About Zen — Buddha is Zen
Meditation Practice is the Path to Awakening
David Hinton, in his book, China Root: Taoism, Chan, and Original Zen, describes Tao as a generative cosmological process, a Way, by which things come into existence, evolve through their lives, and go out of existence. All things are transformed and reemerge in a new form. He says that Chan is a conceptual extension of Taoism. He quotes Bodhidharma as saying: “Original nature is simply mind. Mind is Buddha. Buddha Tao. And Tao is Chan.”
Taoism presents the distinction between Absence and Presence. Presence is the empirical universe, described as the ten thousand things in constant transformation. Absence is the generative void, from which Presence emerges.
Time, Hinton says, an all-encompassing generative present. It can be described as an origin-moment/place, a constant burgeoning forth in which the ten-thousand things emerge from the generative source of existence.
Inhabiting this origin-moment/place, Hinton says, is the abiding essence of Chan, (and Zen) practice.
Chan, as well as Zen, practice is not about conceptually understanding this Taoist ontology/cosmology and the nature of consciousness. It is about actually living that understanding as a matter of immediate experience.
Chan and Zen focus on meditation practice — zazen — as the primary path to awakening.
