Word: zenning
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wealthy Chicago lawyer, she dug deeper into Buddhism, decided that what she wanted was enlightenment, and the way to enlightenment was meditation. "But to find out how to practice meditation in America was an impossibility." On a trip to China and Japan in 1930, she and her husband met Zen Master Dr. Daisetz Suzuki, and Ruth asked him how one went about learning to meditate. "If you can come back to Japan and study for some time." he said, "perhaps you can find...
...meager lunch. After supper at home she would return to the temple for meditation with the monks until 9:30 at night, then return home, take a bath and meditate until bedtime, around midnight. In 1944. after her husband died, she married Dr. Shigetsu Sasaki, a Japanese Zen roshi (teacher) whom she had met in New York City; she was widowed a second time...
Some of a Zen pupil's meditation is devoted to koans -short problems without logical solutions, set by the individual's Zen master and designed to wrench the mind free of ordinary thinking. (Sample koan: "A monk asked. 'Who is Buddha?' The master answered, 'Three pounds of flax.' ") Other meditation is devoted to breath control, plus a kind of concentration on nothingness and what Ruth Sasaki describes as "handling one's mind...
...eyes flash when she says: "It's not easy to become a Zen Buddhist. I can sit in a monks' hall for seven days, sitting crosslegged, sleeping only one hour a night. I can sit 18 or 24 hours crosslegged, meditating. I can also enjoy a glass of champagne, the opera, a good car -I like a fast car, even though I don't drive any more. One of the things we learn in Zen is complete adaptability...
...Cult Phase. With Dr. Sasaki she worked at Manhattan's First Zen Institute of America. In 1950 Ruth Sasaki returned to Kyoto, where she rented a small house built for a retired roshi on the site of what had been the Ryosen-An branch of the Daitokuji Temple. Amply provided with funds from her first husband's estate, she remodeled and enlarged the house to provide a center and library for U.S. students of Zen. She ran into an unexpected obstacle when the Daitokuji Temple insisted that the new center be designated as the restored sub-temple...