Quote Originally Posted by Ignatius
Let me clarify what I mean by laziness. I mean the kind of person who simply declares his or her self to be a Buddhist simply because they imagine it to be a cool thing to be into. ".
I agree, as i said earlier. But that kind of person can be found in every religion. I know born again christians who are exactly the same, and it's the case with every religion from Shinto to Catholicism.


".[/QUOTE]The very act of meditating in an attempt to reach enlightenment is going against the philosophy of Buddhism.

Not really true, I think most other traditions of Buddhism would disagree with you. I do Dzogchen for example, and some of our basic methods are similiar to Zen. We could say that for the highest practitioners in both traditions that no-mind and non-doing are the only ways to reach enlightenment, but that would be to say that all the other 84,000 methods that Buddha cited as 'expedient means' are invalid. Some ways are faster, some slower, that's all. If Buddha hadn't thought that meditation was necessary for *some* then he wouldn't have taught it at all.

We could say that because in Dzogchen we don't meditate in the traditional sense, that it's pointless to even consider meditating and it's beneath us. But meditation in terms of Mahayan Shamatha is a tool for clearing the mind, that's all. It's a preparation for higher practises, not an end in itself. If your mind is already perfectly clear and you're able to perform higher practises without it then fine, it's unnecessary. But that isn't the case for everyone, some people need those basic tools to be in place.

No one way is better than another, the various methods are there to suit the differing minds of each practitioner. Not everyone can just begin with no-mind, so meditation practise has to be done. That it isn't the fastest or best approach is irrelevant until you arrive at a certain point in understanding and begin to work with View/non-View rather than meditation.

".[/QUOTE] It shouldn't be a task, you shouldn't need to sit down and actively prepare yourself for enlightenment, it should arrive naturally. That is the way of Zen. ".[/QUOTE]

Precisely,that's Zen. Not eveyone does Zen, or agrees with its methods. If there was no need to actively prepare for enlightenment then there would be no way of Zen either, there to teach people how to actively NOT prepare for enlightenment. The 'non-preparation', understanding how to be in order for it to arise naturally, still has to be learned, still practised. What you and I do is far from traditional meditation, but whether we call what we do 'meditating' or not is purely semantics. I could say that I 'contemplate', not meditate, but even that term is redundant.

What form of Zen do you practise BTW, what Lineage?

MelT