Historically speaking, we know very little for certain about the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the man who came to be known as "the Buddha ." Although no one today seriously questions his actual existence in ancient India, debates still rage over the dates of his life, with the year of his death now being set anywhere between 486 and 360 B.C. To be ... (more)
There is planned a museum that will rival all other museums worldwide by the type of content, the age of the content, how official the content will be and the fact that the museum will offer something no other museum ever has.
Celebrated in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, Magha Puja is a Buddhist "holiday" that occurs each year on the evening of the full moon of the third month of the lunar calendar.
When I think of Groundhog Day in a Buddhist context, the first thing that comes to mind is this old Zen story: Zen teacher Ummon said to the assembled monks, "I do not ask about 15 days ago, or 15 days hence.
One aspect of Zen meditation I could not yet understand is why there is no metta meditation.
Here's a question that came up in the comments to the last post:
One aspect of Zen meditation I could not yet understand is why there is no metta meditation. In the Triratna tradition - and I suppose in most other Tibetan meditation traditions also- amongst other things there is like mindfulness of the breath meditation also the metta bhavana; a practice I have done on some occassions and also found it helpful to develop compassion. Why does the meditation and chanting practice found in the Metta Sutra and Brahmaviharas not form part of the Zen liturgy or canon? It appears in the Vietnamese Zen (Thien) tradition the Metta Bhavana might be practiced?
In the two major schools of Zen, known in Japanese as Soto and Rinzai, there are two kinds of meditation. In the koan contemplation of Rinzai, students work on and resolve hundreds of koans. I would argue that some of those koans amount to something like metta meditation, although you can't tell that by reading them.
Zen Meditation Question originally appeared on About.com Buddhism on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 at 13:44:27.
