Q&A - Rebirth, Religion, & Compulsivity

Hi, Gil.

Um, so you've, uh, studied originally the So To Zen, uh, practice and then the Vipassana practice, and a number of us here, um, also probably have done both of them.

I'm, I, I practiced So To Zen for a while, and I'm still not really clear.

Like, I think there's a lot of overlap.

They're both Buddhist.

Um, but can you describe kind of what is the kind of different philosophy of those two?

Oh, the different philosophy? What do I know about that? [laughs]

Or what's different at all about them? Are they really the same thing, or is there anything different?

Well, some days I'll say they're the same.

Some days I'll say they're different.

Sometimes I'll say there's a big overlap.

[clears throat] Some of the more unusual ways I'm s- occasionally talk about it very personally for myself, and it goes a little bit along with your philosophy idea, [clears throat] maybe, that, um, the, uh, sometimes I think of, um, Vipassana as being my practice and Zen being my religion, though I'm not very interested in religion.

[laughs] So, um, and the, the reason for that is that, uh, the, the, some of the doctrinal or metaphysical basis for the traditional way that these are taught, that Theravada Buddhism, the Buddhism that Vipassana comes out of, has a certain, um, supernatural beliefs that I'm not at all interested in.

And, and some of them are really fundamental for the tradition, and one of them is that the goal of the practice is to ultimately no longer be reborn, and that doesn't kind of have any...

If that's the fundamental religious belief that really underpins it all, that doesn't interest me.

Uh, luckily for me, uh, if I go back and study the earliest teachings of the Buddha, that doesn't seem to be the case there as well.

That's an idea that grew over time.

And what I like about Zen, the kind of underpinning of that as I came to understand it, is that, um, it kind of represents what our place is in the universe.

That we kind of are the universe.

We belong in the universe.

We, we're c- we can be in deep harmony with this world that we live in.

We're not trying to get off the wheel or out of this world or radically separate ourselves, but that, uh, we can find a, a radical freedom in this world, uh, without positing any for or against or any idea that, uh, we're not part of it or, or that we're part of it even.

There's a kind of a wonderful freedom in the midst of this world that, uh, that, uh, doesn't have to be defined but kind of puts us in the world in a way that feels complete, uh, whole.

And, um, so I kind of see that ...

So that's why I say this funny thing that, uh, my practice is, is Vipassana Theravada.