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"Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence" - Vince Lombardi

I wish that it was me who first thought to say if we chase perfection we can catch excellence, because if anything sums up the ethos of Ultimate Performance personal training this phrase is it.

We constantly strive to be perfect Personal Trainers, in the perfect gym environment, with the perfect personal training methodology. But as we all know, attaining anything close to perfection is always a challenge, especially in something as inherently complex and individualised as personal training.

Trying to find the perfect Personal Trainer for your specific needs can be a tricky business. There are only a few of us with any sort of profile, so sorting the wheat from the chaff can be a rather confusing process. In fact, the hardest part of my job as the boss of the number one personal training team in London is hiring the right Personal Trainers to match our world-class standards. This is despite the fact that we even have our own successful Personal Trainer Education Academy that trains fitness professionals from all over the world. So if I struggle and only interview an average of one applicant per 115 Personal Trainers who apply for a job, heaven help the unsuspecting potential client looking for a great personal trainer but who lacks my insider knowledge.

It is for this reason that this website is set up a bit differently from any other personal training site that you will find. We can tell you that we are fantastic and the best celebrity Personal Trainers in the land, but self-praise is an easy accolade to pick up and doesnt help you to cut through the BS and find the very best Personal Trainer for your unique and specific needs. So the aim of this website is to entertain and inform you by showing you that we really do know more about achieving maximum results in minimum time than you ever thought possible.

London Mayfair Gym The Best Personal Training Gym in London- Mens Health UKSingapore Gym The Largest Personal Training Gym in Asia- Time Out SingaporeMarbella Gym The European Training Mecca! - Muscle & Fitness

We will show off our knowledge of all things related to improving your body composition; our groundbreaking personal training gyms that have been described as the best personal training facilities in London by the likes of Mens Health; and most importantly of all we will show you the results that we consistently achieve with our personal training clients, because no other London Personal Trainer comes close to doing what we can do.

Big words and big promises I know, but if you visit our real results section at the top of this page, you can see that we can back up every word that I write. Our clients run the gamut from City of London professionals to international bodybuilders and Victorias Secret models, from Olympic athletes to pop and soap opera stars, people whose careers rely upon us to help them look and perform at the very top of their game.

We have numerous accolades and testimonials, all of which you should look for in any personal trainer worth their salt, but perhaps it all comes down to this one question that you need to ask yourself:

"Your Body is Your Most Precious Asset, Who Would You Trust With It?"

If I were asked this question I know what my answer would be I would trust the Personal Trainer who shows me the most proof and makes me feel the most comfortable.

And why is UP widely recognised throughout the Personal Training industry as the worlds leading personal trainers? I can give you a vague answer and reel off important yet soft factors such as culture, education, passion and quality control, but rather than waffle allow me to give you a few facts.

UP is the only international Personal Training business in the world, with our own gyms in London, Marbella, Singapore, Hong Kong and Los Angeles. This means that I oversee 2,000 plus personal training sessions every week and have a unique insight into the methodologies that get the best results in real world situations with our specific demographic of busy, often highly stressed, 30-50 year old clients. No one else in the world has access to the information that the human laboratory of UP worldwide can produce, and this has been instrumental in allowing us to refine our processes and generate the results that we are famous for.

So sit back, take your time and browse through our site, check out our credentials, personal training testimonials, and results and if you want to learn more and make an appointment then contact us and wed love to get back to you with any advice that we can.

Yours in Health & Wellness,

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Snowshoeing is a massive growing sport. You can do it almost anywhere, with all kinds of snow conditions, regardless of your fitness level or skill. Personal Best and Caledon Hills Bike Shop are working together to bring you a unique-fun-social winter experience on Sunday, Feb 10th at the Albion Hills Conservation Park in Caledon (5min north of Bolton). The Feb 10th PB-Caledon Hills Bike Shop Event is a part of the Snowshoe Canada Winter Race Series. Participants have a number of options on this fun-social bare-bones event.

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Personal Best is proud to work closely with the C3 Canadian Cross Training Club to bring you the popular Mega Day workouts.

Jan 12th, Feb 2nd & Feb 23th

For details and registrationvisitthe C3 website at http://www.c3online.ca

New this year, the Mega Day starts with an optional 6:30-8:00 swim. Then the regular 9:00-12:00 bike, lunch speaker and then Caron Shepley's legendary core/yoga workout 1:15-2:30pm

Join seventy to one hundred motivated age groupers of all ages and fitness levels riding indoors for 2-3 hours with two world-class teacher/coaches on the front stage. The room will be filled with great music, a big screen and a filled with great energy. Athletes are able to accomplish workouts in the group environment that they never could have done on their own. Following the 3 hour indoor ride (you can take breaks whenever you need one), there is a 75 minute lunch break with a different 30 minute educational seminar at each of the Mega Days. Each days seminar will be a different topic (seminars topics to be finalized). Caron Shepley's Core/Yoga class is a 75 minute session where the world-class ironwoman/yoga expert will take all participants through a strengthening, flexibility and injury prevention workout. Each Workout goes from 1:15-2:30pm in the main ball room. You can come for the morning, the afternoon or the full day.

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During the 1950s and 1960s, British philosopher and writer Alan Watts began popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West, offering a wholly different perspective on inner wholeness in the age of anxiety and what it really means to live a life of purpose. We owe much of todays mainstream adoption of practices like yoga and meditation to Wattss influence. His 1966 masterwork The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (public library) builds upon his indispensable earlier work as Watts argues with equal parts conviction and compassion that the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East. He explores the cause and cure of that illusion in a way that flows from profound unease as we confront our cultural conditioning into a deep sense of lightness as we surrender to the comforting mystery and interconnectedness of the universe.

Envisioned as a packet of essential advice a parent might hand down to his child on the brink of adulthood as initiation into the central mystery of life, this existential manual is rooted in what Watts calls a cross-fertilization of Western science with an Eastern intuition.

Though strictly nonreligious, the book explores many of the core inquiries which religions have historically tried to address the problems of life and love, death and sorrow, the universe and our place in it, what it means to have an I at the center of our experience, and what the meaning of existence might be. In fact, Watts begins by pulling into question how well-equipped traditional religions might be to answer those questions:

The standard-brand religions, whether Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, are as now practiced like exhausted mines: very hard to dig. With some exceptions not too easily found, their ideas about man and the world, their imagery, their rites, and their notions of the good life dont seem to fit in with the universe as we now know it, or with a human world that is changing so rapidly that much of what one learns in school is already obsolete on graduation day.

Watts considers the singular anxiety of the age, perhaps even more resonant today, half a century and a manic increase of pace later:

There is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out.

He weighs how philosophy might alleviate this central concern by contributing a beautiful addition to the definitions of what philosophy is and recognizing the essential role of wonder in the human experience:

Most philosophical problems are to be solved by getting rid of them, by coming to the point where you see that such questions as Why this universe? are a kind of intellectual neurosis, a misuse of words in that the question sounds sensible but is actually as meaningless as asking Where is this universe? when the only things that are anywhere must be somewhere inside the universe. The task of philosophy is to cure people of such nonsense. . . . Nevertheless, wonder is not a disease. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.

At the heart of the human condition, Watts argues, is a core illusion that fuels our deep-seated sense of loneliness the more we subscribe to the myth of the sole ego, one reflected in the most basic language we use to make sense of the world:

We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that I myself is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body a center which confronts an external world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. I came into this world. You must face reality. The conquest of nature.

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not come into this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean waves, the universe peoples. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated egos inside bags of skin.

(A curious aside for music aficionados and fans of the show Weeds: Watts uses the phrase little boxes made of ticky-tacky to describe the homogenizing and perilous effect of the American quest for dominance over nature , space, mountains, deserts, bacteria, and insects instead of learning to cooperate with them in a harmonious order. The following year, Malvina Reynolds used the phrase in the lyrics to her song Little Boxes, which satirizes suburbia and the development of the middle class. The song became a hit for Pete Seeger in 1963 and was used by Showtime as the opening credits score for the first three seasons of Jenji Kohans Weeds.)

Religions, Watts points out, work to reinforce rather than liberate us from this sense of separateness, for at their heart lies a basic intolerance for uncertainty the very state embracing which is fundamental to our happiness, as modern psychology has indicated, and crucial to the creative process, as Keats has eloquently articulated. Watts writes:

Religions are divisive and quarrelsome. They are a form of one-upmanship because they depend upon separating the saved from the damned, the true believers from the heretics, the in-group from the out-group. . . . All belief is fervent hope, and thus a cover-up for doubt and uncertainty.

In a sentiment that Alan Lightman would come to echo more than half a century later in his remarkable meditation on science and what faith really means, Watts adds:

Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness an act of trust in the unknown.

[]

No considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.

Instead, Watts proposes that we need a new domain, not of ideas alone, but of experience and feeling, something that serves as a point of departure, not a perpetual point of reference and offers not a new Bible but a new way of understanding human experience, a new feeling of what it is to be an I.' In recognizing and fully inhabiting that feeling, he argues, lies the greatest taboo of human culture:

Our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

And yet, he argues, the sense of I and the illusion of its separateness from the rest of the universe is so pervasive and so deeply rooted in the infrastructure of our language, our institutions, and our cultural conventions that we find ourselves unable to experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. The antidote lies in recognizing not merely that we belong to and with the rest of universe, but that there is no rest in the first place we are the universe.

Still, Watts cautions that this is not to be confused with the idea of unselfishness promoted by many religions and ideologies, which is the effort to identify with others and their needs while still under the strong illusion of being no more than a skin-contained ego:

Such unselfishness is apt to be a highly refined egotism, comparable to the in-group which plays the game of were-more-tolerant-than-you.

Echoing C.S. Lewiss advice to children on duty and love, Watts writes:

Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt.

[]

Our whole knowledge of the world is, in one sense, self-knowledge. For knowing is a translation of external events into bodily processes, and especially into states of the nervous system and the brain: we know the world in terms of the body, and in accordance with its structure.

One thing that reinforces our isolated sensation of self, Watts argues, is our biological wiring to err on always either side of the figure-ground illusion, only ever able to see one half of the whole and remaining blind to the rest. He illustrates this with a beautiful analogy:

All your five senses are differing forms of one basic sensesomething like touch. Seeing is highly sensitive touching. The eyes touch, or feel, light waves and so enable us to touch things out of reach of our hands. Similarly, the ears touch sound waves in the air, and the nose tiny particles of dust and gas. But the complex patterns and chains of neurons which constitute these senses are composed of neuron units which are capable of changing between just two states: on or off. To the central brain the individual neuron signals either yes or no thats all. But, as we know from computers which employ binary arithmetic in which the only figures are 0 and 1, these simple elements can be formed into the most complex and marvelous patterns.

In this respect our nervous system and 0/1 computers are much like everything else, for the physical world is basically vibration. Whether we think of this vibration in terms of waves or of particles, or perhaps wavicles, we never find the crest of a wave without a trough or a particle without an interval, or space, between itself and others. In other words, there is no such thing as a half wave, or a particle all by itself without any space around it. There is no on without off, no up without down.

[]

While eyes and ears actually register and respond to both the up-beat and the down-beat of these vibrations, the mind, that is to say our conscious attention, notices only the up-beat. The dark, silent, or off interval is ignored. It is almost a general principle that consciousness ignores intervals, and yet cannot notice any pulse of energy without them. If you put your hand on an attractive girls knee and just leave it there, she may cease to notice it. But if you keep patting her knee, she will know you are very much there and interested. But she notices and, you hope, values the on more than the off. Nevertheless, the very things that we believe to exist are always on/offs. Ons alone and offs alone do not exist.

Indeed, he argues that the general conditioning of consciousness is to ignore intervals. (Weve seen the everyday manifestation of this in Alexandra Horowitzs fascinating exploration of what we dont see.) We register the sound but not the silence that surrounds it. We think of space as nothingness in which certain somethings objects, planetary bodies, our own bodies hang. And yet:

Solids and spaces go together as inseparably as insides and outsides. Space is the relationship between bodies, and without it there can be neither energy nor motion.

What further fuels this half-sighted reliance on intervals is the way our attention which has been aptly called an intentional, unapologetic discriminator works by dividing the world up into processable parts, then stringing those together into a pixelated collage of separates which we then accept as a realistic representation of the whole that was there in the first place:

Attention is narrowed perception. It is a way of looking at life bit by bit, using memory to string the bits together as when examining a dark room with a flashlight having a very narrow beam. Perception thus narrowed has the advantage of being sharp and bright, but it has to focus on one area of the world after another, and one feature after another. And where there are no features, only space or uniform surfaces, it somehow gets bored and searches about for more features. Attention is therefore something like a scanning mechanism in radar or television. . . . But a scanning process that observes the world bit by bit soon persuades its user that the world is a great collection of bits, and these he calls separate things or events. We often say that you can only think of one thing at a time. The truth is that in looking at the world bit by bit we convince ourselves that it consists of separate things, and so give ourselves the problem of how these things are connected and how they cause and effect each other. The problem would never have arisen if we had been aware that it was just our way of looking at the world which had chopped it up into separate bits, things, events, causes, and effects.

Nature and nurture conspire in the architecture of this illusion of separateness, which Watts argues begins in childhood as our parents, our teachers, and our entire culture help us to be genuine fakes, which is precisely what is meant by being a real person.' He offers a fascinating etymology of the concept into which we anchor the separate ego:

The person, from the Latin persona, was originally the megaphone-mouthed mask used by actors in the open-air theaters of ancient Greece and Rome, the mask through (per) which the sound (sonus) came.

Indeed, this bisection is perhaps most powerful and painful not in our sense of separateness from the universe but in our sense of being divided within ourselves a feeling particularly pronounced among creative people, a kind of diamagnetic relationship between person and persona. While the oft-cited metaphor of the rider and the elephant might explain the dual processing of the brain, it is also a dangerous dichotomy that only perpetuates our sense of being separate from and within ourselves. Watts writes:

The self-conscious feedback mechanism of the cortex allows us the hallucination that we are two souls in one body a rational soul and an animal soul, a rider and a horse, a good guy with better instincts and finer feelings and a rascal with rapacious lusts and unruly passions. Hence the marvelously involved hypocrisies of guilt and penitence, and the frightful cruelties of punishment, warfare, and even self-torment in the name of taking the side of the good soul against the evil. The more it sides with itself, the more the good soul reveals its inseparable shadow, and the more it disowns its shadow, the more it becomes it.

Thus for thousands of years human history has been a magnificently futile conflict, a wonderfully staged panorama of triumphs and tragedies based on the resolute taboo against admitting that black goes with white.

Returning to our inability to grasp intervals as the basic fabric of world and integrate foreground with background, content with context, Watts considers how the very language with which we name things and events our notation system for what our attention notices reflects this basic bias towards separateness:

Today, scientists are more and more aware that what things are, and what they are doing, depends on where and when they are doing it. If, then, the definition of a thing or event must include definition of its environment, we realize that any given thing goes with a given environment so intimately and inseparably that it is more difficult to draw a clear boundary between the thing and its surroundings.

[]

Individual is the Latin form of the Greek atom that which cannot be cut or divided any further into separate parts. We cannot chop off a persons head or remove his heart without killing him. But we can kill him just as effectively by separating him from his proper environment. This implies that the only true atom is the universe that total system of interdependent thing-events which can be separated from each other only in name. For the human individual is not built as a car is built. He does not come into being by assembling parts, by screwing a head onto a neck, by wiring a brain to a set of lungs, or by welding veins to a heart. Head, neck, heart, lungs, brain, veins, muscles, and glands are separate names but not separate events, and these events grow into being simultaneously and interdependently. In precisely the same way, the individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is rather literally to be spellbound.

So how are we to wake up from the trance and dissolve the paradox of the ego? It all comes down to the fundamental anxiety of existence, our inability to embrace uncertainty and reconcile death. Watts writes:

The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash!

And so we return to the core of Watts philosophy, the basis of his earlier work, extending an urgent invitation to begin living with presence a message all the timelier in our age of worshipping productivity, which is by definition aimed at some future reward and thus takes us out of the present moment. Watts writes:

Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, Now, Ive arrived!

Traditionally, humanity has handled this paradox in two ways, either by withdrawing into the depths of consciousness, as monks and hermits do in their attempt to honor the impermanence of the world, or servitude for the sake of some future reward, as many religions encourage. Both of these, Watts argues, are self-defeating strategies:

Just because it is a hoax from the beginning, the personal ego can make only a phony response to life. For the world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only from the standpoint of someone standing aside from it as if it were quite other than himself and then trying to grasp it. Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.

But a third response is possible. Not withdrawal, not stewardship on the hypothesis of a future reward, but the fullest collaboration with the world as a harmonious system of contained conflicts based on the realization that the only real I is the whole endless process. This realization is already in us in the sense that our bodies know it, our bones and nerves and sense-organs. We do not know it only in the sense that the thin ray of conscious attention has been taught to ignore it, and taught so thoroughly that we are very genuine fakes indeed.

The failure to recognize this harmonious interplay, Watts argues, has triggered a lamentable amount of conflict between nations, individuals, humanity and nature, and with the individual. Again and again, he returns to the notion of figure and ground, of a cohesive whole that masquerades as separate parts under the lens of our conditioned eye for separateness:

Our practical projects have run into confusion again and again through failure to see that individual people, nations, animals, insects, and plants do not exist in or by themselves. This is not to say only that things exist in relation to one another, but that what we call things are no more than glimpses of a unified process. Certainly, this process has distinct features which catch our attention, but we must remember that distinction is not separation. Sharp and clear as the crest of the wave may be, it necessarily goes with the smooth and less featured curve of the trough. In the Gestalt theory of perception this is known as the figure/ground relationship.

Noting our difficulty in noticing both the presence and the action of the background, Watts illustrates this with an example, which Riccardo Manzotti reiterated almost verbatim half a century later. Watts writes:

A still more cogent example of existence as relationship is the production of a rainbow. For a rainbow appears only when there is a certain triangular relationship between three components: the sun, moisture in the atmosphere, and an observer. If all three are present, and if the angular relationship between them is correct, then, and then only, will there be the phenomenon rainbow. Diaphanous as it may be, a rainbow is no subjective hallucination. It can be verified by any number of observers, though each will see it in a slightly different position.

Like the rainbow, all phenomena are interactions of elements of the whole, and the relationship between them always implies and reinforces that wholeness:

The universe implies the organism, and each single organism implies the universe only the single glance of our spotlight, narrowed attention, which has been taught to confuse its glimpses with separate things, must somehow be opened to the full vision

In recognizing this lies the cure for the illusion of the separate ego but this recognition cant be willed into existence, since the will itself is part of the ego:

Just as science overcame its purely atomistic and mechanical view of the world through more science, the ego-trick must be overcome through intensified self-consciousness. For there is no way of getting rid of the feeling of separateness by a so-called act of will, by trying to forget yourself, or by getting absorbed in some other interest. This is why moralistic preaching is such a failure: it breeds only cunning hypocrites people sermonized into shame, guilt, or fear, who thereupon force themselves to behave as if they actually loved others, so that their virtues are often more destructive, and arouse more resentment, than their vices.

In considering how an organism might realize this sense of implying the universe and how we might shake the ego-illusion in favor of a deeper sense of belonging, Watts expresses a certain skepticism for practices like yoga and meditation when driven by striving rather than total acceptance a skepticism all the more poignant amidst our age of ubiquitous yoga studios and meditation retreats, brimming with competitive yogis and meditators:

An experience of this kind cannot be forced or made to happen by any act of your fictitious will, except insofar as repeated efforts to be one-up on the universe may eventually reveal their futility. Dont try to get rid of the ego-sensation. Take it, so long as it lasts, as a feature or play of the total process like a cloud or wave, or like feeling warm or cold, or anything else that happens of itself. Getting rid of ones ego is the last resort of invincible egoism! It simply confirms and strengthens the reality of the feeling. But when this feeling of separateness is approached and accepted like any other sensation, it evaporates like the mirage that it is.

This is why I am not overly enthusiastic about the various spiritual exercises in meditation or yoga which some consider essential for release from the ego. For when practiced in order to get some kind of spiritual illumination or awakening, they strengthen the fallacy that the ego can toss itself away by a tug at its own bootstraps.

In asserting that the ego is exactly what it pretends it isnt not the epicenter of who we are but a false construct conditioned since childhood by social convention Watts echoes Albert Camus on our self-imposed prisons and reminds us:

There is no fate unless there is someone or something to be fated. There is no trap without someone to be caught. There is, indeed, no compulsion unless there is also freedom of choice, for the sensation of behaving involuntarily is known only by contrast with that of behaving voluntarily. Thus when the line between myself and what happens to me is dissolved and there is no stronghold left for an ego even as a passive witness, I find myself not in a world but as a world which is neither compulsive nor capricious. What happens is neither automatic nor arbitrary: it just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious. Every this goes with every that. Without others there is no self, and without somewhere else there is no here, so that in this sense self is other and here is there.

(Perhaps this is what Gertrude Stein really meant when she wrote there is no there there.)

And therein lies the essence of what Watts is proposing not a negation of who we are, but an embracing of our wholeness by awakening from the zombie-like trance of separateness; not in resignation, but in active surrender to what Diane Ackerman so memorably termed the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else, that immutable recognition of the sum that masquerades as parts:

In immediate contrast to the old feeling, there is indeed a certain passivity to the sensation, as if you were a leaf blown along by the wind, until you realize that you are both the leaf and the wind. The world outside your skin is just as much you as the world inside: they move together inseparably, and at first you feel a little out of control because the world outside is so much vaster than the world inside. Yet you soon discover that you are able to go ahead with ordinary activitiesto work and make decisions as ever, though somehow this is less of a drag. Your body is no longer a corpse which the ego has to animate and lug around. There is a feeling of the ground holding you up, and of hills lifting you when you climb them. Air breathes itself in and out of your lungs, and instead of looking and listening, light and sound come to you on their own. Eyes see and ears hear as wind blows and water flows. All space becomes your mind. Time carries you along like a river, but never flows out of the present: the more it goes, the more it stays, and you no longer have to fight or kill it.

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Once you have seen this you can return to the world of practical affairs with a new spirit. You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate you to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. The only real you is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For you is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.

You do not ask what is the value, or what is the use, of this feeling. Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies?

Watts ends with a wonderful verse by the infinitely inspiring James Broughton:

This is Itand I am Itand You are Itand so is Thatand He is Itand She is Itand It is Itand That is That

No words can describe just how profoundly perspective-shifting The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are is in its entirety, and with what exquisite stickiness it stays with you for a lifetime.

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The Ego and the Universe: Alan Watts on Becoming Who You ...

This article is about Chan/Zen Buddhism in China. For an overview of the school, see Zen.

Chan (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: Chn; abbr. of Chinese: ; pinyin: chnn), from Sanskrit dhyna (meaning "meditation" or "meditative state"), is a Chinese school of Mahyna Buddhism. It developed in China from the 6th century CE onwards, becoming dominant during the Tang and Song dynasties. After the Yuan, Chan more or less fused with Pure Land Buddhism.

Chan spread south to Vietnam as Thin and north to Korea as Seon, and, in the 13th century, east to Japan as Zen.

The historical records required for a complete, accurate account of early Chan history no longer exist.[3]

The history of Chan in China can be divided into several periods. Chan as we know it today is the result of a long history, with many changes and contingent factors. Each period had different types of Chan, some of which have remained influential, while others vanished.

Ferguson distinguishes three periods from the fifth century into the thirteenth century:

Although McRae has reservations about the division of Chan's history in phases or periods, he nevertheless distinguishes four phases in the history of Chan:

Neither Ferguson nor McRae gives a periodisation for Chinese Chan after the Song Dynasty, though McRae mentions "at least a post-classical phase or perhaps multiple phases".[note 2]

When Buddhism came to China, it was adapted to the Chinese culture and understanding. Theories about the influence of other schools in the evolution of Chan vary widely and heavily reliant upon speculative correlation rather than on written records or histories. Some scholars have argued that Chan developed from the interaction between Mahyna Buddhism and Taoism, while others insist that Chan has roots in yogic practices, specifically kammahna, the consideration of objects, and kasia, total fixation of the mind.[21] A number of other conflicting theories exist.

Buddhism was exposed to Confucian and Taoist influences when it came to China. Goddard quotes D.T. Suzuki,[note 3] calling Chan a "natural evolution of Buddhism under Taoist conditions". Buddhism was first identified to be "a barbarian variant of Taoism", and Taoist terminology was used to express Buddhist doctrines in the oldest translations of Buddhist texts, a practice termed "matching the concepts".

Judging from the reception by the Han of the Hinayana works and from the early commentaries, it appears that Buddhism was being perceived and digested through the medium of religious Daoism (Taoism). Buddha was seen as a foreign immortal who had achieved some form of Daoist nondeath. The Buddhists' mindfulness of the breath was regarded as an extension of Daoist breathing exercises.

The first Buddhist recruits in China were Taoists. They developed high esteem for the newly introduced Buddhist meditational techniques, and blended them with Taoist meditation. Representatives of early Chinese Buddhism like Sengzhao and Tao Sheng were deeply influenced by the Taoist keystone works of Laozi and Zhuangzi. Against this background, especially the Taoist concept of naturalness was inherited by the early Chan disciples: they equated to some extent the ineffable Tao and Buddha-nature, and thus, rather than feeling bound to the abstract "wisdom of the stras", emphasized Buddha-nature to be found in "everyday" human life, just as the Tao.

Neo-Taoist concepts were taken over in Chinese Buddhism as well. Concepts such as T'i-yung ( Essence and Function) and Li-shih ( Noumenon and Phenomenon, or Principle and Practice) were first taken over by Hua-yen Buddhism, which consequently influenced Chan deeply. On the other hand, Taoists at first misunderstood sunyata to be akin to the Taoist non-being.

The emerging Chinese Buddhism nevertheless had to compete with Taoism and Confucianism:

Because Buddhism was a foreign influence, however, and everything "barbarian" was suspect, certain Chinese critics were jolted out of complacency by the spread of the dharma [...] In the first four centuries of the Christian Era, this barbarian influence was infiltrating China just when it was least politically stable and more vulnerable to sedition. As the philosophy and practice infiltrated society, many traditionalists banded together to stop the foreign influence, not so much out of intolerance (an attitude flatly rejected by both Taoism and Confucianism), but because they felt that the Chinese world view was being turned upside down.

When Buddhism came to China, there were three divisions of training:

It was in this context that Buddhism entered into Chinese culture. Three types of teachers with expertise in each training practice developed:

Monasteries and practice centers were created that tended to focus on either the Vinaya and training of monks or the teachings focused on one scripture or a small group of texts. Dhyna (Chan) masters tended to practice in solitary hermitages, or to be associated with vinaya training monasteries or the dharma teaching centers. The later naming of the Zen school has its origins in this view of the threefold division of training.

McRae goes so far as to say:

...one important feature must not be overlooked: Chan was not nearly as separate from these other types of Buddhist activities as one might think [...] [T]he monasteries of which Chan monks became abbots were comprehensive institutions, "public monasteries" that supported various types of Buddhist activities other than Chan-style meditation. The reader should bear this point in mind: In contrast to the independent denominations of Soto and Rinzai that emerged (largely by government fiat) in seventeenth-century Japan, there was never any such thing as an institutionally separate Chan "school" at any time in Chinese Buddhist history (emphasis McRae).[35]

The Chan tradition ascribes the origins of Chan in India to the Flower Sermon, the earliest source for which comes from the 14th century.[36] It is said that Gautama Buddha gathered his disciples one day for a Dharma talk. When they gathered together, the Buddha was completely silent and some speculated that perhaps the Buddha was tired or ill. The Buddha silently held up and twirled a flower and his eyes twinkled; several of his disciples tried to interpret what this meant, though none of them were correct. One of the Buddha's disciples, Mahkyapa, gazed at the flower and broke into laugher. The Buddha then acknowledged Mahkyapa's insight by saying the following:[21]

I possess the true Dharma eye, the marvelous mind of Nirva, the true form of the formless, the subtle Dharma gate that does not rest on words or letters but is a special transmission outside of the scriptures. This I entrust to Mahkyapa.

Traditionally the origin of Chan in China is credited to the Indian monk Bodhidharma. Only scarce historical information is available about him, but his hagiography developed when the Chan tradition grew stronger and gained prominence in the early 8th century. By this time a lineage of the six ancestral founders of Chan in China was developed.[37] In the late 8th century, under the influence of Huineng's student Shenhui, the traditional form of this lineage had been established:[37]

In later writings this lineage was extended to include 28 Indian patriarchs. In the Song of Enlightenment ( Zhngdo g) of Yongjia Xuanjue (, 665713), one of the chief disciples of Hunng, it is written that Bodhidharma was the 28th patriarch in a line of descent from Mahkyapa, a disciple of kyamuni Buddha, and the first patriarch of Chan Buddhism.

Mahkyapa was the first, leading the line of transmission;Twenty-eight Fathers followed him in the West;The Lamp was then brought over the sea to this country;And Bodhidharma became the First Father here:His mantle, as we all know, passed over six Fathers,And by them many minds came to see the Light.

In its beginnings in China, Chan primarily referred to the Mahyna stras and especially to the Lakvatra Stra.[40] As a result, early masters of the Chan tradition were referred to as "Lakvatra masters". As the Lakvatra Stra teaches the doctrine of the Ekayna "One Vehicle", the early Chan school was sometimes referred to as the "One Vehicle School". In other early texts, the school that would later become known as Chan is sometimes even referred to as simply the "Lakvatra school" (Ch. , Lngqi Zng).[42] Accounts recording the history of this early period are to be found in the Records of the Lakvatra Masters (Chinese: ).

The establishment of Chan in China is traditionally credited to the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma, who is recorded as having come to China during the time of Southern and Northern Dynasties to teach a "special transmission outside scriptures" which "did not stand upon words".

Little contemporary biographical information on Bodhidharma is extant, and subsequent accounts became layered with legend.[37] There are three principal sources for Bodhidharma's biography:[43] The Record of the Buddhist Monasteries of Luoyang by Yng Xunzh's (, 547), Tan Lin's preface to the Long Scroll of the Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices (6th century CE), and Dayi Daoxin's Further Biographies of Eminent Monks (7th century CE).

These sources vary in their account of Bodhidharma being either "from Persia" (547 CE), "a Brahman monk from South India" (645 CE), "the third son of a Brahman king of South India" (c. 715 CE).[37] Some traditions specifically describe Bodhidharma to be the third son of a Pallava king from Kanchipuram.[web 1]

The Long Scroll of the Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices written by Tan Lin (; 506574), contains teachings which are attributed to Bodhidharma. The text is known from the Dunhuang manuscripts. The two entrances to enlightenment are the entrance of principle and the entrance of practice:

The entrance of principle is to become enlightened to the Truth on the basis of the teaching. One must have a profound faith in the fact that one and the same True Nature is possessed by all sentient beings, both ordinary and enlightened, and that this True Nature is only covered up and made imperceptible [in the case of ordinary people] by false sense impressions".[45]

The entrance of practice includes the following four increments:

This text was used and studied by Huike and his students. The True Nature refers to the Buddha-nature.[45]

Bodhidharma settled in Northern Wei China. Shortly before his death, Bodhidharma appointed his disciple Dazu Huike to succeed him, making Huike the first Chinese-born ancestral founder and the second ancestral founder of Chan in China. Bodhidharma is said to have passed three items to Huike as a sign of transmission of the Dharma: a robe, a bowl, and a copy of the Lakvatra Stra. The transmission then passed to the second ancestral founder Dazu Huike, the third Sengcan, the fourth ancestral founder Dayi Daoxin, and the fifth ancestral founder Daman Hongren.

The period of Dayi Daoxin (580651) and Daman Hongren ( 601674) came to be called the East Mountain Teaching due to the location of the residence of Daman Hongren in Huangmei County, modern Anhui. The term was used by Yuquan Shenxiu, the most important successor to Hongren.[47] The East Mountain community was a specialized meditation training centre. Hongren was a plain meditation teacher, who taught students of "various religious interests", including "practitioners of the Lotus Sutra, students of Madhyamaka philosophy, or specialists in the monastic regulations of Buddhist Vinaya".[48] The establishment of a community in one location was a change from the wandering lives of Bodhiharma and Huike and their followers.[48] It fitted better into the Chinese society, which highly valued community-oriented behaviour, instead of solitary practice.[49]

Yuquan Shenxiu (, 606?706) was the most important successor to Hongren. In 701 he was invited to the Imperial Court by Zhou Empress Wu Zetian, who paid him due imperial reverence. The first lineage documents were produced in this period:

[T]he genealogical presentation of the Chan transmission was first recorded on paper in the early years of metropolitan Chan activity. The earliest recorded instance of this was in the epitaph for a certain Faru, a student of Hongren's who died in 689, and by the second decade of the 8th century, the later followers of Hongren had produced two separate texts describing the transmission from Bodhidharma to Shenxiu.[50]

The transition from the East Mountain to the two capitals changed the character of Chan:

[I]t was only when Hongren's successors moved into the environment of the two capitals, with its literate society and incomparably larger urban scale, that well-written texts were required for disseminating the teaching.[51]

According to tradition, the sixth and last ancestral founder, Huineng (; 638713), was one of the giants of Chan history, and all surviving schools regard him as their ancestor.[52] The dramatic story of Huineng's life tells that there was a controversy over his claim to the title of patriarch. After being chosen by Hongren, the fifth ancestral founder, Huineng had to flee by night to Nanhua Temple in the south to avoid the wrath of Hongren's jealous senior disciples.

Modern scholarship, however, has questioned this narrative. Historic research reveals that this story was created around the middle of the 8th century, beginning in 731 by Shenhui, a successor to Huineng, to win influence at the Imperial Court. He claimed Huineng to be the successor of Hongren instead of Shenxiu, the recognized successor.[37] In 745 Shenhui was invited to take up residence in the Heze Temple in the capital, Dongdu (modern Luoyang) In 753, he fell out of grace and had to leave Dongdu to go into exile.

The most prominent of the successors of Shenhui's lineage was Guifeng Zongmi.[53] According to Zongmi, Shenhui's approach was officially sanctioned in 796, when "an imperial commission determined that the Southern line of Ch'an represented the orthodox transmission and established Shen-hui as the seventh patriarch, placing an inscription to that effect in the Shen-lung temple".

Doctrinally, Shenhui's "Southern School" is associated with the teaching that enlightenment is sudden while the "Northern" or East Mountain school is associated with the teaching that enlightenment is gradual. This was a polemical exaggeration since both schools were derived from the same tradition, and the so-called Southern School incorporated many teachings of the more influential Northern School.[37] Eventually both schools died out, but the influence of Shenhui was so immense that all later Chan schools traced their origin to Huineng, and "sudden enlightenment" became a standard doctrine of Chan.[37]

Shenhui's influence is traceable in the Platform Sutra, which gives a popular account of the story of Huineng but also reconciles the antagonism created by Shenhui. Salient is that Shenhui himself does not figure in the Platform Sutra; he was effectively written out of Chan history. The Platform Sutra also reflects the growing popularity of the Diamond Stra (Vajracchedik Prajpramit Stra) in 8th-century Chinese Buddhism. Thereafter, the essential texts of the Chan school were often considered to be both the Lakvatra Stra and the Diamond Stra. The Lakvatra Stra, which endorses the Buddha-nature, emphasized purity of mind, which can be attained in gradations. The Diamond-sutra emphasizes sunyata, which "must be realized totally or not at all". David Kalupahana associates the later Caodong school (Japanese St, gradual) and Linji school (Japanese Rinzai school, sudden) schools with the Yogacara and Madhyamaka philosophies respectively. The same comparison has been made by McRae. The Madhyamaka school elaborated on the theme of nyat, which was set forth in the prajnaparamita sutras, to which the Diamond Sutra also belongs. The shift from the Lakvatra Stra to the Diamond Sutra also signifies a tension between Buddha-nature teachings, which imply a transcendental reality, versus nyat, which denies such a transcendental reality.

Chinese Chan Buddhist teachers such as Moheyan first went to Tibet in the eighth century during the height of the Tibetan Empire.[62] There seems to have been disputes between them and Indian Buddhists, as exemplified by the Samye debate. Many Tibetan Chan texts have been recovered from the caves at Dunhuang, where Chan and Tantric Buddhists lived side by side and this led to religious syncretism in some cases.[63] Chan Buddhism survived in Tibet for several centuries,[64] but had mostly been replaced by the 10th century developments in Tibetan Buddhism. According to Sam Van Schaik:

After the 'dark period', all visible influences of Chan were eliminated from Tibetan Buddhism, and Mahayoga and Chan were carefully distinguished from each other. This trendcan already be observed in the tenth-century Lamp for the Eyes in Contemplation by the great central Tibetan scholar Gnubs chen Sangs rgyas ye shes. This influential work represented a crucial step in the codification of Chan, Mahayoga and the Great Perfection as distinct vehicles to enlightenment. In comparison, our group of [Dunhuang] manuscripts exhibits a remarkable freedom, blurring the lines between meditation systems which were elsewhere kept quite distinct. The system of practice set out in these manuscripts did not survive into the later Tibetan tradition. Indeed, this creative integration of meditation practices derived from both Indic and Chinese traditions could only have been possible during the earliest years of Tibetan Buddhism, when doctrinal categories were still forming, and in this sense it represents an important stage in the Tibetan assimilation of Buddhism.[63]

Daoxin, Hongren, Shenxiu, Huineng and Shenhui all lived during the early Tang. The later period of the Tang Dynasty is traditionally regarded as the "golden age" of Chan. This proliferation is described in a famous saying:

Look at the territory of the house of Tang The whole of it is the realm of the Chan school.

The An Lushan Rebellion (755763) led to a loss of control by the Tang dynasty, and changed the Chan scene again. Metropolitan Chan began to lose its status, while "other schools were arising in outlying areas controlled by warlords. These are the forerunners of the Chan we know today. Their origins are obscure; the power of Shen-hui's preaching is shown by the fact that they all trace themselves to Hui-neng."[66]

The most important of these schools is the Hongzhou school () of Mazu, to which also belong Shitou, Baizhang Huaihai, Huangbo and Linji (Rinzai). Linji is also regarded as the founder of one of the Five Houses.

This school developed "shock techniques such as shouting, beating, and using irrational retorts to startle their students into realization". Some of these are common today, while others are found mostly in anecdotes. It is common in many Chan traditions today for Chan teachers to have a stick with them during formal ceremonies which is a symbol of authority and which can be also used to strike on the table during a talk.

These shock techniques became part of the traditional and still popular image of Chan masters displaying irrational and strange behaviour to aid their students.[37][68] Part of this image was due to later misinterpretations and translation errors, such as the loud belly shout known as katsu. "Katsu" means "to shout", which has traditionally been translated as "yelled 'katsu'" which should mean "yelled a yell".[web 2]

A well-known story depicts Mazu practicing dhyana, but being rebuked by his teacher Nanyue Huairang, comparing seated meditation with polishing a tile. According to Faure, the criticism is not about dhyana as such, but "the idea of "becoming a Buddha" by means of any practice, lowered to the standing of a "means" to achieve an "end"". The criticism of seated dhyana reflects a change in the role and position of monks in Tang society, who "undertook only pious works, reciting sacred texts and remaining seated in dhyana". Nevertheless, seated dhyana remained an important part of the Chan tradition, also due to the influence of Guifeng Zongmi, who tried to balance dhyana and insight.

The Hung-chou school has been criticised for its radical subitism. Guifeng Zongmi ( ) (780841), an influential teacher-scholar and patriarch of both the Chan and the Huayan school, claimed that the Hongzhou school teaching led to a radical nondualism that denies the need for spiritual cultivation and moral discipline. While Zongmi acknowledged that the essence of Buddha-nature and its functioning in the day-to-day reality are but difference aspects of the same reality, he insisted that there is a difference.

Traditionally Shtu Xqin (Ch. , c. 700 c.790) is seen as the other great figure of this period. In the Chan lineages he is regarded as the predecessor of the Caodong (St) school. He is also regarded as the author of the Sandokai, a poem which formed the basis for the Song of the Precious Mirror Samadhi of Dongshan Liangjie (Jp. Tzan Rykan) and the teaching of the Five Ranks.

During 845846 Emperor Wuzong persecuted the Buddhist schools in China:

It was a desperate attempt on the part of the hard-pressed central government, which had been in disarray since the An Lu-shan rebellion of 756, to gain some measure of political, economic, and military relief by preying on the Buddhist temples with their immense wealth and extensive lands.[75]

This persecution was devastating for metropolitan Chan, but the Chan school of Ma-tsu and his likes survived, and took a leading role in the Chan of the later Tang.[75]

After the fall of the Tang Dynasty, China was without effective central control during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. China was divided into several autonomous regions. Support for Buddhism was limited to a few areas. The Hua-yen and T'ient-tai schools suffered from the changing circumstances, since they had depended on imperial support. The collapse of T'ang society also deprived the aristocratic classes of wealth and influence, which meant a further drawback for Buddhism. Shenxiu's Northern School and Henshui's Southern School didn't survive the changing circumstances. Nevertheless, Chan emerged as the dominant stream within Chinese Buddhism, but with various schools developing various emphasises in their teachings, due to the regional orientation of the period. The Fayan school, named after Fa-yen Wen-i (885958) became the dominant school in the southern kingdoms of Nan-T'ang (Jiangxi, Chiang-hsi) and Wuyue (Che-chiang).

The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period was followed by the Song Dynasty, which established a strong central government. During the Song Dynasty, Chan () was used by the government to strengthen its control over the country, and Chan grew to become the largest sect in Chinese Buddhism. An ideal picture of the Chan of the Tang period was produced, which served the legacy of this newly acquired status:

In the Song dynasty (9601279), Chinese Chan Buddhism reached something of a climax paradigm. By "climax paradigm", I mean a conceptual configuration by which Chan was described in written texts, practiced by its adherents, and by extension understood as a religious entity by the Chinese population as a whole ... Previous events in Chan were interpreted through the lens of the Song dynasty configuration, and subsequent developments in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam were evaluated, even as they occurred, against what was known of the standards established during the Song. Thus the romanticized image of the great Tang dynasty masters Mazu and his students, Caoshan, Dongshan, and their students, and of course Linji was generated by Song dynasty authors and functioned within Song dynasty texts. Similarly, even where subsequent figures throughout East Asia Hakuin Ekaku (16851769), the famous reviver of Japanese Rinzai, is the best example evoke the examples of Bodhidharma, the Sixth Patriarch Huineng, Mazu, and the others, they do so through the conceptual filter of Song-dynasty Chan.[77]

During the Song the Five Houses (Ch. ) of Chan, or five "schools", were recognized. These were not originally regarded as "schools" or "sects", but based on the various Chan-genealogies. Historically they have come to be understood as "schools".

The Five Houses of Chan are:[3]

The Linji-school became the dominant school within Chan, due to support from literati and the court. Before the Song Dynasty, the Linji-school is rather obscure, and very little is known about its early history. The first mention of Linji is in the Zutang ji, compiled in 952, 86 years after Linji's death. But the Zutang ji pictures the Xuefeng Yicun lineage as heir to the legacy of Mazu and the Hongzhou-school.

According to Welter, the real founder of the Linji-school was Shoushan (or Baoying) Shengnian () (926993), a fourth generation dharma-heir of Linji. The Tiansheng Guangdeng lu (), "Tiansheng Era Expanded Lamp Record", compiled by the official Li Zunxu () (9881038) confirms the status of Shoushan Shengnian, but also pictures Linji as a major Chan patriarch and heir to the Mazu, displacing the prominence of the Fayan-lineage. It also established the slogan of "a special transmission outside the teaching", supporting the Linji-school claim of "Chan as separate from and superior to all other Buddhist teachings".

Over the course of Song Dynasty (9601279), the Guiyang, Fayan, and Yunmen schools were gradually absorbed into the Linji. Song Chan was dominated by the Linji school of Dahui Zonggao, which in turn became strongly affiliated to the Imperial Court:

...the Ta-hui school of Sung Chan had become closely associated with the Sung court, high officials, and the literati [...] With the establishment of the Wu-shan (Gozan) system during the Southern Sung the school of Ta-hui took precedence. The Chinese bureaucratic system entered into Chan temples throughout the country, and a highly organized system of temple rank and administration developed.[83]

The Gozan system was a system of state-controlled temples, which were established by the Song government in all provinces.[84]

The teaching styles and words of the classical masters were recorded in the so-called "encounter dialogues".[85] Snippets of these encounter dialogues were collected in texts as the Blue Cliff Record (1125) of Yuanwu, The Gateless Gate (1228) of Wumen, both of the Linji lineage, and the Book of Equanimity (1223) by Wansong Xingxiu of the Caodong lineage.

These texts became classic gng'n cases, together with verse and prose commentaries, which crystallized into the systematized gng'n (koan) practice. According to Miura and Sasaki, "[I]t was during the lifetime of Yan-wu's successor, Dahui Zonggao (; 10891163) that Koan Chan entered its determinative stage."[86]Gng'n practice was prevalent in the Linji school, to which Yuanwu and Dahui belonged, but it was also employed on a more limited basis by the Caodong school.

The recorded encounter dialogues, and the koan collections which derived from this genre, mark a shift from solitary practice to interaction between master and student:

The essence of enlightenment came to be identified with the interaction between masters and students. Whatever insight dhyana might bring, its verification was always interpersonal. In effect, enlightenment came to be understood not so much as an insight, but as a way of acting in the world with other people[87]

This mutual enquiry of the meaning of the encounters of masters and students of the past gave students a role model:

One looked at the enlightened activities of one's lineal forebears in order to understand one's own identity [...] taking the role of the participants and engaging in their dialogues instead[note 4]

Koan practice was a literary practice, styling snippets of encounter-dialogue into well-edited stories. It arose in interaction with "educated literati".[89]

There were dangers involved in such a literary approach, such as fixing specific meanings to the cases.[89] Dahui Zonggao is even said to have burned the woodblocks of the Blue Cliff Record, for the hindrance it had become to study of Chan by his students[90]

The Caodong was the other school to survive into the Song period. Its main protagonist was Hung-chih Cheng-chueh, a contemporary of Dahui Zonggao. It put emphasis on "silent illumination", or "just sitting". This approach was attacked by Dahui as being mere passivity, and lacking emphasis on gaining insight into one's true nature. Cheng-chueh in his turn criticized the emphasis on koan study.[91]

The Yuan dynasty was the empire established by Kublai Khan, the leader of the Borjigin clan, after the Mongol Empire conquered the Jin dynasty (11151234) and the Southern Song Dynasty. Chan began to be mixed with Pure Land Buddhism as in the teachings of Zhongfeng Mingben (12631323).[citation needed]

Chan Buddhism enjoyed something of a revival in the Ming dynasty, with teachers such as Hanshan Deqing (), who wrote and taught extensively on both Chan and Pure Land Buddhism; Miyun Yuanwu (), who came to be seen posthumously as the first patriarch of the baku school of Zen; and as Yunqi Zhuhong () and Ouyi Zhixu ().

Chan was taught alongside Pure Land Buddhism in many monasteries. In time much of the distinction between them was lost, and many masters taught both Chan and Pure Land.[92]

With the downfall of the Ming, several Chan masters fled to Japan, founding the baku school.

In the beginning of the Qing dynasty, Chan was "reinvented", by the "revival of beating and shouting practices" by Miyun Yuanwu (15661642), and the publication of the Wudeng yantong ("The strict transmission of the five Chan schools") by Feiyin Tongrong's (15931662), a dharma heir of Miyun Yuanwu. The book placed self-proclaimed Chan monks without proper Dharma transmission in the category of "lineage unknown" (sifa weixiang), thereby excluding several prominent Caodong monks.

Around 1900, Buddhists from other Asian countries showed a growing interest in Chinese Buddhism. Anagarika Dharmapala visited Shaghai in 1893,[web 3] intending "to make a tour of China, to arouse the Chinese Buddhists to send missionaries to India to restore Buddhism there, and then to start a propaganda throughout the whole world", but eventually limiting his stay to Shanghai.[web 3] Japanese Buddhist missionaries were active in China in the beginning of the 20th century.[web 3]

The modernisation of China led to the end of the Chinese Empire, and the installation of the Republic of China, which lasted on the mainland until the Communist Revolution and the installation of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

After further centuries of decline during the Qing, Chan was revived again in the early 20th century by Hsu Yun (), a well-known figure of 20th-century Chinese Buddhism. Many Chan teachers today trace their lineage to Hsu Yun, including Sheng-yen () and Hsuan Hua (), who have propagated Chan in the West where it has grown steadily through the 20th and 21st century.

The Buddhist reformist Taixu propagated a Chan-influenced humanistic Buddhism, which is endorsed by Jing Hui, former abbott of Bailin Monastery.

Until 1949, monasteries were built in the Southeast Asian countries, for example by monks of Guanghua Monastery, to spread Chinese Buddhism. Presently, Guanghua Monastery has seven branches in the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia.[web 4]

Chan was repressed in China during the recent modern era in the early periods of the People's Republic, but subsequently had been re-asserting itself on the mainland, and has a significant following in Taiwan and Hong Kong as well as among Overseas Chinese.

Since the Chinese economic reform of the 1970s, a new revival of Chinese Buddhism is going on.[web 5][web 6] Ancient Buddhist temples, such as Bailin Monastery and Guanghua Monastery have been refurbished.

Bailin Monastery was ruined long before 1949. In 1988, Jing Hui was persuaded to take over the Hebei Buddhist Association, and start rebuilding the Monastery. Jing Hui is a student and dharma successor[web 7] of Hsu Yun, but has also adopted the Humanistic Buddhism of Taixu.[note 5][note 6]

Guanghua Monastery was restored beginning in 1979, when a six-year restoration program began under the supervision of then 70-year-old Venerable Master Yuanzhou (). In 1983 the temple became one of the Chinese Buddhism Regional Temples () whilst 36-year-old Master Yiran () became abbot. The same year, Venerable Master Yuanzhou funded the establishment of the new Fujian Buddhism Academy () on the site.

Several Chinese Buddhist teachers left China during the Communist Revolution, and settled in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Sheng Yen (19302009) was the founder of the Dharma Drum Mountain, a Buddhist organization based in Taiwan. During his time in Taiwan, Sheng Yen was well known as one of the progressive Buddhist teachers who sought to teach Buddhism in a modern and Western-influenced world.

Wei Chueh (19282016) was born in Sichuan, China, and ordained in Taiwan. In 1982, he founded Lin Quan Temple in Taipei County and became known for his teaching on Ch'an practices by offering many lectures and seven-day Ch'an retreats. His order is called Chung Tai Shan.

Two additional traditions emerged in the 1960s, based their teaching on Ch'an practices.

Cheng Yen (born 1937), a Buddhist nun, founded the Tzu Chi Foundation as a charity organization with Buddhist origins on 14 May 1966 in Hualien, Taiwan. She was inspired by her master and mentor, the late Venerable Master Yin Shun (, Yn Shn dosh) a proponent of Humanistic Buddhism, who exhorted her to "work for Buddhism and for all sentient beings". The organisation began with a motto of "instructing the rich and saving the poor" as a group of thirty housewives who donated a small amount of money each day to care for needy families.[98]

Hsing Yun (born 1927), founded the Fo Guang Shan an international Chinese Buddhist new religious movement based in Taiwan in 1967. The order promotes Humanistic Buddhism. Fo Guang Shan also calls itself the International Buddhist Progress Society. The headquarters of Fo Guang Shan, located in Dashu District, Kaohsiung, is the largest Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. Hsing Yun's stated position within Fo Guang Shan is that it is an "amalgam of all Eight Schools of Chinese Buddhism" (), including Chan. Fo Guang Shan is the most comprehensive of the major Buddhist organizations of Taiwan, focusing extensively on both social works and religious engagement.[99]

In Taiwan, these four masters are popularly referred to as the "Four Heavenly Kings" of Taiwanese Buddhism, with their respective organizations Dharma Drum Mountain, Chung Tai Shan, Tzu Chi, and Fo Guang Shan being referred to as the "Four Great Mountains".[100][101]

According to traditional accounts of Vietnam, in 580 an Indian monk named Vintaruci (Vietnamese: T-ni-a-lu-chi) travelled to Vietnam after completing his studies with Sengcan, the third patriarch of Chinese Chan. This, then, would be the first appearance of Thin Buddhism. Other early Thin schools included that of Wu Yantong (Chinese: ; Vietnamese: V Ngn Thng), which was associated with the teachings of Mazu Daoyi, and the Tho ng (Caodong), which incorporated nianfo chanting techniques; both were founded by Chinese monks.

Seon was gradually transmitted into Korea during the late Silla period (7th through 9th centuries) as Korean monks of predominantly Hwaeom (Hangul:; Hanja:) and East Asian Yogcra (Hangul:; Hanja:) background began to travel to China to learn the newly developing tradition. Seon received its most significant impetus and consolidation from the Goryeo monk Jinul () (11581210), who established a reform movement and introduced kan practice to Korea. Jinul established the Songgwangsa () as a new center of pure practice.

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In a thought-provoking lecture Alan Watts once posed this great question: "What would you do if money was no object?"

This pointed and hyperbolic question asks us to dig into the deeper truth of what it is we really want and desire in life and also question the symbolic importance we place on the almighty abstraction of the dollar.

Watts urged his listeners to detach themselves from the notion of chasing money to satisfy our desires. Easier said than done of course but in typical koan fashion, Watts manages to show us that when we instead seek something less material and more spiritually fulfilling, the money part won't become an issue in the end.

The gist of Watt's speech is as follows:

"So I always ask the question, 'what would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?' Well, it's so amazing as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say well, we'd like to be painters, we'd like to be poets, we'd like to be writers, but as everybody knows you can't earn any money that way

Let's go through with it. What do you want to do? When we finally got down to something, which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, you do that and forget the money, because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time To structure your existence with an objective of monetary gain is to spend a lifetime chasing an abstraction.

... And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is, you can eventually turn it you could eventually become a master of it. It's the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you'll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don't worry too much..."

Now money is a fundamental fact of our current constructed reality, even Alan Watts understood that. Barter, exchange, value, currency and what have you there is absolutely no feasible way around it. So leave your pipe dreams and utopian visions at the door, just entertain the question at face value for now. It's probing for something much deeper than some cheap ideological economic fix.

Alan Watts on money, possessions and lifestyle http://www.youtube.com

Pontificating on this issue in any regard is risky business as inherent contradictory and seemingly hypocritical charges are bound to be directed at its speaker.

Watts rightfully so, silenced any criticism for any monetary gain he received for his work. After all, he knew that he was playing the society game and needed to make a living for himself. Watts was a philosopher and quite good at what he did.

This line of questioning would lead to Watts making an important distinction on the nature of differentiating between money and wealth. On a personal level, he understood what wealth was to him and the limits of a human's capacity to experience luxury and excess:

"There are limits to the real wealth that any individual can consume... We cannot drive four cars at once, live simultaneously in six homes, take three tours at the same time, or devour 12 roasts of beef at one meal."

Watts explored the issue deeper in his anthology Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality. In the essay "Wealth Versus Money," Watts remarked on the inability for humankind to distinguish between the merely symbolic and the true.

He looks into our simple confusion between money and wealth:

"Money is a way of measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself. A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft. He needs real wealth, in the form of a fishing rod, a compass, an outboard motor with gas, and a female companion.

But this ingrained and archaic confusion of money with wealth is now the main reason we are not going ahead full tilt with the development of our technological genius for the production of more than adequate food, clothing, housing, and utilities for every person on earth."

This type of symbolic thinking manifests itself in all outlets of the physical world. In his essay, Watts makes a point about the how the fundamental confusion between money and wealth leads us to preposterous positions. He used the Great Depression as an example.

"Remember the Great Depression of the '30s? One day there was a flourishing consumer economy, with everyone on the up-and-up; and the next, unemployment, poverty, and bread lines,

What happened? The physical resources of the country the brain, brawn, and raw materials were in no way depleted, but there was a sudden absence of money, a so-called financial slump

Complex reasons for this kind of disaster can be elaborated at length by experts on banking and high finance who cannot see the forest for the trees..."

Watts makes no claim of being an economic or financial expert. Those to him are mere surface roles muddying the waters at the core of this issue he's trying to broach. Watts likens the absurdity to a man coming to work on the building of a house, the morning of the Depression and the boss saying to him:

Watts realized that there was going to be and will always be harsh resistance to this type of idea or rather awareness of the symbolic:

"What wasn't understood then, and still isn't really understood today, is that the reality of money is of the same type as the reality of centimeters, grams, hours, or lines of longitude. Money is a way of measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself.

It is not going to be at all easy to explain this to the world at large, because mankind has existed for perhaps one million years with relative material scarcity, and it is now roughly a mere one hundred years since the beginning of the industrial revolution."

Now wait just a minute before flinging out those Communist manifestos and leading a riot down Billionaire's row. Regulation and taxation on this abstraction is not the answer.

"To try to correct this irresponsibility by passing laws would be wide of the point, for most of the law has as little relation to life as money to wealth. On the contrary, problems of this kind are aggravated rather than solved by the paperwork of politics and law.

What is necessary is at once simpler and more difficult: only that financiers, bankers, and stockholders must turn themselves into real people and ask themselves exactly what they want out of life in the realization that this strictly practical and hardnosed question might lead to far more delightful styles of living than those they now pursue. Quite simply and literally, they must come to their senses for their own personal profit and pleasure."

So then we're brought back to the original question: what do I desire?

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Philosopher Alan Watts on money - Big Think

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Transcendental Meditation (TM) refers to a specific form of silent mantra meditation called the Transcendental Meditation technique,[1] and less commonly to the organizations that constitute the Transcendental Meditation movement.[1][2] Maharishi Mahesh Yogi introduced the TM technique and TM movement in India in the mid-1950s.

The Maharishi taught thousands of people during a series of world tours from 1958 to 1965, expressing his teachings in spiritual and religious terms.[3][4] TM became more popular in the 1960s and 1970s, as the Maharishi shifted to a more technical presentation, and his meditation technique was practiced by celebrities. At this time, he began training TM teachers and created specialized organizations to present TM to specific segments of the population such as business people and students. By the early 2000s, TM had been taught to millions of people, and the worldwide TM organization had grown to include educational programs, health products, and related services.

The TM technique involves the use of a sound called a mantra, and is practiced for 1520 minutes twice per day. It is taught by certified teachers through a standard course of instruction, which costs a fee that varies by country. According to the Transcendental Meditation movement, it is a non-religious method for relaxation, stress reduction, and self-development. The technique has been seen as both religious and non-religious; sociologists, scholars, and a New Jersey judge and court are among those who have expressed views.[4][5][6] The United States Court of Appeals upheld the federal ruling that TM was essentially "religious in nature" and therefore could not be taught in public schools.[7][8]

TM is one of the most widely practiced and researched meditation techniques.[9][10][11] It is not possible to say whether it has any effect on health as the research, as of 2007, is of poor quality.[12][13]

Transcendental Meditation dates its origin back to the Vedic traditions of India.[14] The Transcendental Meditation program and the Transcendental Meditation movement originated with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the organization, and continue beyond his death in 2008. In 1955,[15][16][17] "the Maharishi began publicly teaching a traditional meditation technique"[18] learned from his master Brahmananda Saraswati that he called Transcendental Deep Meditation[19] and later renamed Transcendental Meditation.[20]The Maharishi initiated thousands of people, then developed a TM teacher training program as a way to accelerate the rate of bringing the technique to more people.[20][21] He also inaugurated a series of world tours which promoted Transcendental Meditation.[22] These factors, coupled with endorsements by celebrities who practiced TM and claims that scientific research had validated the technique, helped to popularize TM in the 1960s and 1970s. By the late 2000s, TM had been taught to millions of individuals and the Maharishi was overseeing a large multinational movement.[23] Despite organizational changes and the addition of advanced meditative techniques in the 1970s,[24] the Transcendental Meditation technique has remained relatively unchanged.

Among the first organizations to promote TM were the Spiritual Regeneration Movement and the International Meditation Society. In modern times, the movement has grown to encompass schools and universities that teach the practice,[25] and includes many associated programs based on the Maharishi's interpretation of the Vedic traditions. In the U.S., non-profit organizations included the Students International Meditation Society,[26] AFSCI,[27] World Plan Executive Council, Maharishi Vedic Education Development Corporation, Global Country of World Peace and Maharishi Foundation.[28] The successor to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and leader of the Global Country of World Peace, is Tony Nader.[29][30]

The meditation practice involves the use of a mantra for 1520 minutes twice per day while sitting with the eyes closed. [31][32] It is reported to be one of the most widely practiced,[33][34] and among the most widely researched, meditation techniques,[9][10][11][35] with hundreds of published research studies.[36][37][38] The technique is made available worldwide by certified TM teachers in a seven-step course,[39] and fees vary from country to country.[40][41] Beginning in 1965, the Transcendental Meditation technique has been incorporated into selected schools, universities, corporations, and prison programs in the US, Latin America, Europe, and India. In 1977 a US district court ruled that a curriculum in TM and the Science of Creative Intelligence (SCI) being taught in some New Jersey schools was religious in nature and in violation of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.[5][42] The technique has since been included in a number of educational and social programs around the world.[43]

The Transcendental Meditation technique has been described as both religious and non-religious, as an aspect of a new religious movement, as rooted in Hinduism,[44][45] and as a non-religious practice for self-development.[46][47][48] The public presentation of the TM technique over its 50-year history has been praised for its high visibility in the mass media and effective global propagation, and criticized for using celebrity and scientific endorsements as a marketing tool. Also, advanced courses supplement the TM technique and include an advanced meditation program called the TM-Sidhi program.[49]

The Transcendental Meditation movement refers to the programs and organizations connected with the Transcendental Meditation technique and founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Transcendental Meditation was first taught in the 1950s in India and has continued since the Maharishi's death in 2008. The organization was estimated to have 900,000 participants worldwide in 1977,[50] a million by the 1980s,[51][52][53] and 5 million in more recent years,[54][55][56][57][58][59][60] including some notable practitioners.

Programs include the Transcendental Meditation technique, an advanced meditation practice called the TM-Sidhi program ("Yogic Flying"), an alternative health care program called Maharishi Ayurveda,[61] and a system of building and architecture called Maharishi Sthapatya Ved.[62][63] The TM movement's past and present media endeavors include a publishing company (MUM Press), a television station (KSCI), a radio station (KHOE), and a satellite television channel (Maharishi Channel). During its 50-year history, its products and services have been offered through a variety of organizations, which are primarily nonprofit and educational. These include the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, the International Meditation Society, World Plan Executive Council, Maharishi Vedic Education Development Corporation, the Global Country of World Peace, and the David Lynch Foundation.

The TM movement also operates a worldwide network of Transcendental Meditation teaching centers, schools, universities, health centers, herbal supplements, solar panel, and home financing companies, plus several TM-centered communities. The global organization is reported to have an estimated net worth of USD 3.5 billion.[64][65] The TM movement has been characterized in a variety of ways and has been called a spiritual movement, a new religious movement,[66][67] a millenarian movement, a world affirming movement,[68] a new social movement,[69] a guru-centered movement,[70] a personal growth movement,[71] a religion, and a cult.[67][72][73][need quotation to verify] Additional sources contend that TM and its movement are not a cult.[74][75][76][77] Participants in TM programs are not required to adopt a belief system; it is practiced by atheists, agnostics and people from a variety of religious affiliations.[78][79][80][81] The organization has also been criticized as well as praised for its public presentation and marketing techniques throughout its 50-year history.

The first studies of the health effects of Transcendental Meditation appeared in the early 1970s.[82] Robert Keith Wallace, the founding president of Maharishi University of Management, published a study in Science in 1970 reporting that TM induced distinct physiologic changes and a novel state of consciousness in practitioners.[83] In contrast, a 1976 study by independent researchers found that TM was biochemically similar to sitting with one's eyes closed.[84] A second 1976 study of five subjects found that TM practitioners spent much of their meditation time napping rather than in the unique "wakeful hypometabolic state" described by Wallace.[85] By 2004 the US government had given more than $20 million to Maharishi University of Management to study the effect of meditation on health.[86]

It is not possible to say whether meditation has any effect on health, as the research is of poor quality,[12][13] and is marred by a high risk for bias due to the connection of researchers to the TM organization and by the selection of subjects with a favorable opinion of TM.[87][88][89] Most independent systematic reviews have not found health benefits for TM exceeding those produced by other relaxation techniques or health education.[12][90][91] A 2013 statement from the American Heart Association said that TM could be considered as a treatment for hypertension, although other interventions such as exercise and device-guided breathing were more effective and better supported by clinical evidence.[92] A 2014 systematic review and meta-analysis funded by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found no evidence that mantra meditation programs such as TM were effective in reducing psychological stress or improving well-being.[93][94] A 2015 systematic review and meta-analysis found that TM may effectively reduce blood pressure compared to a control groups, although the underlying studies may have been biased and further studies with better designs are needed to confirm these results.[95] A 2014 Cochrane review found that it was impossible to draw any conclusions about whether TM is effective in preventing cardiovascular disease, as the scientific literature on TM was limited and at "serious risk of bias".[96]

In the 1960s, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi described a paranormal effect claiming a significant number of individuals (1% of the people in a given area) practicing the Transcendental Meditation technique (TM) could have an effect on the local environment.[97] This hypothetical influence was later termed the Maharishi Effect. With the introduction of the TM-Sidhi program in 1976, the Maharishi proposed that the square root of one percent of the population practicing the TM-Sidhi program, together at the same time and in the same place, would increase "life-supporting trends". This was referred to as the "Extended Maharishi Effect".[98][99] Evidence, which TM practitioners[100] believe supports the existence of the effect, has been said to lack a causal basis.[101] The evidence was said to result from cherry-picked data[102] and the credulity of believers.[101][103]

More here:

Transcendental Meditation - Wikipedia

Kanan Jarrus meditates on Lothal.

Meditation was a mental technique performed by living beings. By meditating, Force-sensitives could reach a deeper state of relaxation, making them easier to connect with the Force with a clear mind.[1] This technique, which consisted of opening a connection to the Force, was something even the eldest of Jedi Masters studied over a lifetime.[2] On the other hand, whereas the Jedi meditated to quiet their minds and connect with the Force, Sith Lords meditated to concentrate their anger, their fear, and their hatred into a pure point of ruthless power within them.[3] As meditation was to have a stronger and more direct connection with the Force, it could sometimes affecting one's surroundings without the practitioner's conscious control, usually causing surrounding objects, or even the practitioner themselves to levitate. [4][5]

The basics of Jedi meditation were to focus on whatever emotions were uppermost in one's mind, to be honest with oneself about the feelings one experienced and their effects. Then, one was to let each emotion gothe goal being to make of oneself an empty vessel that the Force would be able to fill.[2]

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Meditation | Wookieepedia | FANDOM powered by Wikia

The Town of Secaucus' new online tax payment provider is now active. To pay your taxes online, please visit the tax collector page.

The winners for the holiday lights contest have been announced!

The following is an important announcement from the Secaucus Police. Be advised throughout the state there has been theft of mail from mailboxes. Thieves are using a sticky material to retrieve mail in the hopes of securing checks and are then altering and cashing them. We have been advised that theft of mail has occurred at the mailboxes on the corner of Pandolfi and Golden Avenue and the mailbox at the Municipal lot at the intersection of Centre Avenue and Chestnut Street. If you placed mail in either of these mailboxes on or after December 17thit may have been stolen and the police would like you to come to the station and complete a report. The police recommend that all checks be mailed directly from the Post Office.

Alternate side of the street parking will be suspended from December 17, 2018 - March 18, 2019

As of December 17 street sweeping will be suspended. An update will be published when the sweeper resumes in the spring.

Please be advised: Effective Friday, 12/7/18, the Town of Secaucus will be permanently discontinuing shuttle service from the lot at Laurel Hill Park to the Train Station.

The Home Energy Assistance Program helps low income residents with their heating and cooling bills, and makes provisions for emergency heating system services and emergency fuel assistance within the Home Energy Assistance Program.

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Radio Art is a European, internet radio station. It plays many types of music, but emphasizes acoustic instruments and natural sounds that are specially selected for stress-relief and anxiety reduction.

The music is carefully selected, aiming to create a special environment that will bring an oasis of peace to the listener, as well as aid relaxation, reduce mental fatigue, and help cope with stress. The reduction of stress and anxiety improves mental and physical health, with the result of improved control over thoughts and feelings, stronger endurance during work, and the achievement of a calm and relaxing sleep at night.

The journey of Radio Art on the internet is based on the cooperation of sensitive and insightful programmers, musicians and musicologists from all over the world, the Radio Art program has continued to improved and develop.

Currently RadioArt broadcasts 120 music channels and 24 music sound channels. It enjoys support and connectedness with listeners from over 100 countries.

Following great effords of development, Radio Art released a unique system for its listeners, where the listener is able to exploit a broad range of options to combine music with natural sounds. For instance, the listener can add bird songs to piano music creating an envelope of sound that is perfectly conductive to relaxation and rest. Furthermore the listener can make a rotation playlist with any of the music channels, adjust the order and time of rotation and create a beautiful music atmosphere. The list can be saved and opened again at any time.

The main intent of Radio Art, is to enhance foreground dreaming, inner peace, stress relief, and soul cultivation through music.

Radio Art is managed by a team who is grounded in science and a love for Music and Art, and who draw from expertise in Art, Medicine, Management and Information Technology.

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Radio Art - The Art of Relaxing Music and Meditation Music ...