If asked about the Zen Buddhist Temple on Packard Street in Ann Arbor, most people would probably think of the wall that separates the temple from the street.

“The wall is there not to separate us from the rest of the town,” said senior member Catherine Brown of Ann Arbor.

It serves, instead, as noise barrier. Silence plays a key role in a Zen Buddhist service.

Upon entering the temple, those in attendance sit in quiet meditation for about 20 minutes. This is repeated at the end of service.

Meditation is integral to the Zen Buddhist belief system. Meditation is how Siddharta Gautama reached enlightenment to …

Minh Cong Nguyen has found a home for his displaced Buddhist congregation – this time outside of Rankin County.

Nguyen opened a Zen Center last month on Terry Road, just south of U.S. 80, which will house meditation classes and worship services.

He holds worship services on Sunday for Buddhists as well as meditation classes for everyone.

“Westerners are invited,” the monk said of the free classes he will start holding on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. The first is Saturday.

Americans live a stressed-out lifestyle, and these two-hour sessions give people a mental break, he said.

“Our minds are like a computer,” he said. “You keep putting too much information in it. Meditation is the delete …

Buddhist nuns and volunteers at the Buddha Mind Monastery are creating a walking meditation trail along the religious center’s expansive east Oklahoma City site

With the pioneering spirit of their adopted state, a group of Buddhist nuns is forging a path through a new frontier.
That untamed land is right outside their doors at the Buddha Mind Monastery, 5916 S Anderson Road.

The nuns and a determined group of volunteers are creating a walking meditation trail throughout and along the perimeter of the monastery’s sprawling 40 acres in far east Oklahoma City.

Jian Jian Shih, a nun at the monastery, said the new trail is the first of many changes at …

Originating in China, Zen Buddhism took hold in Japan in the late 12th century.

Unlike more traditional factions of Buddhism, Zen fosters the belief that enlightenment can be gained through meditation and intuition instead of blind devotion and dogma. It advocates achieving a balance between appreciating the beauty of our natural, physical world, while freeing oneself from the earthly preoccupations that inhibit the path toward nirvana.

This delicate balance has long been fodder for the creation of art. And for local artist Fumino Hora, it’s the basis for her latest body of work, “The Way of Samsara,” which currently comprises an installation-style exhibit in the Hodge Gallery at Pittsburgh Glass Center.

A native of Tokyo, Hora came to Pittsburgh in 2006 after living …

Living without pain may not require potent drugs, according to a new study published in the medical journal Pain — all you need is a cushion, a quiet corner and maybe a mantra.

Previous research has found that people who practice Zen meditation are less sensitive to pain. For the new study, researchers at the University of Montreal aimed to figure out why. They exposed 13 Zen masters and 13 comparable non-practitioners to equal degrees of painful heat while measuring their brain activity in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.

The meditators reported feeling less pain than the control group did. What’s more, the Zen group reported feelings of pain at levels below what their neurological output from the fMRI indicated. …

Zen meditation has many health benefits, including a reduced sensitivity to pain. According to new research from the Université de Montréal, meditators do feel pain but they simply don’t dwell on it as much. These findings, published in the month’s issue of Pain, may have implications for chronic pain sufferers, such as those with arthritis, back pain or cancer.

“Our previous research found that Zen meditators have lower pain sensitivity. The aim of the current study was to determine how they are achieving this,” says senior author Pierre Rainville, researcher at the Université de Montréal and the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal. “Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrated that although the meditators were aware of the pain, this sensation …

As you read this article your mind is likely to wander off onto other thoughts; trouble at work, your evening plans, a mounting to-do list… and you might be all the more unhappy in life as a result of such distracted thinking.

According to a recent study in the November issue of Science Magazine, whether and where people’s minds wander is a better predictor of happiness than what they are doing. The study included more than 2,200 people around the world who agreed to use an iphone app called trackyourhappiness.

A team of Harvard psychologists contacted the participants at random intervals to ask how them how they were feeling, what they were doing and what they were thinking. The team …

Zen teacher and writer Brad Warner tells a story about the origins of this book. When Warner was visiting Montreal to deliver a talk on Zen, a rather eccentric member of the audience asked him: “Are Buddhists allowed to jack off?” He swiftly gave the short answer: “They’re encouraged to.”

The book “Sex, Sin and Zen” could be seen as the long answer to the same question. Or rather, to all the questions about Buddhism and its attitudes toward sex – if indeed such specific Buddhist attitudes exist.

Brad Warner has acquired a certain reputation as the “punk Buddhist” – a rock bass player turned Zen Buddhist and teacher …

Hospitals and meditation are coming together, what with the growth in mindfulness-based programs that started with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction several decades ago. Sutter Hospital, in California, is one of the latest to add a Meditation Garden.

Meanwhile, at an Asheville, North Carolina, hospital, meditation is being used to help breast cancer patients. According to the Asheville Citizen-Times, a study “found patients using the body/mind/medicine therapies, including guided imaging, reported lowered blood pressure, heart rates and anxiety levels.”

In military medicine circles, the army’s plans to build up mental ‘resilience’ in soldiers serving in Iraq include a meditation room with stained glass windows.

There’s an Asheville connection with regards to Rev. Teijo Munnich, who is said to have been …

Writer Renée Miller introduces a book on Zen koans written by Elaine Miller, who is both a Catholic nun and a Zen priest.

When we step to the edge of our experience and then have the courage to take yet one more step, we are often surprised to find that the anxiety we felt at taking that “one more step” vanishes in a whole new feeling of expansion. When it comes to religious thinking, we are accustomed to holding fast to our familiar patterns of belief and tradition because what we know or have been taught feels like a protection and security for us. The religion itself may put constraints on our exploration …