities in meditation hall and kitchen, dining hall and fields and garden. So, also we need some rules, some discipline, some caution to resume the pure inner essence. That is all. Nothing special.


Now turn to the Other part of this story. We are giving the impression that the innermost essence is pure, and the outer mind and its thoughts are impure,, and a nuisance all the time. So, mind is kept at a distance. Is that correct? Is our mind made up of a different and impure substance? Is Our thoughts always disturbing us?


Try to think with me. To understand the truth of this you look at this anology of water in the sea. There is water on the surface and water at the depth. Water in the depth is calm and quiet. On the surface there are waves. There could be tsunami. But, the nature of water is always calm, pure and clear,,whether it is on the surface or in the depth. On the surface, there are winds. These winds cause the surface disturbance. If there is no wind, then the surface water is also calm like the deep water. Mind is also like this. You have eyes and ears and so on, you see. They grasp the disturbances of the world and the mind gets polluted. Otherwise, the mind is also made up of same substance as the inner awareness.


So, this is right understanding, so you need some discipline in the practice. It is to minimize the disturbance for the mind and to keep it pure, practice will take care of this.


That is right understanding!

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