“Sitting in your garden is a feat to be worked at with unflagging determination and single-mindedness - for what gardener worth his salt sits down. I am deeply committed to sitting in the garden.”
- Mirabel Osler
- Mirabel Osler
Photo by Karen Garofalo taken in our backyard, November 2008.
“The Chinese term for meditation is Ching Tso, which translated means “sitting
still with peaceful mind.” Meditation is the training of the inner senses of the body and mind. It is as rigorous as the training undertaken by an athlete or an artist. … By helping us to think clearly and concentrate fully, Ching Tso enables us to commune totally with our God, with distracting or artifical thoughts. … The highest and most advanced goal of meditation is to gain enlightenment. We want to go beyond the limitations of our knowledge and our three-dimensional view of the world. Our goal is to perceive fully the fourth dimension and understand our relationship to it.”
- Jou Tsung-Hwa, The Tao of Meditation, p 3-5.
still with peaceful mind.” Meditation is the training of the inner senses of the body and mind. It is as rigorous as the training undertaken by an athlete or an artist. … By helping us to think clearly and concentrate fully, Ching Tso enables us to commune totally with our God, with distracting or artifical thoughts. … The highest and most advanced goal of meditation is to gain enlightenment. We want to go beyond the limitations of our knowledge and our three-dimensional view of the world. Our goal is to perceive fully the fourth dimension and understand our relationship to it.”
- Jou Tsung-Hwa, The Tao of Meditation, p 3-5.
“The first and most important gigong meditation is called ru jing (”entering tranquillity”). Entering tranquillity means training the mind to be silently aware with any particular point of focus. It is nothingness. The mind is not thinking about but rather experiencing directly, immediately, without the mediation of thoughts and concepts. Ancient Daoist classics called
this “the fasting of the mind.”
- Kenneth S. Cohen, The Way of Qigong, p. 148
this “the fasting of the mind.”
- Kenneth S. Cohen, The Way of Qigong, p. 148
Even though I have a copy of T.H. Jou's fine book, the reference to ching tso took me aback for a moment. For those of us who are more comfortable with pinyin, it would be jingzuo, which means sitting quietly, as opposed to zuowang, the meditation Livia Kohn calls sitting in oblivion.
ReplyDeleteMr. Jou is from Taiwan, which explains the Romanization, and perhaps also that jingzuo has somewhat Confucian overtones, as opposed to the more Taoist zuowang. The characters for the terms are different. (At least the jing and wang parts. Zuo/tso means sit.)
But of course, there are all kinds of meditation, and not all involve zuo.
At some point, working with all this Chinese stuff turns into codebreaking!
Sitting, just sit. Gardening, just garden. Enlightenment? Where is my coffee?
ReplyDeleteBaroness radon,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your scholarly observations and insights.
Sitting still, observing nature, dwelling less on personal concerns, slowly one's breathing, being still ... the garden is quite beautiful.
Eight Ways to break the code of wonder. Poetry and art are two.
Best wishes,
Mike
ordinary malaysian,
ReplyDeleteAnother sip of java,
another post,
another morning in the garden.
Enlightenment?
ripe fuyu persimmons
I'm rarely
ReplyDelete"oblivious"
to the Not I
that is me,
maybe when asleep
(maybe when dead
but I'd never know)
but
of course
there are all kinds of
meditation
of which I'm unaware.
Michael, ripe fuyu persimmons - well said!
ReplyDelete