…est la méditation assise : ZAZEN [ZA (assis); ZEN (méditation)]

C’est la posture pratiquée par le BOUDDHA.

Assis dans la posture correcte : jambes croisées, dos bien droit, concentré sur une respiration calme et profonde, l’esprit retrouve une vraie
tranquilité et s’éveille d’instant en instant, permettant ainsi d’observer notre vraie nature. Le flux des pensées incessantes et des ruminations mentales est interrompu par l’attention portée à la posture du corps et à la respiration.

Notre mission :

Permettre, à tous, la pratique de la méditation ZEN, source de paix de l’esprit et de meilleure compréhension entre les hommes, et plus particulièrement de transmettre la pratique et l’enseignement des maîtres ZEN de la lignée de Maître TAISEN DESHIMARU.

Um einmal darzustellen, wie sich Intelligenz durch Meditation manifestieren kann, habe ich mehrere Video Clips von Meistern gesammelt, deren Intelligenz relativ leicht wahrzunehmen ist. Heute geht es also nicht so sehr um die Worte, die in den Videos gesprochen werden, sondern es ist der Versuch, Intelligenz abzubilden.

Meher Baba (1894-1969)
Wortlose Intelligenz

Wir beginnen mit Meher Baba. Meher Baba kritisierte, dass Leute sich anschreien: „Je größer die Liebe, desto sanfter die Stimme.“ Letztlich brauche man gar keine Worte mehr. Deshalb schwieg er vom 10. Juli 1925 an die restlichen 44 Jahre seines Lebens. Um sich mitzuteilen, nutzte er fortan Buchstabentafeln und ab 1954 Handzeichen.
Interview mit Meher Baba, 1932
Avatar Meher Baba

Jiddhu Krishnamurti (1895-1986)
Intelligenz hat seine eigene Disziplin

“Die Wahrheit ist ein Land ohne vorgegebene Wege”, sagt Jiddhu Krishnamurti. Keine Methode, keine Religion, kein Lehrer könne zur Wahrheit führen. Jeder sei für seinen Weg selbst verantwortlich.
Krishnamurti über Intelligenz und Disziplin
Why don’t you change?

Georges Iwanowitsch Gurdjieff (1866-1949)
Harmonische Entwicklung des Menschens

Georges Iwanowitsch Gurdjieff spricht von einem Vierten Weg als Synthese und Weiterentwicklung der drei traditionellen Wege zur Evolution des Denkens (Yogi), des Fühlens (Mönch) und des Körpers (Fakir). Demnach verläuft der Vierte Weg im täglichen Leben – nicht etwa hinter Klostermauern oder im fernen Himalaya.
Tribute to Gurdjieff
The Forth Way – Fotos und Texte

Suzuki Shunryū Roshi (1905-1971)
“Dieser Kuchen ist köstlich”

Suzuki Shunryū Roshi soll auf seinem Totenbett nach einem Stück Kuchen als letzten Wunsch verlangt haben. Seine letzten Worte waren:”Mmmhhh, dieser Kuchen ist köstlich.** (Die letzten Worte eines Meisters sind traditionell die Zusammenfassung seiner Lehre.)
Sound and Noise

Taisen Deshimaru (1914-1982)
Einzig konzentriertes Sitzen

Taisen Deshimaru, japanischer Zen-Meister in der Sōtō-Linie, ließ sich in Paris nieder und versammelte in kurzer Zeit eine Schar Anhänger um sich, mit denen er sehr erfolgreich die Verbreitung des Zen-Buddhismus in Europa begann. Es entstanden zahlreiche neue Zen-Gruppen, die die Praxis des Zazen (Shikantaza: Einzig konzentriertes Sitzen) übten.
How to sit in Zazen
Mildtätige Schläge vom Meister

Osho (1931-1990)
Das Leben in allen seinen Facetten lieben und feiern

Osho sagt, jede wie auch immer geartete Tätigkeit kann dem inneren Wachstum dienen. Osho widerspricht sich oft selbst, bewusst, denn er will vermitteln, dass es nicht auf die Worte ankommt, sondern vielmehr darum geht, die Bindung an deren Bedeutung und Inhalte fallen zu lassen – wer die Wahrheit sucht, muss den Sprung ins Unbekannte wagen.
Selling Bliss
Anybody who gives you a belief system is your enemy

Und noch was zum Schluss:
Perfekte Meister gibt es zu jeder Zeit

Viel Spaß mit der Intelligenz des Herzens
wünscht

Samarpan
PS: Jemand mit Intelligenz in seinen Händen

Die Sekunden Meditation für mehr Wachheit im Alltag

Stille, heitere Artikel im Zen Shop

…miniature American flags for others!

It’s funny, if you try to compare how difficult to learn the various martial arts are, there’s no clear winner. I have my own views (Taiji is the best ever! A delicious martial art!) but they’re all pretty hard in their own right. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be worth much nor require discipline. The thing is, the uninformed public tends to gauge difficulty by how impressive something appears on the surface. For this reason I think Taijiquan has gotten a misleading reputation.

Taijiquan and other similar “internal” arts are difficult not just physically, but also in the aspect of listening and using mental awareness. They demand one get rid of muscular strength and learn a certain kind of coordination and intuition. One cannot become lazy and just put blatant physical force into the movements. The concepts are a little more subtle than just getting strong and pounding people.

Lots of people I’ve known will accept that Yoga or Tae Kwon Do or Shaolin kung fu is tough to do, just ‘coz it looks all acrobatic or elastic and spiffy. Taiji is rarely practiced fast, except when you get down to the sparring or weapons stuff. WHICH WE DO ALL THE TIME, geez. Even so, we don’t hop around all that much either. Which isn’t to say we can’t, particularly since a lot of people who practice this stuff with a serious teacher end up with a really serious rooting ability. It’s good for running around mountains or whatevas.

Another interesting thing about Taiji, is there are no visible results in your physique! Yeah yeah, we’ve all said it’s cause of taiji when we get a beer belly. But seriously, the more I do Taiji, although I get in better shape, it is absolutely not visibly noticeable to anyone — not even to me. Although my body becomes lighter and springier, and my movements more balanced and “full”, my muscle mass actually just melts away! See why you can’t attract the babes doing Taiji? You end up looking like an old Chinese man.

Based upon this, I suppose no one is surprised then that Taiji doesn’t attract the largest amount of MMA types. On top of that, to really kick ass with Taiji (having had no prior experience), it would take like 5-10 years with a good teacher. I feel like time with any typical Muay Thai teacher or whatevers, would yield “tougher” results or result in fighting ability more quickly (assuming you were already a young male in good physical shape, not the prerequisite for Taiji, if ya ask me). I just seriously doubt if those positive results from studying Muay Thai could last through one’s middle-aged career, or through illness or debilitating injury. Same with Tae Kwon Do, actually. I’ve met a couple of middle-aged guys who needed hip replacements from all their flying spinning jumps.

In fact, Deshimaru, a dude I’m always talking so big about, proves his ignorance on the subject in his otherwise pretty rockin’ Zen Way to the Martial Arts. See, Deshimaru fell into the same trap most people in popular culture have, in assuming the Taiji sponsored by the Communist Chinese government in the ’60s was a serious source of the art. The Chinese government did have some member of the Yang lineage create a watered down public Yang form for the people as a kind of nationalistic exercise, which has been spread under the guise of the 24-posture Yang form. But Taijiquan is an old-school lineage of gongfu and martial skill which goes back several centuries.

When people used to ask what kind of gongfu I study, I initially wouldn’t even say Taijiquan because it’s so annoying that everyone thinks it isn’t a deadly, soul-crushing dance with the devil. These days I usually just suck it up and tell people I do Taiji, ‘coz I don’t want the only people saying they do Taiji to be some pony-boys now, do I? There are a lot of those around: people who do Taiji for a couple of months and try push-hands a few times and think they have experience. But really, push-hands is (A) just an exercise and (B) very hard to do correctly without consistent practice for years. On the one hand you can’t have rules in push-hands because then what is the practical point of the exercise? On the other hand, without any rules it just becomes a stupid shoving match. So you stick to principles (not dogma).

Some people seem to think if they’re really peaceful and just practice push-hands and some form work they’ll magically get enlightened one day and be martial masters. I understand that people are afraid of or perturbed by martial arts, they don’t want to fight or hurt people (almost all Taiji teachers do not require that you learn to fight if you are opposed to the idea). It’s sick to hurt someone else. I have always thought that. We all say that, but I am serious. I started practicing martial arts because I really hated hurting people. In fact, I used to get bullied because I didn’t want to fight. But was that smart? Anyway, the point is, the highest level in the stuff is achieved by the martial masters. Sad but true. Not that anyone in particular has   cornered enlightenment or ultimate reality more than anyone else.

I was watching this crucial documentary the other night, called Le Chant Du Dragon about one of Taisen Deshimaru’s French dharma heirs, Stefane Kosen. It’s really good (and free for download); you should watch it. It made me recall and laugh at how I was once so eager to have crazy esoteric experiences. As one martial arts teacher said, “you are so eager to jump into so much esoteric bullshit!” What can I say? I’ve always been something of a chump.

It’s true, that a lot of people want mysterious or magical or mind-blowing spiritual experiences. Whether they want them in some sort of crazed bliss-ninny, yoga context or some deviant, sinister magickal context, the desire for the mind-blowing mystery is all the same (albeit with different “flavors” of energy). But isn’t it true that, once you hit the big kahuna and break down all the walls of illusion or whatever, nothing is mysterious for you? Isn’t that what happens when we use desire to get to the end of desire? There’s nothing left that is curious or weird or unexplainable. It’s all perfectly normal stuff.

So I think that’s why historically in Soto Zen it’s always said not to search after anything, how we just want to come to the normal human condition, how zazen itself is enlightenment, etc. It makes sense in the ultimate context. We only pursue the things that still retain an element of mystery to us. Once we’ve fully understood something we move on to other things. That’s (again) why the most interesting romantic mates for humans are always the ones we don’t know anything about. Often the more you know about something or someone, the less you care.

That strikes me as something of a difference between Soto Zen and say, Nyingma or whatever branch of Tibetan Buddhism. Soto Zen seems like it’s imploring its practitioners to look at the world from this ultimate sense, or it’s at least passing it down in that way. It’s written as if it is conveying a conventional sense of things, but the conventional sense as perceived by one with the “ultimate perspective”. This strikes me as different from most religious teachings, which are inherently condescending and write of ultimate reality in the most romantic and other-worldly ways possible.