Oakville Zen Meditation
What is the most important Zen teaching ?
If you were asking Zen teachers to name the single most important teaching of Zen, they may remain silent, pour a cup of tea until it overflows, point at the floor, laugh, walk away, dance …whatever crazy things they may decide to do. It is not an evasion to your question. On the contrary, they point directly to the core core of Zen practice:
The single most important teaching of Zen is to experience directly the concrete, factual reality of the present moment, reality totally free from our intellectual and emotional clutters.
All these teachers reply in the same way and indirectly: being aware of the reality of the moment.
In other words: bringing our mind where our body is and what it is doing right now through conscious awareness. See pic below.
Mindfulness-based meditation is the perfect example of how to experience this concrete reality, and this is why it is the #1 pillar of Zen’s practice.
All the rest of Zen teaching is the consequence of this fundamental axiom.
Zen is not a system of beliefs or doctrines to be memorized, but an immediate insight into your true nature here and now; not from the past, not into the future.
This central realization is traditionally summarized in four famous lines attributed to Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen (Chan) Buddhism in China:
1 Zen is a special transmission outside the scriptures: Zen points directly to reality, bypassing standard religious texts and doctrines.
2 Not founded upon words and letters: Truth cannot be captured or contained by language, books, or intellectual study.
3 Directly pointing to the human mind: Practice looks straight at your own immediate, conscious experience rather than intellectual concepts.
4 Seeing into one's true nature and attaining Awakening.
Awakening happens the moment you realize your own original Nature disconnected from your own non-cognitive non ego-driven, daydreaming mind.
Few basic consequences related to these 4 lines:
Our intellect analyzes, categorizes, and separates ourselves from surrounding relaity - that is object vs. subject- Awareness of the moment is blending them.
Practice is simply dropping the mental clutter obscuring it. To be awake is moving away from our delusional almost constant daydreaming.
Experiencing each moment free from concept, opinion, judgment, meeting reality as it is.
