Welcome...

...to the practice of Buddhism.

Don't just sit there - do something!

Conventional wisdom

Don't just do something - sit there!

Buddhist wisdom

This website includes a practical ten step how-to course in Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced Zen.

The first three steps are easy Beginning Zen practices. Steps four through nine are Intermediate Zen practices, and the tenth step of Advanced Zen includes a number of demanding practices for experienced practitioners.

It's a rather lengthy website and it continues to grow so we may want to bookmark it for future reference. There is too much content here to absorb in one visit.

It includes Beginning, Intermediate and Advanced practices that are good in the beginning, good in the middle and good in the end.

Hsi Lai

Hsi Lai Temple, Los Angeles

Although the Hsi Lai temple complex in LA may be the grandest of all Buddhist temple complexes in the continental U.S., it is merely one of thousands of Buddhist temples in the western hemisphere.

Buddhism has come to the West. ("Hsi Lai" means "Come to the West" with "Buddhism has" being implied).

We use the term "Zen" in its broad meaning of meditation. The course is not limited to the practices of the Zen sect of Buddhism. We include all of the Zen practices, but we also include practices from other Buddhist schools, including the Theravada school, the Mahayana school, and the Pure Land sect (Zen and Pure Land are sects of the Mahayana school).

Most of us believe that Zen is impenetrable and mysterious. "What is the deepest wisdom of Buddhism?" Answer: "The cypress tree in the courtyard!"

Or sometimes the answer is: Three pounds of flax!

Here you will learn why such answers are given.

Just remember it's a grand illusion

And deep inside we're all the same.

Styx wisdom

Getting started as a beginner is easy. An hour from now, you'll be a Beginning Zen practitioner!

But ten years from now, thirty years from now, you'll still be practicing Zen. It's not a hobby, it's not something you try awhile and then walk away from.

Vista

Vista Zen Center

We have no affiliation with the Vista Zen Center; we use this photo just to depict a typical Zen practice group. Note that some people are sitting on cushions and some are in conventional chairs and they are not monks or nuns.

Zen practice in the States is primarily a lay practice by people who lead busy lives. As such, it is much more relaxed than the classic Zen or Ch'an practiced in Japanese or Chinese monasteries where the discipline is strict, heads are shaved, and no chairs are to be found.

We will learn what is meant by Stream Entry, the Once Returner, the Non-Returner, and Nirvana.

More importantly, if we persist, we will experience Stream Entry.

Here we will learn (and experience) why the Buddha said: "We are the happy ones!"

Venerable Ajahn Sumedo with Master Hsuan Hua

Buddhism is not involved in a rivalry with any religion.

Buddhism has no supreme God that sits in judgment on human beings, but Buddhism does not sit in judgment on religions that have such a God.

Buddhism has no sacred texts that are the word of God, but it does not deny that such texts exist.

Buddhism recognizes that the Great Chain of Being does not end with us humans.

Buddhism has no gurus, no quarrel with science. It respects the great teacher who was known as The Buddha, but does not worship him.

As we progress through this course, we'll understand what happened when Moses went up to the top of a mountain and conversed with a bush that was burning but not consumed by fire.

Every visitor to this website who practices the ten steps of this course with diligence will climb that same mountain and have the same conversation with the same burning bush.

Here we will find the sixteen step meditation that the Buddha followed to full and complete enlightenment.

A year from now, you won't be the same person you are now. Of course, that will happen whether you take this course or not! But the change will be for the better even if you just practice the first three steps of Beginning Zen.

If you resolve to master this course at all three levels, a year from now you'll be glad you did. We look forward to hearing from you at Contact Us when you "complete" all three levels.

We put "complete" in quotes because practice has no beginning and enlightenment has no end...Dogen Zenji.

This site will seem quite strange at times to those who are unfamiliar with Buddhism. However, truth be told, it is the conventional, mundane world that is really the strange one...

Chuang Yen

Chuang Yen Monastery, Carmel, New York

Some people tell me they don't want to become enlightened because it is the end of all being. The Buddha said, however, that the views of eternal life or eternal annihilation were both wrong views. Anything we say about enlightenment will miss the mark because it cannot be described in words.

"What arises is only suffering arising, what ceases is only suffering ceasing." The Buddha (The Kaccanagotta Sutta).

The Buddha said he taught only the arising of suffering and the cessation of suffering. The ten dharma realms of the Mahayana or northern school and the thirty one dhamma realms of the Theravada or southern school are just planes of existence, planes created by ignorance, i.e., planes that don't exist at samyak sambodhi - full and complete, perfect enlightenment.

The dharma/dhamma realms exist only in the cloud of ignorance. Our minds, awash in sense desire, create dreams and fantasies and that's what we are - ignorance-born minds awash in stupidity, utterly ignorant of reality, and suffering as a result thereof.

That's why the Buddha told us to wake up and taught us how to wake up.

ddrc

Dharma Drum Mountain Retreat Center, Pine Bush, NY

Through daily practice that is diligent, ardent, and resolute we gradually realize that the mundane world is just a mirage, a fantasy, a dream without substance, a fog created by a deluded mind.

As the mirage lifts with daily cultivation, we discover that Nirvana/Nibbana is all there is and there never was anything else.

Builders used to put up large billboards by busy highways to advertise their developments to commuters stuck in traffic, saying:

If you lived here, you'd be home now!

A Buddhist-inspired New Yorker cartoon provided the perfect retort:

If you lived now, you'd be home here.

Thanks to the down-to-earth, easy-to-follow instructions provided by the Venerable Ajahn Brahm, we can guarantee that at this website you will learn how to live now, and to be home where ever you are.

When you experience the beautiful breath for the first time, you'll be happy that you stumbled here. Just follow the practices, every day, until they become second nature. You will eventually see the nimitta, the sign of Nirvana, during the ninth of the sixteen steps.

Emptiness is the jewel at the heart of the lotus.

If you follow the concrete, step-by-step instructions disclosed by the Buddha, you'll experience that truth; you don't have to believe anything.

The first three practices appear in Beginning Zen.

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