This is my comment on the article see the link below.
I doubt that for the author awareness is equivalent to understanding. Let me recall that when concentrating on the external world, you should also be fully aware of your body (see Zen Training : Methods and Philosophy by Katsuki Sekida.) Otherwise, no special skills are required, if you lose the feeling of your body while focusing on something. And you can really be aware of your body only by denying the outer world: the context (zazen in fact is a total denial of everything.) That's why spiritual practices have always attached great importance to such challenges as dousing with cold water, for example. Otherwise, you can easily concentrate on a sexual object and by doing this dissolve your self - to what elimination of dualism could this possibly refer?
And as far as the adverse effects of a too favorable environment, from my subjective point of view, the most interesting Zen texts are the ancient ones related to the time when Zen (Chan) confronted the official (Confucian) culture in China; and the greatest damage to Zen was caused by the fact that at some point, it itself became an official ideology already in Japan. There are some clues that ancient masters focused on understanding - how to comprehend a situation: the meaning of what is happening - but modern Zen followers don't go so far. Something important was lost; maybe it's the courage to call things by their proper names: understanding (truth) is a process of destruction. The destruction of what? Apparently those who came up with the design of Zen gardens knew that.
Modern Buddhists often describe the experience of their practice as emptiness at the same time noting that it is not nothingness so that at least it's clear what they don't understand: nothingness in this case is understanding.
http://tricycle.org/magazine/
I doubt that for the author awareness is equivalent to understanding. Let me recall that when concentrating on the external world, you should also be fully aware of your body (see Zen Training : Methods and Philosophy by Katsuki Sekida.) Otherwise, no special skills are required, if you lose the feeling of your body while focusing on something. And you can really be aware of your body only by denying the outer world: the context (zazen in fact is a total denial of everything.) That's why spiritual practices have always attached great importance to such challenges as dousing with cold water, for example. Otherwise, you can easily concentrate on a sexual object and by doing this dissolve your self - to what elimination of dualism could this possibly refer?
And as far as the adverse effects of a too favorable environment, from my subjective point of view, the most interesting Zen texts are the ancient ones related to the time when Zen (Chan) confronted the official (Confucian) culture in China; and the greatest damage to Zen was caused by the fact that at some point, it itself became an official ideology already in Japan. There are some clues that ancient masters focused on understanding - how to comprehend a situation: the meaning of what is happening - but modern Zen followers don't go so far. Something important was lost; maybe it's the courage to call things by their proper names: understanding (truth) is a process of destruction. The destruction of what? Apparently those who came up with the design of Zen gardens knew that.
Modern Buddhists often describe the experience of their practice as emptiness at the same time noting that it is not nothingness so that at least it's clear what they don't understand: nothingness in this case is understanding.
http://tricycle.org/magazine/
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