Zazen Meditation

Day 155 / 365

Most of you would have heard of the word ‘Zen’. People not familiar with the concept might relate it to happiness, calmness, or a state of nirvana. I had been reading up on Zen and Buddhism lately. One interesting thing I learned is the origins of the word ‘Zen’. When Buddhism originated in India, Zen used to be ‘Dhyana’. As it moved to China, it gradually transformed into ‘Zen’.

To understand Zen one would have to understand a lot of concepts like mindfulness, non-duality, no-thing and what not. But you can start and practice it through meditation. One such form of meditation is Zazen or seated meditation.

Zazen meditation involves sitting in a particular posture and clearing your mind of the clutter that thoughts cause. But the approach is slightly different. Rather than forcing thoughts out of your mind, you have to train yourself to mentally step aside and let the thoughts die off themselves.

The thing to keep in mind is that you should not practice with the aim of getting something or achieving a state of enlightenment. Instead, the practice, the meditation in itself should be the reward.

Once you have been able to get good at just sitting there for extended periods without getting restless, you can move on to using that time to focussing on Zen Koans, which are small stories or ideas that require a lot of introspection to understand.

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — Trepanning