What Is Zen?
by Mel
Ash
Who are we really? What is really the meaning of Life? How can we
attain lasting happiness in the face of our seemingly endless troubles? These
questions are basic to our lives, and it is from these questions that the practice
of Zen has its birth.
Zen can be the compassionate scalpel that removes the
layers of accrued opinions, beliefs, and frozen expectations that stand between
us and true experience. Zen shows us that what we mistakenly call ourselves, our
personal identity, is really no more than a mask over our true selves and natures.
Beliefs, opinions, prejudices, educational and cultural training, our family backgrounds:
All these are merely accidental factors, if you will. They are necessary tools
for survival and integration into the larger society, but they are not really
who you are.
Without falling back on convenient definitions of job, religion,
sex and so on, who and what are we? If you lose your job, will you lose yourself?
If you convert to another religion, do you substantially change? It may seem so
if you are overly attached to these limiting definitions.
Despite all these
changes, however, something remains the same. What and where is the thing upon
which we can stand firm? If the outside is so unstable and prone to change, then
it would make sense to look within-to ourselves. But what are we on the inside?
What in the world are we?
Zen can help us answer these questions, although
Zen itself is not an answer. Zen is, if anything, the biggest question of all.
It is the question that becomes a wedge in the cracked shell of our true self,
prying us open to a meaning and truth that will have relevance to ourselves alone.
It is a dance and a tug-of-war with ourselves. It demands no belief in anything,
and instead insists on a great doubt concerning everything we had heretofore taken
for granted. While belief is not a requirement, faith most certainly is.
Faith
is the unspoken, nameless and formless yearning for completion and wholeness.
Alone and unaided, it can pull us to union with our God or true self like a great
free-floating balloon. Belief is the anchor that keeps our faith from ever ascending
and testing its limits. Belief is the limiting and inhibiting of faith. Zen points
out to us the area of our lives where our faith in our selves has been silenced
by the rigidity of belief. Once pointed out, we are freed to ride our faith to
heights unimagined and certainly not permitted by the jealous jailer called belief.
In
Zen practice, the process of identify ing and reducing our attachments to our
own beliefs, ideas and opinions is sometimes called "putting them down."
Just as we would put down a load that has gotten too heavy for us, so too can
we put down our heavy load of self, which we identify with our per sonal situations,
ideas and beliefs.
Zen is simply nothing more than paying attention to your
life as it unfolds in this moment and in this world. The mindful, non judgmental
perception of this process is the action of your true, original self, which exists
before thinking, opinions, and beliefs arise and seek to name and divide experience.
By becoming mindful of our original nature, we are able to lessen the grip of
the denial that separates us from true experience. As we become more spontaneous
and intuitive in our relationships with ourselves, others and the world, the world
and our deepest selves start to act as one, and we come to realize that there's
never been a problem except in our thinking.
Zen is the ultimate and original
recovery program. It exposes our denial of true self and shows us how we've suffered
because of our diseases of attachment, judgment and division. It suggests a program
for recovering our original nature and teaches steps we can take immediately.
It shows us how all our other diseases and discontents flow from our fundamental
denial of unity with each other and the universe. Zen is there when you swerve
out of the way of a speeding car without thinking. It is there when you cry at
a movie, feeling deeply the suffering of another. It is there in the unconscious
grace of your walk, the elegant flow of your thoughts, and the automatic breathing
that keeps you alive. No, Zen never forgets about you. It is you who have forgotten
about Zen. It is you who takes this moment for granted and believes that you are
separate from all you survey, alone and unique in your suffering. It is you who
search high and low for meaning, contentment, satisfaction or deliverance. To
try to fill your emptiness with meaning from outside yourself is like pouring
water into the ocean to make it wet.
The practice of Zen is the alarm clock
that wakes us up to our lives and enables us to stop sleepwalking through reality.
It is the friendly map that says: "Right here is the place. You have always
been here. Where else is there?" It is the calendar that says: "Right
now is the time. Who could want another?" Zen practice identifies the liars
and thieves in the temples of our hearts and casts them out so that we may live
as we are meant to live: whole, fearless, and rejoined with that for which we
so desperately long.