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Anne Hainer, Penn State Collegian, Pennsylvania: Penn State students, faculty and local residents were able to get an introduction to Buddhist culture and meditation this weekend.

Several hundred people attended a lecture by Chan Master Sheng Yen and introductory meditation classes as part of the Chan (Zen) events that took place Saturday and yesterday.

“We hope to help introduce Buddhism into Western society; not for religious reasons, but more to help people understand Eastern philosophy,” said Chang-Jin Lai, the lecture’s coordinator.

“It is important for people to understand other people’s beliefs as well as their own; we want to help this school diversify.”

Yen, who has written more than 100 books and has spoken with Pope John Paul II and the Dalai Lama, spoke about focusing on how to achieve happiness while being mindful of others and promoting the interests of the general public.

Yen travels worldwide to spread not only ideas of Buddhist thought but also the ideas of religious tolerance and interfaith cooperation….

Buddhism and the Blues (Phayul.com, Tibet)

October 31, 2003

Mediation techniques can help cure depression, and Buddhism’s core techniques of meditation and awareness may have much to offer ordinary Westerners, whose material comforts have not wiped out rampant emotional distress. Read more

Summary: Mediation techniques can help cure depression. Buddhist psychology offers more than a method of investigation. Its core techniques of meditation and awareness may have much to offer ordinary Westerners, whose material comforts have not wiped out rampant emotional distress.

To most people Buddhism is an ancient Asian religion, although a very special one. It has no god, it has no central creed or dogma and its primary goal is the expansion of consciousness, or awareness.

But to the Dalai Lama, it’s a highly refined tradition, perfected over the course of 2,500 years, of analyzing and investigating the inner world of the mind in order to transform mental states and promote happiness. “Whether you are a believer or not in the faith,” the Dalai Lama recently told a conference of Buddhists and scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you can use its time-honored techniques to voluntarily control your emotional state.

Yes, the Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of over 300 million Buddhists worldwide. Yes, he is the head of the Tibetan government in exile. But in the spirit of Buddhism the Dalai Lama has an inquiring mind and wishes to expand human knowledge to improve lives. At its core, Buddhism is a system of inquiry into the nature of what is.

He believes that psychology and neuroscience have gone about as far as they can go in understanding the mind and brain by measuring external reality. Now that inner reality–the nature of consciousness–is the pressing subject du jour, the sciences need to borrow from the knowledge base that Buddhism has long cultivated.

A comprehensive science of the mind requires a science of consciousness. Buddhism offers what MIT geneticist Eric Lander, Ph.D., called a “highly refined technology” of introspective practices that provide systematic access to subjective experience. Yet Buddhist psychology offers more than a method of investigation. Its core techniques of meditation and awareness may have much to offer ordinary Westerners, whose material comforts have not wiped out rampant emotional distress.

Over the past 15 years, starting with his own personal interest, the Dalai Lama has set up discussions with Western scientists in an effort to further knowledge about the emotions. The recent meeting, held at MIT, was actually the eleventh in a series of annual conversations sponsored by the Colorado-based Mind & Life Institute. But it was the first one that was open to other participants.

The Buddhist view of how the mind works is somewhat different from the traditional Western view. Western psychology pretty much holds to the belief that things like attention and emotion are fixed and immutable. Buddhism sees the components of the mind more as skills that can be trained. This view has increasing support from modern neuroscience, which is almost daily providing new evidence of the brain’s capacity for change and growth.

Buddhism uses intelligence to control the emotions. Through meditative practices, awareness can be trained and focused on the contents of the mind to observe ongoing experience. Such techniques are of growing interest to Western psychologists, who increasingly see depression as a disorder of emotional mismanagement. In this view, attention is hijacked by negative events and then sets off a kind of chain reaction of negative feeling, thinking and behavior that has its own rapidity and inevitability.

Techniques of awareness permit the cultivation of self-control. They allow people to break the negative emotional chain reaction and head off the hopelessness and despair it leads to. By focusing attention, it is possible to monitor your environment, recognize a negative stimulus and act on it the instant it registers on awareness. While attention as traditional psychologists know it can be an exhausting mental activity, as Buddhists practice it it actually becomes a relaxing and effortless enterprise.

One way of meditation is to use breathing techniques in which you focus on the breathing and let any negative stimulus just go by–instead of bringing it into your working memory, where you are likely to sit and ruminate about it and thus amplify its negativity. It’s a way of unlearning the self-defeating ways you somehow acquired of responding catastrophically to negative experiences.

Evidence increasingly suggests that meditation techniques are highly effective at helping people recover from a bout of depression and especially useful in preventing recurrences. Medication may be needed during the depths of an acute episode to jump-start brain systems, but at best “antidepressants are a halfway house,” says Alan Wallace, Ph.D., head of the Santa Barbara Institute for the Study of Consciousness. But meditation retrains the mind to allow ongoing control over the content of thoughts and feelings.

Basic Meditation Exercise

1. Sit with an alert and relaxed body posture so that you feel relatively comfortable without moving. (You can sit either in a straight-back chair with your feet flat on the floor or on a thick, firm cushion three to six inches off the floor.)

2.Keep your back, neck and head vertically aligned, relax your shoulders and find a comfortable place for your hands (usually on your knees).

3. Bring your attention to your breathing. Observe the breath as it flows in and out. Give full attention to the feeling of the breath as it comes in and goes out. Whenever you find that your attention has moved elsewhere, just note it and let go and gently escort your attention back to the breath, back to the rising and falling of your own belly.

4. When you can maintain some continuity of attention on the breath, try expanding the field of your awareness “around” your belly to include a sense of your body as a whole.

5. Maintain this awareness of the body sitting and breathing, and, when the mind wanders, bring it back to sitting and breathing.

Zen and the art of meditation

October 31, 2003

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Anne Broache (The Daily Northwestern, Evanston, Illinois): To run a center for Zen Buddhist meditation, where silence and stillness are sacred necessities, a college town can provide more pitfalls than peace.

“Particularly students screaming as they walk past,” said Sevan Ross, director and resident teacher — or sensei — of the Chicago Zen Center.

Despite such noise and in spite of its name, the Chicago Zen Center has resided at 2029 Ridge Ave. in Evanston since the mid-1970s.

A group formed and opened the local center after Zen expert Roshi Philip Kapleau, who had founded the Rochester Zen Center in Rochester, N.Y., in the 1960s, held a public workshop in Chicago during the early ’70s. For years the center was affiliated with the Rochester center, which sent teachers to Evanston a few times each year to conduct meditative retreats.

Then Ross, a former Catholic who was ordained in 1992 as a Zen Buddhist priest, became the Chicago Zen Center’s director in 1996. He was sanctioned as a teacher two years later.

From the outside the Zen center resembles a typical Evanston house. It has a sprawling front porch, ample windows and gray-green siding. Ross said he hopes his bamboo plantings on the center’s north side will grow into the most massive grove in the city.

Inside, the aroma of incense — a difficult-to-find, Japanese temple variety, Ross noted — wafts through the halls. Walls have been added and subtracted. Bathrooms glow with bright blue and green paint.
“If you’re going to be a Zen teacher in the West,” Ross said, “you have to know carpentry and electricity and all of that.”

Meditation occurs on the polished wooden floors of the zendo, a large room that overlooks Ridge Avenue from the second floor. A small Buddha statue poses on an altar at the front…

EXPERIENCE AND DISCOVERY
Zazen, Japanese for meditation, is the core of Zen Buddhism. Ross said he expects his students to practice zazen daily, either on their own or at the center.
“Zen practice is not about doctrine or belief,” Ross said. “It’s about experience and discovery.”
Zen Buddhism teaches that no truth resides outside oneself, and zazen forces a reorientation inward. Not all meditation involves silent sitting; some involves walking or chanting.
Wearing dark robes, Zen practitioners position themselves on round and rectangular gray cushions lining the zendo’s perimeter. A series of strikes on bells and wooden blocks guide them through the initial stages of meditation.
The third and final piercing strike on the inkin bell, a small handbell, signals that sitters must stop readjusting their posture and remain completely still for the meditation period.
“People who come here are not really looking for doctrine,” Ross said. “They’re looking for truth that can be discovered in themselves — not in a psychological sense, but deeper.”
During sesshin, two- to six-day intensive retreats scheduled throughout the year, sittings can last up to 14 hours per day. Participants eat simple vegetarian meals centered around rice and sip tea produced by the Chinese Tenren Tea Company — Ross’s vendor of choice in Chicago.
At such retreats members divide their time between sitting, chanting, work, lectures and extremely private interviews, or dokusan, with Ross.
“It’s a meeting about one’s meditation practice,” Ross said. “Therefore it is often not verbal because words and letters are going to be misleading past a certain point.”
The physically demanding retreats employ senior Zen members as monitors, who use “encouragement sticks” to slap acupuncture pressure points on meditators’ backs. Not to be interpreted as punitive, Ross said, the hits aim to prevent stiff, hunched bodies and to promote open, Zen-like posture.
“Americans are armored: We walk with our heads down, shoulders bent, armored to the world,” Ross said. “That’s one of the things that Zen training does — it opens them up to the world.”
SMOOTHING HILLS AND VALLEYS
Senior member Elie Nijm, 54, a school psychologist who lives in Buffalo Grove, Ill., has wielded the encouragement stick. He started coming to the Chicago Zen Center around the time he started practicing Zen, about 15 years ago.
Nijm spent his childhood as a Christian Arab in Israel but has lived in the Chicago area for 32 years.
“I grew up in a religion where I was always shown the pictures of God and was told stories about God,” he said. “But no one taught me to taste God directly.”
A combination of such feelings and circumstances led Nijm to Zen. He read a book about Zen practice in one sitting and, captivated by its ideas, decided to seek a local center.
“For me,” he said, “the most fundamental questions I was seeking was the question of, ‘What is reality?”’
Similar questions confounded Evanston resident Steve Cole, 49, when he decided to begin Zen practice about five years ago.
Cole had arrived at a “personal dead end,” he said, when his eight-year career as a Harvard University professor ended abruptly. The Babylonian history scholar found himself teaching in Helsinki, Finland, and meditating at a Zen center there, where he hoped to regain control of his life. He later discovered the center was connected to a network that includes the chapters in Rochester and Evanston.
Now employed at a fast-paced software development company in Park Ridge, Cole practices Zen meditation for at least 45 minutes each morning. He tries to attend sittings at the Evanston center every other week and to go on as many retreats as his vacation time permits.
But Cole said he considers Zen more of a lifestyle than a religion.
“It’s a way of living in the world realistically and comfortably despite the ups and downs,” he said. “It really helps you to smooth out the hills and valleys.”

Monks work to construct mandala (The Penn Online, Pennsylvania)

October 29, 2003

The Penn: Meditation, as practiced by the 10 Tibetan Buddhist monks visiting IUP this week, provides “stability and calmness” and opens the potential of one’s mind, said Eleanor Mannikka, Monday’s Six O’Clock Series speaker.

“What powers your behavior is your mind,” said Mannikka, an IUP art professor and 25-year practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. “All the minds that human beings have are the most powerful tools in the universe. Without meditation you’re using a small fraction of your mind.”

Buddhists practice the teachings of Siddhartha Gotama — the Buddha — who after six years of meditation about 2,500 years ago, found the “middle path,” or enlightenment, in his search for the ways to avoid suffering and be happy.

Much of that suffering, Mannikka said, comes from attachment to worldly things, whether it’s material or a connection with others.

“[Buddha] didn’t say it’s love and compassion for your friends that causes suffering, but if you have an attachment with that love where you want good feedback … If you want something in return, you’re going to suffer,” she said.

Buddhism — the fourth-largest religion and only one with enlightenment as the goal — seeks to break that attachment through meditation, which must be taught by an instructor first-hand and “altruistic thinking,” Mannikka said.

In stages and with years of practice, one achieves enlightenment, “a state of emptiness” that comes from wisdom, ethical conduct and mental discipline, she said.

“Underlying everything in the entire universe is the basis of what we call emptiness,” which “cannot be described because it lies beyond concept,” she said. “It is very different for us to imagine that our minds can actually operate beyond concept.”

Eventually, those who meditate might experience “nanoseconds of what that emptiness is, and it is so mind-blowing. You would not believe that your mind can exist in that particular state,” she said.

For the master Tibetan monks, that transcendence may have metaphysical implications, she said.

“The Tibetans are notorious for doing things like walking through walls,” levitating or flying, she said. “This world that we see is illusory. … When the mind transcends the illusion of solidity in all objects, then solid objects cease to maintain their obstacle nature.”

Meditation typically involves controlled breathing, a focus on relieving tension and introspection.

“You don’t have to be a Buddhist to do the basic meditation. … When you think of yourself in that way, that you’re much bigger than this moment, that your life has meaning. It is then your job to fulfill that meaning,” she said.

Article no longer available in the original website (Original URL.)

Medicine for the mind (The Independent, UK)

October 27, 2003

The Independent: Ian Robinson doesn’t mince his words when it comes to admitting his past failings. “I was a bugger for road rage,” he confesses. “I’d be driving along and someone would cut me up and I could kill.” Ian laughs at the admission. Other road users no longer wind him up. Their driving hasn’t changed – Ian has. The 44-year-old factory worker has discovered meditation.

Ian Robinson doesn’t mince his words when it comes to admitting his past failings. “I was a bugger for road rage,” he confesses. “I’d be driving along and someone would cut me up and I could kill.” Ian laughs at the admission. Other road users no longer wind him up. Their driving hasn’t changed – Ian has. The 44-year-old factory worker has discovered meditation.

Ian and eight of his colleagues from Indmar Sheetmetal in Wigan, Lancashire, were taught how to meditate over a three-month period for a BBC2 documentary which will be screened on Thursday evening. The results were remarkable. According to Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at Umist, their mental and physical wellbeing increased by more than 300 per cent. “We took pulse rate measures before they started the course,” he says. “We repeated them before and after various sessions, and then at the end to see if there was an overall improvement on pulse rate.” The researchers also used psychometric stress tests at the end of the experiment. “What was very interesting was that the workers showed a massive improvement in their overall mental and physical health scores. And they were better than normative. Eight out of nine people showed substantial changes. And their heart and pulse rates improved significantly, too.”

The factory workers, most of whom were initially sceptical, were taught breathing techniques and t’ai chi, and were then taken on guided meditations during which they imagined themselves in a tranquil place. “I loved it, I really did,” says Ian, a systems manager. “I wasn’t too keen on the t’ai chi, but the meditation – there’s something in that. I felt more focused after I did it. I could meditate for 50 minutes and it would seem like five or 10 minutes. While I was doing it, all sorts of things were happening – I was flying and seeing lights. After-wards I felt relaxed and more focused.” Ian has continued to practise. “I do the meditation once a week at least. Now I’m more chilled. Nothing fazes me.”

Ian’s colleague Elaine Walsh, 40, a press operator, says that learning to meditate has changed her life. “I was sceptical at first,” admits Elaine. “But I found it very relaxing. I had mood swings before. I don’t get them at all now. My husband noticed a change straight away; he made me carry on. It has changed my life. I feel more alive, awake. I suffered from asthma and I don’t get it as much now. I still meditate twice a day.”

Meditation has never been so popular, as more people struggle to cope with the pressures of work and home life. Celebrities such as Richard Gere, Shania Twain, Sting, Goldie Hawn and Sheryl Crow are also at it. Some forms require you to concentrate on your breathing, others on an object such as a candle, or to repeat a mantra. Some are practised while walking or dancing.

Researchers continue to find evidence of its benefits. It was recently discovered that Buddhists who meditate may be able to train their brains to feel happiness and to control aggressive instincts. According to Owen Flanagan, professor of philosophy at Duke University in North Carolina, Buddhists appear to be able to stimulate the left prefrontal lobe – the area just behind the forehead – which may be why they can generate positive emotions and a feeling of wellbeing at will.

In August, the journal Psychosomatic Medicine reported that researchers from the University of Wisconsin had found that meditation could boost the body’s immune system and change brain activity in areas associated with positive emotion. Twenty-four employees took an eight-week meditation course, and found that the positive biological effects lasted for up to four months.

Meditation appears to be helpful for a wide range of health problems. Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of the stress reduction programme at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, has been using a type of meditation called mindfulness (which involves paying attention to the experience of the moment) to help people cope with cancer, Aids, heart disease, chronic pain, chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, high blood pressure, anxiety and panic. In two trials by Dr Kabat-Zinn, psoriasis patients who listened to meditation tapes while receiving ultraviolet light treatments healed four times faster than those on light treatment alone.

In addition, two studies by Dr John Teasdale, a psychologist at the Medical Research Council’s cognition and brain sciences unit in Cambridge, have found that, teamed with cognitive therapy, mindfulness meditation halved the risk of relapse for people who have suffered three or more episodes of clinical depression. The treatment is currently being used clinically within the NHS in a small number of places around the country.

The greatest claims, however, come from supporters of Transcendental Meditation (TM), a specific technique popularised by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It was first taught here in 1960 and more than 160,000 Britons have subsequently learnt it – at a cost (currently £1,280 for the course). It is practised for 15 to 20 minutes twice daily, repeating a specific mantra while sitting comfortably with the eyes closed.

Research into the technique has been conducted at more than 200 universities, hospitals and research institutions in 27 countries, its supporters say. They claim the studies show that practising TM reduces a variety of important risk factors for diseases such as coronary heart disease and cancer, including high blood pressure and cholesterol levels, cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, drug abuse, obesity, stress levels, anxiety and depression.

One US study on volunteers with high blood pressure, which was reported in The Lancet, found that TM could significantly reduce clogging of the arteries and cut related health risks, particularly of heart disease. Studies published in The American Journal of Cardiology and Stroke have shown that TM helps to relieve angina and reduce hardening of the arteries.

More research conducted in America found that a group of 2,000 people who practised TM had fewer than half the number of visits to the doctor and days in hospital compared with a control group over a five-year period. Jonathan Hinde, a TM teacher and spokesman for the organisation in Britain, says over the last five or so years, The National Institutes of Health, the main government funding body for medical research in the US, has put about $20m into research specifically on the connection between TM and various aspects of cardiovascular health. “What has been found is that if you practise TM for about three months, blood pressure tends to be reduced by about the same amount as taking any drug for hypertension. Hypertension is implicated in both strokes and heart attacks, two of the three biggest killers in the Western world.”

There are, of course, sceptics. In an editorial in the BMJ last May, Peter H Canter, a research fellow in complementary medicine, concluded that “overall, current evidence for the therapeutic effectiveness of any type of meditation is weak, and evidence for any specific effect above that of credible control interventions even more so.” He added that most of the researchers for these studies were directly involved in the organisation offering TM, and “seem keen to demonstrate its unique value”.

Yet Larry Culliford, a consultant psychiatrist at a community mental health centre in Brighton, who was trained in meditation by Buddhist monks more than 20 years ago, is convinced that it works. He practises it once a day, paying attention to the rise and fall of his chest and abdomen while he breathes. “Sogyal Rinpoche, who wrote The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, says that giving yourself the gift of learning to meditate is the best gift you can give yourself in this life. You could say without too much exaggeration that it has transformed me and my life.

“The evidence is that it is very good for people with a range of physical as well as mental health problems. Meditation gets the mind and body back into harmony and this allows the natural healing processes the best chance to work. Benefits are possible in every organ system of the body and every part of health disorder, including mental health disorder.”

Also convinced of the benefits of meditation is Roger Chalmers, a GP working in East Anglia, who has been practising TM since 1974. “An enormous amount of what we deal with in general practice is stress-related, and TM is a really excellent method for eliminating stress.

“TM is something that anyone can do; it’s completely effortless and enhances wellbeing. Everybody benefits from being more well-rested and free from stress. We all know what it feels like when we have a good rest overnight or a good holiday. Everything in your life improves, and, in a way, you can see TM as something that just gives you a very easy technique to ensure that more of life is spent in that state and less is spent feeling tired and strained.”

[via the Independent]

Sitting Meditation (Boston Globe)

October 21, 2003

1. Sit upright on a cushion on the floor or in a firm chair, with your eyes open, hands resting on your thighs.

2. Relax your body. In a downward sweep, let go of physical tension.

3. Bring your awareness to your breath as it goes out. Keep it light and be open, “letting the breath mix with the space of the room.”

4. When your mind wanders off, notice it without judgment, label it as “thinking,” and “do that with honesty and gentleness.” And return to your breath.

SOURCE: Shamatha-Vipashyana (“tranquillity-insight”) Meditation, adapted from “Start Where You Are,” by Pema Chodron.

[Via Boston.com

The tortuous path to ‘pretzel karma’ (Boston Globe)

October 21, 2003

A while ago, I had what writer James Thurber would have called “a permanent case of the jumps.”

“Meditation versus medication,” a friend advised me.

So, I pulled a chair up to a blank patch of wall, and relaxed from my forehead down to my toes, letting everything but my spine go soft. I endeavored to quiet the mind and, like a Buddhist monk, be open to whatever sensations and emotions arose, without reacting. I visualized thoughts as autumn leaves or taxi cabs blowing past and didn’t try to catch them. I aspired to lighten up.

And I signed up for a correspondence course with the Central Chinmaya Mission Trust in India. “Blessed Self” began the letters accompanying the lessons in stamp-strewn envelopes from Mumbai. Eventually I called Chinmaya’s Washington Regional Center, in Silver Spring, Md., to enroll in a Sanskrit class. A man from the center returned the call, ending his message on our answering machine with a pleasant “Hari Om.”

My husband raised an eyebrow. “Heidy ho.”

In hindsight, this captured the tenor of my meditative.. .

endeavors as, time and time again, nerve failed me in the vestibules of various spiritual traditions. I couldn’t stay put, even though meditation is supposed to reorient the brain from a stressful flight-or-fight response to a calmer mode of acceptance and contentment.

Using modern technologies to study the minds of Tibetan Buddhist monks, University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson has shown that meditation decreases stress, anxiety and depression while boosting the immune system and increasing concentration and happiness. Deepak Chopra, in “Ageless Body, Timeless Mind,” promises that meditating for 20 minutes twice daily will make us look three years younger.

According to the Aug. 4 issue of Time magazine, 10 million American adults now say they meditate regularly, “twice as many as a decade ago.” Cumulatively that could lead to a lot less need for skin-repair cream.

My own lurches into meditation groups, however, only added gray hairs. At Chinmaya, women in brilliant saris slipped off their shoes, revealing lovely be-ringed toes. Mortified of tracking talcum-powdered, big-foot-sized prints onto the carpet, I bolted.

At Baltimore’s Zen Meditation Center, a student with an Eastern name and a Philadelphia accent demonstrated the sturdiness of the full lotus posture. I couldn’t quite achieve “pretzel karma,” but, for some reason, the attempt made me salivate like a Saint Bernard. I fainted briefly taking a deep cleansing breath. Collecting my shoes, I fled.

Meanwhile, I continued to meditate at home and experienced subtle shifts in perception. Colors were vivid. Stuck in traffic, I suddenly would be intensely aware of the beauty of the sky — the clouds, folded like egg whites — or enchanted by a handful of wrens on a median strip. Once, coming off an elevator, I was flooded with tenderness for a woman, a stranger, getting on. Maybe it was not such a great idea to stare at a wall by myself.

Earlier this year, I lurched into yet another group, signing on for a weekendlong introductory meditation program. A Friday-night lecture, and periods of seated and walking meditation from 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. “How relaxing.” friends intoned.

“I have a feeling I’ve just paid to be tortured,” I said, writing a check for the suggested $110 donation.

Immediately, the uncomfortable cushion-on-floor seating arrangement engendered an irritation with all of meditation and life. The posture of a dignified Buddhist “warrior” — straight-spined, gaze downward cast, head positioned levelly “as if resting on a shelf” — eluded me. I fantasized about fashioning an armchair out of spare pillows.

During walking meditation, other participants mindfully circled the room, aware of their breathing and of their feet touching the ground. Meanwhile, my thoughts were: “For people who routinely go shoeless, Buddhists ought to own better socks.”

When the prayer clackers signaled that it was time for a return to our cushions, I jostled past everyone as if we were playing musical chairs for cash. Saturday, I missed breakfast, shrugged, and said: “Late Buddha.” At lunch, I suggested to the meditation teacher that the center’s carpet could use a good shampooing. I was, as a Zen Buddhist might say, “the worst horse.”

Maybe I was a candidate for medication after all. Some pill that hopefully wouldn’t involve drooling. My primary-care doctor suggested regular massages.

The masseuse, Ruth, was originally from Taiwan. “Let go!” she said grimly, stretching my arms behind my back. “Let go! Relax!” A Buddhist would understand her communication to be sacred.

Athletic Ch’an—melding movement with meditation for relaxation, health

October 16, 2003

Taiwan Journal: Only a few months ago Taiwan was in the grip of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic. Now that the crisis has passed and life is returning to normal, the experience has engendered a positive legacy: realization of the importance of a healthy lifestyle.

In the post-SARS period, many have come to see exercise as an essential ingredient in the maintenance of good health and resistance to disease. Consequently, Taiwan has witnessed a marked increase in the number of people doing early-morning exercise in city parks and plazas or working out in gymnasiums.

A newcomer to the many varieties of exercise is one known as “Dharma athletic Ch’an,” promoted by the Dharma Drum Mountain Buddhist Foundation as a way of enhancing mental and physical harmony. The Chinese word Ch’an, a translation of the Sanskrit dhyana, or concentration, names a tradition of Buddhist meditation developed in China, which, since its transmission to Japan, has become known to the world by the Japanese-language equivalent Zen. The word Dharma is a Sanskrit term meaning the fundamental way of things, or Reality, underlying the world of phenomenal appearances.

According to the Dharma Drum Foundation–an enthusiastic advocate of Ch’an meditation–the exercise emphasizes relaxation and harmonious alignment of body structure rather than muscular development. Although Dharma athletic Ch’an is similar in principle to tai chi chuan martial-art training techniques, it emphasizes meditation on the body as a whole rather than chi kung disciplines for cultivating the body’s subtle chi energy flow. “As a way of mastering coordinated physical action, meditation allows practitioners to gain insight into ‘universal oneness of being’ and to thereby attain a physically and mentally balanced state,” read the foundation’s press release.

This new approach to cultivation of mental and physical well-being comprises eight standing movements combined with meditative observation: upright spinal twisting; circular head-and-neck motion; circular hip motion; reaching for sky and ground; shallow squatting with forward-extending arms; rotational left- right lateral reaching with bent waist; circular motion of bent knees; and a forward-stretching motion similar to an epee plunge. “Although the exercise appears very simple and ordinary, only when you actually practice the principles of effortless breathing, rhythmic movement and physical equilibration can you realize its benefits,” said practitioner Chen Wu-hsiung.

“Relaxation is the key to the exercise,” added Chen. “It involves the entire body and mind, so as to ensure that every bone and muscle is relaxed, thereby allowing chi to flow without hindrance and enabling practitioners to be aware of their surroundings and move in rhythm with Nature,” he explained.

Since 1987, when martial law was lifted in Taiwan and religious groups began developing freely, Ch’an has become increasingly popular throughout the island. According to legend, it originated with Siddhartha Gautama–popularly known as the Buddha, or Awakened One–and was transmitted to posterity via his disciple Mahakashyapa and a subsequent lineage of Ch’an masters stretching over the two and a half millennia since then. When the Buddha held out a bouquet of flowers in front of his disciples without uttering a word, nobody knew what the gesture meant except for Mahakashyapa, who just smiled. “Only Mahakashyapa understands the true Dharma and the wondrous mind of nirvana,” said the Buddha.

A reputed link in the chain of Ch’an transmission, Bodhidharma, introduced the precursor of Ch’an to China a millennium later in the 6th century. Though few people know of this story, what attracts them to Ch’an is the possibility of experiencing meditative insight leading to the attainment of enlightenment, or clear perception of one’s true nature.

“To meditate, a practitioner starts by concentrating on inhaling and exhaling. With concentration, one can ignore any thoughts that arise and thus return to a thought-free state,” said Ch’an Master Sheng Yen, founder of the Chung Hwa Institute of Buddhist Culture and the Dharma Drum Mountain Buddhist Foundation. “The combination of meditation and exercise enables people to become aware of the life energy underlying all achievement and expression,” said the master, who has practiced the exercise for some 20 years.

Practitioners attest to both physical and psychic benefits of Dharma athletic Ch’an. “The relaxation that the exercise brings gets rid of my serious muscle aches and helps me reduce stress,” said a 45-year-old woman surnamed Lee. Another zealous practitioner surnamed Huang claimed that since beginning to do the exercise, he not only has become slimmer but calmer as well. “Before taking up athletic Ch’an, I tended to lose my temper easily, as in traffic jams. Now I’m more patient.” Though Dharma athletic Ch’an is a relatively recent development, debuting in April of this year, this melding of meditation and motion is finding growing favor among Taiwanese, thus far having attracted 4,000 practitioners island-wide. In order to boost the exercise, many enthusiasts have volunteered to teach the technique at hospitals, prisons, companies and schools.

[Article no longer available at original source]

Buddhist monk helps rugby club

October 15, 2003