Barbelith Underground > Temple > To Zen Or Not To Zen

Would you say that Zen [...]can work whilst living within modern society

Yes, otherwise it wouldn't be zen.

While the seclusion and calm of a monastic setting might give one an easier insight, there is no reason this insight cannot be reached in everyday life. Obviously, you need to set aside a little time each day to meditation, but that's no big fuss.

As the sole ingredient of zen pie is awareness, you can do zen anywhere. There is no need to create a physical barrier between oneself and the 'real world' - it's all the same stuff at the end of the day.

The idea of attaining freedom and enlightenment through overcoming the material seems to be a kind of misinterpretation made throughout the years. In the teachings of zen, one attains enlightenment through non-attatchment to the world. i.e. the less one self-identifies with one's material self, one's desires etc, the more one realises oneself as pure consciousness, or something.

Through time (and maybe with some ill-play by teh priests) this simple non-attatchment ('oh, my hand is there, it's not all that i am, it seems to be getting along fine as itself, so i don't need to 'attatch'') becomes resitance ('I am not my hand'), becomes overcoming ('The hand is a fake!/The hand is evil!').

I'm not sure how it happens, but it seems a bit silly and isn't really what 'zen is saying' (='what i understand zen to be about'). If we look at it in terms of zen mytheology - we are all the one/many same [something]. Always have been, always will be. So is everything else. Enlightenment comes when we become aware of this/when the singular consciousness becomes conscious of its part as the [something]/when the drop becomes part of the ocean/etc.

So if we are already everything and everything is us, there is no point to 'overcoming'. There's not even any chance of 'overcoming - how could one 'overcome' existence? To understand oneself as part and equal of [something] is to understand onself as part and equal of everything - including the material. The material and the spiritual are all equal, with no hierarchy (NB the yin-yang symbol - a taoist symbol which expresses this point very well). A being could be wholy spiritual without an ounce of mud, but could be just as enlightened as... something which isn't very enlightened...

Or, more simply:

Zen isn't overcoming. Zen is acceptance.

As for i did X\Y for ten years, it did do some stuff for me but I stopped in the end: There are plenty of people who do the same thing in a temple or an ashram. There are also plenty of people who say 'i did X/Y for ten years and now i am teh superenlightened guru', when they aren't. First rule is to trust only your own practice.

I wonder why prostitution isn't even given the slightest recognition as sacred in Buddhist doctrine, or any other.

I suppose it works in the same way that Jesus taught love and tolerance, yet many churches preach division and judjment. People are often all too willing to use their religion to justify their predjudices, rather than let their religion define their attitudes. Much of the time it seems the Religion is not the Teaching.