Zen Buddhism!

Based on what I have found, stereotype-wise, Americans have tons of misconceptions about Buddhism.  The funny thing is, most of them seem to come from extremist ideas that are akin to Jainism.  If I were asked to describe Buddhists, before I knew anything about it, I would have most likely said that they meditate all the time and don’t kill things.  In my mind, Buddhism was all about clearing your mind, making it completely blank, having no thoughts, becoming a void…etc.  These stereotypical ideas are one of the reasons I never even tried to understand Buddhism; it seemed like an impossible religion.  There was absolutely no way that someone could sit for hours and not have ONE thought in their head, and if they said they could they were lying.  Brad Warner puts this stereotype to rest when he discusses his week-long sesshin at Great Sky in chapters twenty thru twenty-three.

I don’t think this stereotype is positive or negative.  It is more like a twisted generalization of the Buddhist practice of meditation, or in Warner’s case, zazen.   This generalization stems from a lack of accurate knowledge, and a gain of inaccurate knowledge on Buddhist practices.  Americans tend to have high expectations about meditation because I believe that they think once meditation is “mastered”, enlightenment can be achieved.  In the beginning of his book Warner talks about people believing in a get-enlightenment-quick option.  Someone will come to one zazen session, or even a week of zazen sessions, and get frustrated because they are not enlightened yet. 

In chapter 20 Warner gives us a teaching from Dogen on what should be accomplished in zazen: “think the thought of not thinking.”  Then through the next three chapters he shows us his difficulty with following this rule in the beginning, to finally get some decent zazen practice in the end.  Like most of us, during Warner’s retreat he just had too many thoughts buzzing around in his head.  I like when he talks about having a problem and sitting with it rather than over-thinking and over-analyzing it.  It explains how we as human beings wrestle with our tangled up problems in our minds rather than letting them untangle themselves.  Warner says that “…the solution to any problem is always here.  We just cover it over with thought.”   So zazen is almost like sitting with our thoughts, not really thinking about them, but letting them straighten out to reveal the solution underneath.