Summary

A quick look at Intermediate Zen practice

1. Reciting The Three General Resolutions and the Four Noble Truths, walking in kinhin with hands held in shashu, and performing the Eight Form Moving Meditation takes about ten minutes. Present Moment Awareness meditation - about fifteen minutes.

2-3. Loving Kindness and Silent Present Moment Awareness, followed by reciting the repentance gatha, another fifteen minutes.

4. Reciting The Ten Cardinal Precepts, while still seated, takes one minute.

5. Reciting Master Hakuin's Chant in Praise of Zazen, while still seated, takes about ninety seconds. The Heart Sutra takes a few seconds over two minutes. The other two chants take a total of a minute although they are usually chanted over and over for several minutes each. Minimum time is thus about five minutes.

6. Fifty four recitations of Amitabha Buddha, while still seated, takes a little more than a minute. We suggest putting this chant on a CD in your car and mentally chanting with it while commuting. We will go way over the minimum and that's not a bad thing.

7. Each prostration takes about ten to fifteen seconds so fifty four prostrations take about ten to fifteen minutes.

Total time is less than an hour.

To minimize practice time, we can add the recitations and chants to the morning kinhin. We can recite Amitabha Buddha during the prostrations or add that practice to the kinhin as well.

8. For our evening practice, we read a Theravada sutta for thirty minutes or so every day.

9. After sutta study, we practice counting breaths for thirty minutes or so or we invest thirty minutes in practicing Tranquil Wisdom meditation.

None of these steps are dogma. If we prefer to do prostrations at night, we do that. We can rearrange the ten steps into any order that works for us.

10. The important thing to remember is to work on leaving the lower nine dharma realms and arriving at the first dharma realm every day. To be a Buddha, think like a Buddha every day.