Name: The Fruits of Zen Practice
Uploaded: 2014-06-11T14:52:41.000Z
Duration: 9 min 32 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

and in doing so, awakening to the dynamic reality of each present moment.

whereby we are able to give ourselves time

If someone is able to do this in a sustained way,

there are three fruits that come to bear in such a person's life.

This is what we call, "The Three Fruits of Zen Practice."

The first fruit involves a way of life that comes from the center of one's whole being.

It is a way whereby one is able to live fully in the here and now.

The word we use here is, "concentration."

But I like to put a hyphen between, "con"

to emphasize the centering aspect of this.

Namely, we come back to the center of our being,

It is a way whereby we are no longer hankering after

When we are talking with somebody, we are fully there,

In other words, we are attentive to what is happening

As one deepens this sense of attentiveness to the here and now,

the second fruit of zen is more easily opened up.

This is what we can describe as a glimpse

A very helpful way of putting this in words is that

it is a realization of our non-separateness

a realization of our relatedness with each and everyone,

and with each and every element in this whole universe.

strikes me at this point as an experience

Thomas Merton talks about an experience of his

when he was visiting the city of Louisville in Kentucky,

standing on a busy street corner called, "Fourth and Walnut."

There, just watching all the people pass by,

all of a sudden, he writes in his journal,

he came to a realization that he loved all these people

and that they also were bound to him in that,

that also enveloped his whole being and everyone else.

That experience was a turning point in Merton's own life.

Those who know the trajectory of Merton's life

see that that glimpse of non-separateness

enabled him to really engage himself in the world,

in a way that sought to transform the world toward its betterment.

to his home in Kamakura, that's about an hour away.

And, around the middle of the train ride,

he is reading a book by zen master Dogen of the

and his eyes fall upon a passage that said,

And as his mind really saw through that passage,

and as he realized what it was pointing to,

there was his wife beside him, sitting on the train,

that mind is no other than mountains and rivers!