In his foreword to  A Profound Mind: Cultivating Wisdom in Everyday Life  by  His Holiness the Dalai Lama , Nicholas Vreeland wrote, "Perhaps the chief difference between Buddhism and the world's other major faith traditions lies in its presentation of our core identity. The existence of the soul or self, which is affirmed in different ways by Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is not only firmly denied in Buddhism; belief in it is identified as the chief source of all our misery. The Buddhist path is fundamentally a process of learning to recognize this essential nonexistence of the self, while seeking to help other sentient beings to recognize it as well." In other words,  this is what Buddhism is . Everything else the Buddha taught can be tied back to the cultivation of wisdom. In my previous post   I struggled to define what Zen is and isn't. For the reader who wants to review some of my sources, they are listed there. I'll go back and revise that o...

I'm very new to Zen, so what follows is an account of my personal search for what Zen is all about. I am not alone in using the term "Zen" rather loosely to refer to an aesthetic outlook and a constellation of related ideas that include " Mindfulness ". As it happens, Mindfulness itself is a rather fuzzy concept, more or less identical to Zen in some minds (such as  Siegel , see below), but used in such a wide context for so many different "therapies" and mental disciplines as to be almost meaningless.  Everybody  seems to think of themselves as "mindful", rendering discussion of the subject pointless. I, therefore, prefer to use the term "Zen", which is also fuzzy but tends to produce more interesting discussions. In passing, it should be noted that no term is fuzzier than "Christianity", but Zen followers do not go to war to defend their own definitions.  It turns out to be tricky to define Zen.  Wikipedia   gives the ...