Full Disclosure: How people lie about sitting meditation

What is meditation, and why do people lie about it?

1. They lie that they're doing it; most religions say you need special instruction and supervision..
2. They lie that they are not doing it; some religions claim that their method in practice is ordinary... But you still need special instruction in supervision.
   

3. They lie about where it comes from. Zazen was invented by Dogen, a Tientai Buddhist priest. It was never a Soto Zen Practice. Vipassana as practiced today was a modern reinvention from the early 1900s.

4. They lie about what it is supposed to do... But more often they just don't even know what their own doctrine says. What is the purpose of their sitting meditation tradition according to its primary text?

   • Zazen is supposed to create Buddhas that come into the world only during Zazen practice. The "masters" are thought to be able to maintain it after practice for various lengths of time.

5. They lie about what it does: Zazen for example, is supposed to be the gate to enlightenment, when the most prominent Zazen masters of the 1900s were all involved in meditation teacher sex predator scandals, and many of them were drug addicts.

6. They lie about Zen: It's interesting because it turns out that people who misrepresent their own sitting meditation tradition also want to misrepresent Zen. There are people in this forum who have some loose affiliation to a meditation religion and they consistently lie about Zen.

   • A great example is people who say r/Zen has an anti- meditation cult. That's not only ridiculous... people agreeing isn't a cult thing. Calling r/Zen a cult is a deliberate cover for the fact that some people are actually personally associated Dogen's meditation cult.
     
   • There's a long history (well documented to at least 900 CE) of zen masters rejecting sitting, meditation traditions... To study then is to reject sitting meditation religions. /r/zen/wiki/notmeditation
   • "Just be natural in accordance with our mind, do not engage in the practice of insight and do not stop your mind['s] activities" - Patriarch's Hall

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^Yo͞ok  Welcome! ^{Meet me}  My comment: One of the most concerning things about all this is that it points to cultures where lying is part of the culture. Once you pick at one lie, all these other misrepresentations unravel. I've had people tell me that some kinds of lying aren't that big a deal... well, if that's true, why do it? If you are not affiliated with a church and your views are your own, why not say that? If you have strong sympathies with a cult and friends in that cult, why not say so? If you live by yourself, why pretend you are in a monastic community of one?

Far more alarmingly, though, it's clear that most of this lying has (accidentally) very real, very measurable financial and social benefits for the liar. From churches lying about being Zen and making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year off that lie to individuals wanting the public attention of forums like r/Zen, all this lying is associated with measurable benefits. It seems in that context that the lying isn't an accident.

Submitted March 13, 2023 at 06:36AM by ewk https://ift.tt/BxkbDLp