Thread: Meditation
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Old 09-11-2013, 11:11 AM   #31
lbb
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Re: Meditation

Quote:
Benjamin Edelen wrote: View Post
I would not invest the slightest trust in the catholic church's estimation of value.

I thought, from the title of the thread, that we were talking about what english speaking zen practitioners also refer to as "sitting", which I understand to be a formal training method that is more or less universally practiced by Buddhists.
I don't think that's a given. We're using the English word "meditation", which comes to us from the Latin, dates from about 1200, and therefore seems likely to have its roots in Christian spiritual practices. Nowadays, it's used for a range of spiritual practices (see my earlier post). No one tradition owns the term "meditation", not even within the context of an Aikido forum.

(as an aside, I'd disagree with "more or less universally practiced by Buddhists". I've practiced Zen and also shamata vipassana -- my current practice -- and find that while they have much in common, they also have significant differences)

Quote:
Benjamin Edelen wrote: View Post
If fancy pants famous characters want to call other types of practice meditation too, that is certainly their prerogative, but I suspect such overloading of the term is the root of the lack of common ground on the subject.

I guess that having diverse interpretations of esoteric terminology is very apropos to this venue.
It depends on the terminology, but in the case of the word "meditation", I'd say that's appropriate anywhere. It's a very wide-ranging term and is not "overloaded" by anything that anyone's said here. I think it's perfectly valid to frame it in a specific context for the purposes of a discussion ("Zen meditation", for instance), but that's not how this discussion began.
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