2017年2月1日水曜日

Oh,God! Please help me. Zen vs Christianity

I am a weak human,too.
The essence of any religion is , in my opinion, to listen to the
voice,"I am a weak person. Please help me. "tenderly and to
respond to their despair ,saying " I am a weak person,too. Let's
ask for help together in such a way that we can share our despair with each other." Whatever protection we may cover our heart with in this world such as family, friends wealth and
so on, our human heart is so lonely deep inside that the only
way to shake off our loneliness is either to depend on worldly
desire or to seek the place where the core of our frozen heart can get warmed , which I think is the root of the motive of our
human activities.

The age of loneliness gets deeper
We are lonelier than the past time. It is human 
nature that the more we get to know, the more anxieties we have
. To make the matter worse, what was to be considered to be
in the realm of God is now dissected with bloodless scientific
scalpel. As a result we are pushed into deeper loneliness. The
other reason for our deeper loneliness is that such a thing as 
vital science are handled by a kind of people who have never
been cornered into absolute loneliness coming from the 
consciousness of our human tininess when we face the infinitive and ever-lasting dark universe. They don't know what
it feels like to have no ways to express their ultimate loneliness except for giving a big cry breathlessly. Unlike Einstein , they are not usually modest enough to say " I have
no words except the work of God to describe" when they look
up at the perfect arrangement and order of the universe.

Seeking zen for salvation
I sought zen for the salvation because I felt such religions as
Christianity and Islam were , to be frank, too fictional to believe in. But recently a strong doubt rose up in my heart, " Can Zen save anyone even those weak people including me who are not strong enough to be ready for entire self-denial?
In such a state of my mind I opened the Bible. "WARM! It is
so warm that I felt as if I were wrapped with the warmth. " 
responded my emotion. " But when it comes to some main points in their teaching・・・・・・・?”responded my reasoning-
power. " But,you can't deny the fact that numerous genius  accepted Christianity in the end in the history of about 2000 years. I wonder why? " I reflected on it deeply. I understood one thing. They were reading the Bible not with brain but with belief, the final shore of their struggle.
Life is painful. We writhed in agony. " Oh, I wish I could run away!" Until we are cornered to such an extent , we are not
entitled to say anything about religions.

Zen and Christianity
I compared the essential points of Zen with those of Christianity. Zen just like any other Buddhism starts with transiency,
that is all earthly things come and go. Zen seeks its salvation in our spiritual experience of 空, void, namely the state of no mind detached from either life or death, which can be experienced only after the act of thinking stops. On the other
hand, in my poor understanding, Christianity is also rooted in 
seeking eternal life starting from the fear of death, which means that Zen and Christianity are no different in terms of the starting point, despair when we become conscious of our
tiny existence in this cosmic world. And both of them claim that we can obtain peace of mind only by abounding the 
consciousness of me formed with ego. In fact I see no difference between the state of no mind in Zen and the state  
of our peaceful mind in Christianity when we lose the consciousness of me after leaving everything of me to God.

My interpretation of miracles through Zen
I contemplated miracles like the Resurrection hard to accept
from modern scientific view through Zen. It is , to be sure, an
impossible story if you depend on our ordinary way of thinking, that is dividing subject and object in philosophical sense.But it is not impossible to accept such an unscientific 
story if we think of it on the basis of Zen's way of thinking that , to begin with, things in themselves don't exist and come 
into being only when we have both subject, the mirror of things which can reflect everything and object. 

The unexpected thing happened in my heart
How strange it is to feel our mind more and more peaceful and vigorous when we gradually make the consciousness of me less and less in the direction of total disappearance. I picture
of historical figures such as Francis of Assisi whose portraits hanging on the wall of my room,  Mother Teresa, Gandhi and so on. They are those who found absolute peace in the depth of their mind . Their face tell clearly their peaceful mind and the strength of their determination.

Hiding nook
It seems to me that people of today are worried more than ever due only to the increase of the knowledge without painful mental and physical experiences from their childhood. The good example is the case of excessive consciousness of reaching life expectancy. The words of a Zen priest , Ryohkan,
lightens our mind. He says, " When we become sick, we should
become sickness itself. When time comes, we die. " In his words can be seen the wisdom of how to reach  the peace of mind. Another Zen priest , Dohgen, says, " To learn Buddhism
is to learn ourselves. To learn ourselves is  to forget ourselves." which means in my understanding , that by making 
ourselves nothing , we become no mind itself , the true ourselves , not phenomenal existence. Their attitude seems to
have a substantial agreement with entire self-denial to God
in Christianity. Now, everyone, Let's have a hiding nook where
we can rest our mind whatever may happen in this world.