last highlighted date: 2025-01-01
Highlights
- The most distinguishing feature of this school of the Buddha-Way is its contention that wisdom, accompanied by compassion, is expressed in the everyday lifeworld when associating with one’s self, other people, and nature
- Zen demands an overcoming of this paradigm in practice by achieving a holistic and nondualistic perspective in cognition.
- By contrast, the everyday lifeworld for most people is an evanescent transforming state in which living is consumed, philosophically speaking, by an either-or, ego-logical, dualistic paradigm of thinking with its attendant psychological states such as stress and anxiety
- 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
- Meditation was picked as the name for this school because the historical Buddha achieved enlightenment (nirvāna) through the practice of meditation