Oakville Zen Meditation
Enlightenment: Dialogue between a student and teacher. This is Dharma lecture #600
Student: “What is Enlightenment?” Teacher: “Before Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
After Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” said Zen Master Pang 8th century.
This is a famous Zen saying often used as a koan given to Zen sudents to be solved.
What does that mean? If nothing changes, what's the point in searching for Awakening ?
Why does Zen make a promise, and then break it? is asking the student.
I will reply: “Zen practice does not promise anything, a different world full of good stuff, stress-free, happiness, ongoing success, control, and permanent serenity.”
Instead, after Enlightenment /Awakening the wood remains the wood, water remains water, day-today life remains as it is with its ups and downs, glooms and dooms, stress, excitement, and fun.
It means that change during Awakening is not coming from the “outside world” but from the inside, that is coming from the person chopping the wood, and carrying the water.
What is Awakening?
Being Awakened is to experience the genuine, factual contents of our surrounding realities in the present moment. Realities such as our body, things, people, events, thoughts / feelings are expressed clearly, concretely, pragmatically as they are and not as we want them to be. Our mind becomes a mirror reflecting the outside world as it is. In other words we move away from the permanent mind-made dreaming state that is from a “day sleep walker” to an Awakened one which means a Buddha. In fact,“achieving” Awakening means that you find yourself where you have already been since Awakening exists already in all of us.
Awakening is the practice of waking up. Waking up is the practice of Zen.
Research on PTSD and N.D.E. shows something similar. After their trauma the subjects describe that their ordinary life feels saturated with meanings that they did not perceive or did not exist before.
Though their day-to-day lives haven't changed, their eyes and mind have.
What we did perceive as routine, boring, not too exciting or exciting, in other words ordinary, becomes extraordinary.
Becoming mindful: the Zen foundation in discovering our inside awakening state .
There is no Awakening w/o being mindful.
Being mindful is to be aware vividly in a non-judgmental non-analytic way, of our body, what we do, our thoughts/ feelings, people, events, and life in general including things that you usually have almost totally ignored before. I.e. You become mindful to what your hands are doing, what your inner voice is telling you all the time, the fresh air you breathe, the taste of an orange, the sound of the wind, the color of a tulip, the face of the person across from you at dinner or in the street, the sound of the rain, the hot water on your skin, the talk from others, and so on…
Nothing has changed outside, but the inside did, that is the frequency and quality of your mindfulness-based awareness. This is why and how we are practicing meditation.
As consequence, we look at things differently with an open non-conceptual mind:
Free from our frozen mind-set, and our constant labelling, we experience reality as it is, such as for example:
1 Nothing is permanent, 2 We do not control anything, 3 Thoughts exist but their contents are often fictional. 4 Uncontrolled attachments such as desire, aversion, illusion/delusion are the main sources
of suffering. 5 No living being exists as a separate, islolated, independant self-sustained entity.
6 Interconnectiveness is the web of life. 7 The present moment is the only existing spacetime.
We learn to accept the non-acceptable, to control our clinging, aversion,deceptive illusions / delusions, and to appreciate being alive every morning,
In fact, with Zen practice, what we perceive as “ordinary” becomes extraordinary.
Here is a very short list of suggested readings. You do not need more.
1-On Buddhism: Buddhism for dummies. Excellent book indeed.
2- On Zen & Zen philosophy / practice:
3- On Zen meditation:
4- On Mindfulness:
5- How meditation works: medical review:
merican1114-38.html?WT.ec_id=SCIENTIFICAMERICAN-201411.
A short but excellent review. But we still don’t know how exactly how meditation works.
6- Web sites:
They are many and most of them pretty bad if not dangerous.
7- Youtube:
A wonderful description of Zen philosophy, a must listen many times.
There are many others references. Please contact me.
