zen buddhism

Buddhism is one of the world's oldest and as such one of the most influential religions in history. Laying claim to the majority of East Asia, Buddhism finds its beginnings set in Ancient India. Through the centuries, Buddhism's teachings and themes have evolved and grew while the religion its self spread across borders and civilizations. Along the ancient silk road trade route Buddhism and its practitioners seeped into Chinese culture setting the stage as to what is now known as Chan/Zen Buddhism. One of the most well known and popular aspects of Buddhism is its incorporation of meditation into everyday life. Long a staple of many Buddhists sects, meditation has been the backbone of religious thought and practice to further enlightened thinking or in effect, achieve enlightenment. Dogen, one of the early masters of Buddhism and father of Japans adoption of Buddhist thinking stressed a critical importance of Zazen, or sitting meditation as a central practice within the religion. He considered Zazen to be identical to studying Zen, describing the practice as being "in a state of brightly alert attention that is free of thoughts, directed to no object, and attached to no particular content." To put it more clearly Zazen's aim is to suspend all judgmental thinking and letting words, ideas, images and thoughts pass without getting involved in them. It is these themes that have thrust meditation out from behind the walls of Buddhist thinking and into the minds of Western popular culture. : During the last 40 years, the practice of meditation has become increasingly accepted in Western countries as a complementary mind-body therapeutic strategy for a variety of health-related problems. Meditation and its therapeutic effects have been characterized in many ways in the scientific literature. The complex nature of meditation and the coexistence of many perspectives adopted to describe the characteristics of the practice have contributed to great variations in the