Chuang Tzu: >"May I ask about the mind's fast?" > >"Center your attention," began Confucius. "Stop listening with your ears and listen with your mind. Then stop listening with your mind and listen with your primal spirit. Hearing is limited to the ear. Mind is limited to tallying things up. But the primal spirit's empty: it's simply that which awaits things. Way is emptiness merged, and emptiness is the mind's fast." > >"Before I begin my practice," said Yen Hui, "I am truly Yen Hui. But once I'm in the midst of my practice, I've never even begun to be Yen Hui. Can this be called emptiness?" > >"Yes, that's it exactly," replied Confucius. --- Evan Thompson: > Meditation, whether traditional or modern, is [[ritual]]. When you meditate you engage in a practice of transforming the self (and the community) by repeatedly performing certain scripted actions and adopting certain roles, which serve to continually remind you of how things are or how they can be imaginatively envisioned, according to a governing conceptual framework, which in turn you work to assimilate through those very actions. The idea that meditation isn’t ritual because it’s supposed to be a practice for well-being or examining the mind is a typical "Buddhist modernist" misconception. Know this, and also know how to set this knowledge aside in order to practice wholeheartedly.