Meditation and the practice of Zen

With our materialistic mindset it is easy to imagine that our thoughts come from the body; that somehow, mysteriously, the body has managed to make thoughts.  We could even say our thoughts are electro-chemical reactions that emerge from neural processes which depend upon the body.  At this point, our understanding of how thought is formed before it emerges is not known.  We only have hypotheses. 

Also, what Zen’s no-thought really means finds no answer.  It certainly does not come from daily blocking our thoughts; trying to smother them.  Only when there is just pure spirit, that is, Mind-only, is one released from the powerful seduction of thoughts.  Here lies the Buddha’s liberation.

Most everyone who is interested in Zen equate it with seated meditation.  I imagine that if you suffer from a light case of “akathisia” which is characterized by a feeling of inner restlessness and the inability to sit still, seated meditation might be helpful.  Seated meditation tends to produce a general feeling of quietude. 

But what does it mean to have the noble insight of revulsion…having arrived at the door to the deathless?  This is not some relaxed state of being.  With the deathless as its final goal Buddhism understands the deathless to be also unconditioned.  But our thoughts are not other than conditioned.  Now we can begin to see what Zen is aiming at by “no-thought”.  No-thought goes beyond the mortality of our body which is conditioned.

But we moderns will have none of this mumbo-jumbo (postmortem survival).  When our body dies along with our thoughts which are electro-chemical we believe there is nothing beyond—certainly no such state as no-thought.  But Bodhidharma once said: “No-thought is nothing other than practice; there is no other practice. Thus you'll realize that no-thought is everything, and that extinction of the conditioned (nirvana) is nothing other than no-thought.”