Zen Buddhism: the sound of one hand
You've probably read about Zen Buddhist masters who beat their students with a stick or shouted their instructions to the fullest extent of their lungs. But you may not have even suspected that Zen Buddhism is a unique combination of Mahayana Buddhism and the local Chinese tradition known as Taoism (which emphasizes the holistic and inseparable nature of life known as Tao). (Although Indian monks brought Buddhism to China as early as the first centuries A.D., Zen Buddhism emerged as an independent movement only in the VII-VIII centuries.) Zen Buddhism has radically moved away from traditional Buddhism, focusing on the direct, silent transmission of the enlightened state from teacher to pupil, sometimes through behavior that the average person thinks is strange or even ridiculous.
While other Buddhist traditions focused on the study of sacred scriptures, Zen Buddhism managed to make a breakthrough through the metaphysical veil and said: "Just sit down! Meditation has become the primary means to overcome the lifelong attachment to the material world and to comprehend what Zen Buddhist teachers call the nature of Buddha, the wisdom that is inherent in each of us from birth.
Zen Buddhism has also formulated seemingly unsolvable riddles known as koans, such as "What sound can one hand make?" By being completely immersed in such a koan, a monk may eventually enter the nature of all things - what Zen teachers call satoris.
In Japan, Zen Buddhism has greatly contributed to the development of the well-known samurai strength of spirit and hardness, and has given rise to the development of strict, clean, simple yet sophisticated aesthetics, such as stone gardens and ink drawings. From Japan, Zen Buddhism paved the way for itself to North America, earned great popularity among the beatnik generation in the 1950s, and paved the way for a recent surge in interest in meditation. (For more on Zen Buddhism in North America, see the section on "Americanization of Meditation" later in this chapter.)
Vajrayana Buddhism: The Path of Transformation
Like China (where Buddhism encountered Taoism), Tibet also had its own religion, called Bon, which included, among other things, magical rituals designed to appease local spirits and pagan deities. When the great Indian teacher Padmasambhava brought Buddhism from India to Tibet in the seventh century AD, he first had to defeat the evil spirits that resisted his efforts. Ultimately, these spirits became an integral part of Tibetan Buddhism, serving as defenders and allies in the complex Tibetan pantheon.
Tibetan Buddhists believed that the Buddha preached his teaching at different levels at the same time, depending on the needs and abilities of his disciples. The most intimate of the Buddha's teachings, they claimed, had been kept secret for centuries and eventually ended up in Tibet, called Vajrayana. Traditional meditation on the basis of maximum inclusion in Vajrayana is combined with elements of Indian tantra and uses powerful methods of energy management. If traditional Buddhism teaches to eliminate negative emotions and states of consciousness, such as anger, greed and fear, Vajrayana Buddhism teaches its adherents to transform all this negative directly into wisdom and compassion.
Meditation in Tibetan Buddhism also involves visualization, i.e. the active use of imagination to attract powerful spiritual forces that initiate the process of spiritual comprehension.
To the Middle East and beyond to the West
Although meditation in Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions is developing independently, meditators in the Middle East may have been influenced by the methods used in India and Southeast Asia (see previous sections of this chapter). Historians believe that merchants and pilgrims have long visited these regions, and Buddhist monks appeared in Rome in early Christian times! Indian meditators - following the ancient notion that Amman equals brahman ("I and the basis of being are one whole") - focused on themselves and focused on themselves, trying to find the divine in the depths of their own self, Western thinkers and theologians pointed to God, who they believed existed outside the individual.