What is zen meditation

The body should be upright and well-balanced, neither too tense or too relaxed. For zen meditation, the eyes are often kept open to help the yogi stay awake and alert. However, the eyes are only softly open with no focused gaze. Sometimes the yogi will face a wall to avoid distraction.

The hands are held in a mudra known as the cosmic mudra, with the left hand supported in the right and the tips of the thumbs touching. The breathing in zen meditation is usually through the nose with calm, slow breaths and an emphasis on the exhalation. The mind is then calmed through deep concentration on breathing and the body position. One method of learning zazen is to correct the posture first, then regulate the breath, then then mind, then integrate all the stages as into a holistic body-mind experience.

To help you bring attention to your doshas and to identify what your predominant dosha is, we created the following quiz. Also, it is significant to note that as the practitioner enters a deeper state of meditation, the interval between inhalation and exhalation is prolonged, i. These are mostly things of concern that have occupied the practitioner in the history of his or her life, or things the practitioner has consciously suppressed for various reasons.

Initially, the practitioner experiences recent desires, anxieties, concerns, ideas, and images that have surfaced in his or her daily life. A psychological reason that the practitioner experiences these various things is due in part to the fact the practitioner has lowered the level of conscious activity, by assuming the meditation posture, and doing the breathing exercise. This mechanism is the same as when one has a dream at night. When the level of consciousness is lowered, the suppressive power of ego-consciousness weakens, and consequently the autonomous activity of the unconscious begins to surface.

However, these desires, images and ideas are distractions insofar as meditation is concerned. This is because in meditation you must learn to focus your awareness on one thing. One must learn just to observe without getting involved in them.

That is, one must learn to dis-identify oneself with them. In the process of deepening meditation, one can roughly identify three distinct stages: the stage of concentration, the stage of meditation, and the stage of absorption.

In the stage of concentration, the practitioner concentrates, for example on the lower abdomen, establishing a dualistic relationship between the practitioner who is concentrating and the lower abdomen that is the focus of concentration. This dualistic relationship is broken gradually as the practitioner moves into the stage of meditation. The activity of the ego-consciousness is gradually lessened, and the barriers it sets up for itself are gradually removed.

There will be no separation or distancing between an object of the mind and the activity of the mind itself. As the practitioner repeats this process over a long period of time, he or she will come to experience a state in which no-thing appears. No-mind does not mean a mindless state. Nor does it mean that there is no mind. It means that there is no conscious activity of the mind that is associated with ego-consciousness in the everyday standpoint. In other word, no-mind is a free mind that is not delimited by ideas, desires, and images.

No-mind is a state of mind in which there is neither a superimposition of ideas nor a psychological projection.

That is, no-mind is a practical transcendence from the everyday mind, without departing from the everydayness of the world.

Since then, various Western philosophers have attempted to capture human nature with this goal in mind by using ego-consciousness as a starting point as well as a destination in philosophy. See Yuasa , — For this reason, Zen contends that physical nature and human nature must be sought in an experiential dimension practically trans-descending, and hence transcending, the standpoint of ego-consciousness.

As a result, paradoxes, contradictions, and even what appears to be utter nonsense abound in Zen literature. Therefore, we can say that Zen is an anti-philosophy in that it is not a systematization of knowledge built on the use of a discursive mode of reasoning anchored in the alleged certainty or transparency of ego-consciousness, one that follows an epistemological paradigm built on an ego-logical, either-or, dualistic mode of knowing.

This standpoint, as mentioned in the foregoing, relies on the discursive mode of reasoning to understand reality, while presupposing an ego-consciousness as the standard referential point. From this perspective for example, a distinction between the outer and inner worlds emerges, using a sensory perception as the point of reference. One of the salient characteristics of this standpoint is that the world appears to be dualistic in nature, that is to say, it recognizes two and by implication, many things to be real.

Epistemologically speaking, Zen observes that this renders opaque, or at best translucent, the experiential domains beyond the sensible world as well as ego-consciousness, both either taken naturalistically or by means of theoretical speculation.

The inability to go beyond these experiential domains occurs because ego-consciousness is physiologically rooted in the body and psychologically in the unconscious. This points to a philosophically important consequence. This logic thinks it reasonable to divide the whole into two parts when knowing or understanding reality. That is, when this logic is applied to the whole, it compels the user of this logic to choose, reasonably in the mind of the user, one part, while disregarding the other part s as irrelevant or meaningless.

It prioritizes one part at the expense of the other part s , while celebrating the exclusion. It champions one-sidedness in cognition and judgment as the supreme form of knowing and understanding reality. However, Zen thinks that this prioritization, this exclusion, violates a cardinal principle of knowing, for knowledge of anything demands an understanding of the whole. Either-or logic fails on this account. For example, if one maintains that the mind is real, one disregards the body as unreal, yielding an idealist position.

On the other hand, if one thinks the body is real, it disposes of the mind in the same way, favoring materialism as true and real, which is presupposed, for example, by natural science. Either position commits itself to reductionism. Here, questioning this practice and the consequences it entails, Zen instead speaks of mind-body oneness, an holistic perspective, as it abhors one-sidedness.

Zen finds that these two things impose on the epistemological subject a structuring that is framed dualistically and either-or ego-logically, as mentioned in the foregoing. Accordingly, this structuring unknowingly frames things to appear dualistically and either-or ego-logically to the epistemological subject, while extending the paradigm to itself for self-understanding as well as things other than itself in the same manner.

Consequently, the subject stands opposed either to the outer world e. Moreover, Zen notes that the subject cannot by definition become the object or vice versa, for they are distanced from each other either really or ideally. When one attempts to know her from the everyday standpoint, one relies on the language she speaks and her body language.

Here one cannot know her in toto , let alone the destiny of her life-history, because she is shielded from an observer by the spatial-temporal density of her being. Zen maintains that the situation created by assuming this epistemological paradigm is not ideal, or real, for that matter. An either-or logic ignores this interdependence, in part because it operates within a conceptual and linguistic space with the assumption that there is no temporal change. This assumption enables a thinker to establish the law of identity, namely that A remains the same with itself, or identical with itself.

With this recommendation, Zen maintains that mind and body, I and others, I and nature ought to be experienced as one by those who remain in the everyday standpoint. Otherwise, Zen fears that the practitioner will fall into one-sidedness, in which the knowledge claim ends up being partial, imbalanced, and even prejudiced. This is because Zen thinks the practitioner cannot achieve this negation simply by following either-or logic, or for that matter by following the intellectual process of reasoning, because both logic and reasoning intrinsically involve two things, for example, the thinker and the thought.

In other words, in the eyes of Zen, these methods lack consideration for the concreteness and immediacy of lived experience. This is in keeping with a general method of teaching in Buddhism, i.

This complication is further compounded by the differences in the personality of Zen masters. To properly respond to this question, Zen thinks it important to determine whether it is posed with a practical concern or a theoretical concern in mind. The difference allows a Zen master to determine the ground out of which this question is raised, for example, to determine if the inquirer is anchored in the everyday standpoint or in a meditational standpoint.

Why does Zen insist on this? In so doing, the monk relativizes Buddha-nature qua being, while contrasting and opposing it with non-being.

Buddha-nature is not something that the dog can have or not have ; Buddha-nature is not something contingent. Nor do I expect you to reply that the dog both has and does not have buddha-nature.

Nor do I expect you to reply that the dog neither has nor does not have buddha-nature. How do you respond to this? An appeal to discriminatory thinking based on the standpoint of [ego-]consciousness is of no use either. It is also unacceptable to appeal to bodily action, let alone to engage in a mere verbal exchange.

Do not swallow it where something is generated. This is, no doubt, an existential challenge to Zen practitioners, and so they make an all-out effort, staking life and death, because it guarantees them an embodiment of truth and freedom. In order to get an idea of this experience from a contemporary point-of-view, or from outside of Zen tradition, one may also consider out-of-body experiences.

It points to a practical transcendence from the everyday either-or, ego-logical, dualistic standpoint. In light of the outer-inner distinction Zen interprets the non-dualistic experience to mean that the distinction has been epistemologically collapsed, as it arises in such a way to respond to the dualistic perspective from which the outer and the inner worlds appeared.

Explore NY. Ananthaswamy A. Zen meditation allows greater access to subliminal messages. New Scientist. Reconstructing and deconstructing the self: cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice. Trends Cogn Sci Regul Ed.

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Benefits of Zen. Impact on the Brain. Access to the Unconscious. Drug Abuse Treatment. How to Learn It. Is It Right for You? Meditation for Stress Reduction.

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Related Articles. The premise of TM is that no concentrating, mind monitoring or conscious mindfulness is really required, which is why it is often viewed as the form of meditation that requires the least amount of mental effort 5. Already a Muse user?

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