Click HERE Japanese Zen Buddhism
Zen is a way of living rather than a religion. It is not dualistic.
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
The most distinguishing feature of this school of the Buddha-Way is... that wisdom, accompanied by compassion, is expressed in the everyday lifeworld when associating with one’s self, other people, and nature.
"...the Zen practitioner can celebrate, with stillness of mind, a life directed toward the concrete thing-events of everyday life and 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 presencingbefore one’s eyes or under one’s foot is no other than an expression of suchness. In other words the thing-event is disclosing its primordial mode of being such that it is as it is. It also understands a specificity of the 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, or vice versa.
As such, Zen maintains a stance of “not one” and “not two,” that is “a positionless position,” where “not two” means negating the dualistic stance that divides the whole into two parts, while “not one” means negating the nondualistic stance occurring when the Zen practitioner dwells in the whole as one, while suspending judgment in meditation. The 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, neither “not one” nor “not two”.
It's taken me all these years to realize, that all I know about Zen Buddhism, I learned from my mother. She was 98% Japanese, I know that because my DNA is 49% Japanese. But that's not the point. The point is that she taught me about Zen without ever mentioning the word. Without lectures, dogma, or readings. She lived a life of Zen, and that's how I learned everything I know about Buddhism.
