What is Zen❓✌🏽

2 days ago
3 min read

The word Zen gets thrown around a lot in yoga, but the word doesn't actually mean what we think it does. It's very similar to the word yoga. Or Joga, as my mum pronounces it. An old subcontinent way of saying it.

So a better way to put it, rather than saying we have the meaning of Zen wrong, is that there are two types of Zen. As there is yoga. There is the old meaning of the word and a new meaning. And neither is right or wrong. Words often evolve with time.

Many moons ago, a man named Siddhartha Gautama lived in Lumbini (present-day Nepal). He was the son of the king Śuddhodana and, as you may have already read in the story (my original blog on the Buddha from 2016), turned his back on the material world to to find a deeper meaning to life and existence. Once he discovered, or uncovered more specifically, the mystery of life, he was now eternally awake and was now referred to as Gautama Buddha. Eternally awake, Gautama was now enlightened. That is the moment he became for the first time an unconditioned, truly sane and free human being.

The Buddha's teachings (as reluctant as he was to share something beyond words) would spread far and wide, and followers of the path laid out by the Buddha would become Buddhists. His words and the eternal teachings started out in India and spread into China, where a meeting of philosophies occurred. Here, the wisdom of the Buddha hit close to home with the Chinese philosophy of Tao, or Dao. A philosophy and way of being (moving along life as if being carried by a tide with no resistance) was founded, or first popularised, by the legend that is Lao Tzu. I have often referenced him in my book and blogs ever since I started writing.

The principles of both aligned and the language may have clashed at times, but the underlying message did not. So Zen was born. Zen was not a philosophy as Buddhism and Tao were. It was an unconscious merging of both. Like the yin-yang symbol, once they meet, they merge and only appear separate for visual aesthetics. But the marriage of the two, the meeting of philosophies, created Zen. Zen, like the principle of real meditation in yoga, is not an act. It is a becoming. It's what happens rather than what we try and do. You can't be Zen. Zen grows in you 🥀.

As the quote goes:

“Taking it all in all, Zen is emphatically a matter of personal experience; if anything can be called radically empirical, it is Zen.”

Another way I understand it, or rationalise it, is that Buddhism (to me at least), alongside Tao, is purely philosophical. When you immerse yourself in either path, your mind is forever asking why. Thus, your journey is philosophical. Once you no longer need to ask why, as in, why are we here? Why am I here? Even, where do I belong? When you organically lose the questions and just start being as you are, you are no longer philosophical. You are Zen. You are religious. And that, to me, is religion in its truest sense. Not something you try to be, but something that you are. Being religious isn't tied to your clothes or beliefs; it flows inside you, oblivious to the outside world.

In modern times we call everything Zen, and that isn't wrong. It's just a new use of the word to describe any feeling of calmness and tranquillity. But the old use of the word went far beyond. The true meaning of Zen (and yoga, for that matter) appears so far out of reach that we have created a new meaning for it. Rather than reaching for Zen, we have brought Zen closer to us to meet our world. We have done the same to God. We humanised God so "he" would be relatable. And we do that with everything (especially anything yoga related). But that's an email (rant) for another day 😁.

Just know that some things are OK to remain a mystery. The world keeps its magic that way .✨

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Namaskar - Eternal Seeker

Zahir Akram

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