Zen and Meditation

I recently started meditating again. And a funny thing popped into my head when I was meditating this morning: that I should blog about the topic.

I’m a big fan of meditation, or at least eastern Zen Buddhist meditation. Of course there are lots of different styles and philosophies of meditation. But the eastern philosophy seems to be the most meaningful and fulfilling for me. 

I became interested in meditation around 8 years ago. I started reading lots of philosophy books which eventually lead to some considerable self reflection on who I was and the meaning of my life. Now, I should say that I’m not going to get all religious and gooey here or try to convert anyone to anything. I’ll simply try to share my experience.

If we fast forward through time from when I started thinking about who I was up to around 2004 when I found a Zen meditation book called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki (the link above is a FREE pdf! Hooray!). I wanted to learn what meditation really was and how to do it, yet I couldn’t find a single person who could tell me or guide me on this journey. Later I discovered that meditation can really be whatever you want it to be. But my meditation needed to be something Zen.

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is a surprisingly simple, unassuming little book (I believe the pdf is around 70 pages). Yet the text is full of fantastic little insights and instruction on exactly what to do – something I was hungry for and needed. There aren’t necessarily any wise sayings in the book. It’s definitely not the I Ching or Confucius. It’s simply a how-to-meditate book written by a Buddhist Monk who was trained by other monks.

The story goes that the Zen Master and Teacher Shunryu Suzuki came to the west coast of the United States around 50 year ago. At some point he began teaching the Zen Philosophy to willing students in the San Francisco area. Eventually some of his students got together and decided to record his teachings, compiling them into a small book of discussions on Zen Meditiation.

What I like about the book is how you are encouraged to savor every word in the book, instead of scanning through quickly for content like one reads a 800 paperback spy novel. Each word has meaning and is a well thought out idea or concept. For example, there is discussion in the beginning chapters of the book about breathing and concentration, two important elements of Zen Meditation. What is discussed is simple, almost overly simple, yet it is the basis for your meditation and although it is simple, it is also important. In general, I think we westerners tend to over complicate tasks frequently and this is a nice departure from our daily complicated lives.

Another thing I like is that you can read the book over again and get new information that you might have missed before, or see something on a different level. Honestly, I have been reading the book for years (mostly the 1^st few chapters over and over) and I’ve yet to finish it, which I find funny since it is such a short book.

At any rate, it is a valuable book and I highly recommend it to anyone considering meditation – even meditation in another philosophy or culture.