If I were to define Zen Buddhism, I would do so in two four-word sentences:
Absolute attention is prayer.
Compassion for all beings.
“Zen teaches nothing. It merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach; it points. The truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect. The truth of Zen is what turns one’s humdrum life, a life of monotonous, uninspiring commonplaces into one of art, full of genuine creativity.” – D. T. Suzuki
Let’s review the Four Noble Truths before we begin our exploration of the Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration practices of the Eightfold Path. I define all the elements of the Eightfold Path as practices, because this is not a philosophy. It’s a way of living your life, which entails your active participation and practice.
Summary of the Four Noble Truths
The Buddha simplified the solution to the problems of the human condition into what he called the Four Noble Truths.
The First Noble Truth simply stated that human suffering is inevitable. There is suffering. To be human is to suffer. We all experience it.
The Second Noble Truth identified the causes of suffering: craving, delusion, and ignorance.
The Third Noble Truth was the critical step. The Buddha taught that since there was an identifiable cause for suffering, then there had to be an identifiable method for ending human suffering. That method was the Fourth Noble Truth.
The Fourth Noble Truth was the path to the end of suffering, what the Buddha called the Eightfold Path. The Fourth Noble Truth was a systematic approach to the end of human suffering—the dispelling of ignorance and the liberation of the mind. This is the Eightfold Path.
Related article: The Eightfold Path: Guidance For Life’s Challenges
Right mindfulness
Mindfulness is one of the eight practices of this path. It’s the one element of the path unifying and informing all the others. Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “When Right Mindfulness is present, the Four Noble Truths and the seven other elements of the Eightfold Path are present.” All together the eight practices are:
Right Mindfulness
Right Concentration
Right Thought
Right Understanding/View
Right Action
Right Effort
Right Livelihood
Right Speech
“There exists only the present instant; a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday, and no tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago, and a thousand years hence.” – Meister Eckhart
Mindfulness is always now. The reality of your life is always now and to realize this, and experience it, can be liberating. But we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth—overlooking it, running from it, repudiating it. And for the most part, we succeed. We somehow manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, chasing one desire after another, ignoring our fears, grasping at pleasure and seeking to avoid pain, and thinking incessantly about how to keep the ball going so that we don’t fall apart! It consumes our every waking moment. Sound familiar?
As a result, we spend our lives much less content than we might otherwise be. We fail to appreciate what we have until we’ve lost it. We crave experiences, material objects, relationships, only to become unsatisfied or bored with them. Being happy or wishing we could be happy all our lives is illusory.
Right mindfulness of daily miracles
Existence is yin and yang, suffering and joy, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, etc. But with Right Mindfulness we can learn to lessen our pain and experience joy. And we can turn our suffering into compassion and joy. Despite our suffering, even on bad days there are daily miracles for us to notice and to fill us with delight.
The problem is twofold. First, we are not grateful for what we have and the experiences we encounter throughout the day. When we are grateful for the daily miracles that life offers us then we begin to feel joy. Secondly, we are so focused on our own problems, we are so bored by our mundane lives that we don’t recognize the myriad of gifts that come our way.
So to appreciate what our lives have to offer we need to be awake—we must be mindful. We can’t be grateful for what we don’t notice. With practice we find that meditation or mindfulness practices make our ‘ordinary experiences’ extraordinary. I, myself, have found that meditating, whether walking or sitting, allows me to rest both my mind and body. It’s taking time out from ‘doing’ and switching to ‘being’ mode—simply letting go and following the music of my breath and my own beating heart.
How can we become aware of all the miracles of life if we don’t even notice them, if we’re caught in a continuous loop, ruminating on the past, and fretting over the future?
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There’s no fighting in this practice
In the beginning, when we practice meditation, there’s no chasing after concepts, but simply focusing on our breath and embracing silence and resting. And when thoughts or emotions arise, simply embrace them with your breath, and gently let them go.
It’s essential to know that there’s no need to struggle—there’s no fighting in this practice. Be kind to yourself, you are trying your best. With every mindful breath and every mindful step, you are beginning a journey to live a good life with meaning. You are beginning on the Eightfold Path. The goal is not to chase after dogma and concepts or seek ‘enlightenment’. In Zen Buddhism, the Path, itself, and helping others who are also on it, is the goal.
“The true journey of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having fresh eyes.” – Marcel Proust
Mindfulness has become a commonplace practice these days and is used in hospitals, substance abuse recovery groups, in the workplace, and by professional athletes. It’s practiced in completely secular settings and the literature on its psychological benefits is now substantial. There’s nothing esoteric about mindfulness. It’s simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant.
Right mindfulness requires great courage
Critics of mindfulness practice maintain that practicing meditation is simply ‘navel-gazing’: a passive enterprise that engages in wishful thinking and is simply a waste of time. However, there’s nothing passive about mindfulness. In fact, it requires an immense effort on one’s part.
Rather than engaging in wishful thinking, it requires great courage, for it entails standing in the ground of our own lives without running away from our own problems and shortcomings, without trying to project ourselves into a better strategic future, without resisting ‘what is’ in favor of ‘what should be’. Once we begin to perceive our lives more clearly and the problems that we, as humans, inevitably face, we can find better solutions to our own problems and ways to overcome our own shortcomings.
We are all struggling; none of us have gone far.
Let your arrogance go and look around inside–
The blue sky opens out farther and farther,
The daily sense of failure goes away.
The damage I have done to myself fades,
And a healing light seeps through the cracks
When I sit firmly in that world.
You are not alone.
Right Concentration
Eventually, by practicing Right Mindfulness, we develop an ability to concentrate, to focus our attention. Then, and only then, can we practice compassion by combining attention with intention for going beyond mindfulness to moral experience. This practice is called loving-kindness meditation. Love is not just a feeling, but an ability. And if it’s an ability, we can practice it.
If we have someone in our lives who is going through a very difficult illness, we say, ‘May this person be loved and protected, happy and healthy.’ You can say it for yourself, too. We need to be compassionate towards ourselves. We can say it for our families, our loved ones. Eventually, we expand our circle of love to more and more people, even to those we do not know.
I live my life in ever-widening circles
That reach out across the world.
I may not ever complete the last one,
but I give myself to it.
– Rilke
When I first moved to Seoul, South Korea to teach, I became very claustrophobic on the subway. It was so crowded. If I was lucky enough to get a seat, I would wedge myself in between two people and take a quick glance around me at the tension on people’s faces. I would then close my eyes, and practice loving-kindness with a calm smile on my face. I would think over and over, ‘May everyone on this subway car today be loved and protected, happy and healthy.’ It helped me. It actually became a part of my daily routine. But the most remarkable thing was that when I opened my eyes, I could see and feel that a lot of the stress was gone from people’s faces. Some people would even smile at me. Psychiatry has a term for this phenomenon: emotional contagion.
Right concentration and insight meditation
Along with loving-kindness meditation, we may also begin to cultivate Right Concentration by practicing vipassana or what is often called ‘insight meditation’.
My teacher would refer to vipassana as ‘looking deeply’. He also would refer to the ‘energy’ of mindfulness, or to shine the light of mindfulness on something. This used to confuse me, until I realized that he was referring to concentration—the ability to focus our attention on something inside or outside of ourselves for clarity—for insight.
Full disclosure: My teacher was and still is Thich Nhat Hanh. I have never met him but his teachings, his writings, and his poetry were a guide for me in a time of darkness. He has passed away now, but his teachings live on. And he would be the first person to tell you that eventually you need no teacher but yourself. Don’t get caught up in dharma talks, dogma, charismatic teachers, claiming to be ‘enlightened’. Live in the present moment and have compassion for all sentient beings. There’s an old Zen aphorism that says: ‘Do not mistake the finger pointing at the moon as the moon itself.’
Related article: Thich Nhat Hanh & The Zen Practice Of Stopping
With the simple practices of sitting and walking meditation, one can learn to concentrate, to focus. With this ability to practice Right Concentration, we can look deeply into ourselves to identify our suffering, what has caused it, and how we can best alleviate it. Often, there are no quick answers, or certitudes. Sometimes, it’s enough to accept the mystery of life itself.
Let things take their way
In Western culture, we are always looking for logical answers to all of life’s questions. In university, whether writing an essay for history, philosophy, or the social sciences we must begin with an argument. We have to repudiate the work of someone else. If we write a master’s or doctoral thesis, we have to defend it against a group of professors. The study of literature is not the appreciation of brilliant literature but literary criticism.
In the teachings of Zen Buddhism, a teacher or master, tells stories, leaving the onus on the student to understand the teaching for themselves. A student once complained to his master: ‘You always tell us stories, but you never reveal their meaning to us.’ The master replied: ‘How would you like it if I gave you fresh fruit and then chewed it for you?’
When we come to Buddhism, we’re generally in a hurry for answers to all our questions and get caught up in concepts: the meaning of impermanence, emptiness, no-self, etc. It’s best to be patient with yourself. Go at your own pace as you walk the Eightfold Path.
Where did my life come from?
Where will it go?
Even the present moment
Can’t be pinned down.
Everything changes, everything is empty
And in that emptiness, this ‘I’ exists
Only for a little while.
How can one say anything is or is not?
Best just to hold these little thoughts.
Let things simply take their way
And so be natural and at your ease.
– Ryokan
Harmonizing intention with attention
By ending our search for precise answers and by relinquishing our need to defend against and control external factors, we free up cognitive bandwidth. We open our hearts and minds, creating the conditions favorable for Right Concentration. We need this receptivity and clarity to practice Right Concentration—to harmonize our intention with attention.
Usually, we wake up in the morning reinvigorated with good intentions. We start our week afresh each Monday feeling motivated to tackle the challenges that lay before us. Classically, we mark January 1st as a day imbued with fresh intentions. But, in all of these cases, we often fail to sustain our intentions. So what goes wrong?
The antithesis of Right Concentration is distraction. We fail to manifest our intentions because we allow all kinds of thieves of attention to enter our conscious experience. In fact, we often deliberately welcome them in the form of entertainment, discursive engagement on social media, and unchecked sensual pleasure.
Zen Buddhism teaches that our innate nature is one of stillness—clear and undisturbed, transparent and reflective, like the mirrored surface of a pristine lake. Naturally, we are like an uncarved block of wood, unaltered by the whittling of distraction.
Right Mindfulness is the spotlight that illuminates our experience. Right Concentration is the aperture we can use to focus the light wherever we choose. Right Concentration keeps distractions, grasping, and aversion in the dark, leaving us with a torch of attention that we can direct towards the truly good things in life. With it, we can illuminate all the simple beauty often abundant in our lives: a fridge full of food, the changing colors of nature, a long car trip with the people we love most. We can illuminate our breath in sitting meditation with the intention to simply experience our existence. We can shine our awareness on thoughts of love and peace for ourselves, our loved ones, and for all beings. We can shine it on our body with the intention of softening, slowing, stopping.
Meditation is the training ground
For Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration to permeate our daily experience, we must train the muscles of mindfulness. This is done through meditation.
Mindfulness meditation isn’t easy. Practice is the only thing that can lead to success. As every meditator soon discovers, distraction is a pervasive condition of our minds—whether wandering off into daydreaming or falling into negative states of mind. Meditation is a technique for waking up. The goal is to come out of the spell of incessant thinking and to stop reflexively grasping at the pleasant and recoiling from the unpleasant, so that we can experience a mind of equanimity undisturbed by worry.
How to meditate
1. Sit comfortably with your spine erect, either in a chair or cross-legged on a cushion.
2. Take a few deep breaths, and feel the points of contact between your body and the chair or floor. Notice any sensations associated with sitting—pressure, warmth, tingling, etc.
3. Gradually become aware of the sensation of breathing. Pay close attention to where you feel your breath the most—the nostrils, mouth, or the rising and falling of your abdomen.
4. Allow your attention to rest in the sensation of breathing. You don’t have to manipulate your breath. Your breath will take care of itself. Is it shallow or deep? Does it change as you settle in or don’t settle in, whatever the case?
5. Every time your mind wanders (which will be every few seconds), gently return your attention to the breath. Don’t judge yourself harshly for failing to hold your attention on the breath. There is no fighting in this practice. Be kind to yourself. You’re doing your best.
6. As you focus on the process of breathing, you will also perceive sounds, bodily sensations, and emotions. Don’t push them away. Simply observe these phenomena as they appear in your consciousness and then return to the breath.
7. The moment you notice that you have been lost in thought (this is mindfulness), observe the present thought (I have been lost in thought) as an object of your attention. Then return your attention to the breath or to any sounds or sensations arising in the next moment.
8. Continue in this way until you can merely witness all objects of consciousness—sights, sounds, sensations, emotions, even thoughts themselves as they arise, change, and pass away.
Success is not measured in terms of what is happening to us, but by how we relate to what is happening. Not paying attention keeps us in an endless cycle of wanting, of longing. We move on to the next thing because we aren’t cognizant of what we already have. Inattention creates an endless need for stimulation for us to feel alive! We can easily fall into addictive behavior.
His life is a pursuit of a pursuit forever
It is the future that creates his present
All is an interminable chain of longing
– Robert Frost
When our lives feel like an endless chain of longing, usually the first link in the chain is not being fully present. Concentration is what breaks the chain. Learning to deepen our concentration allows us to look at the world with calm and equanimity and begin to feel at home with our body and mind and with life itself.
Your true home
With right mindfulness and concentration, you can find your true home in the full relaxation of your mind and body in the present moment. No one can take it away from you. When we stop speaking and thinking and deeply enjoy our in- and out-breath, we arrive at our true home and we can touch the wonders of life. When you breathe in, you bring all yourself together, body and mind: you become one. Equipped with that energy of mindfulness, you may take a step. And if you can take one step, you can take another and another.
“Once you’re facing in the right direction, all you need is to keep walking.”
With insight you realize that you are alive. Your true home is a solid reality that you can touch with your hands, feet, and mind. In your daily life, your body and mind often go in two different directions. You’re in a state of distraction; mind one place, body another. Your body is putting on your coat, getting what you need for your day, and your mind is preoccupied—caught in the past and the future. But between the mind and body there is something that can bring them together: your breath.
And as soon as you go home to your breath with awareness, your mind and body come together very quickly. While breathing in, you don’t think of anything; just focus your attention on your in-breath. Become your in-breath. Suddenly you find that you are alive and fully present. Joy and happiness can only be experienced with right mindfulness and concentration.
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