ZEN – SO EASY?
We have a lot of exercises, saving up our energy, converting it, moving it on our Macrocosmic Orbit, and trying to take it out through Bai Hui for soul exit. When the soul will exit, they say, a lot of things will become comprehensible.
But Japanese (very practical people), for example, from the samurai times carried away with Zen meditation: “watch the dot and do not take your eyes off”, or meditate on the phrase and just on it. And with such practice the enlightenment comes.
It is much easier. I would say suspiciously easier. One exercise and the same result – enlightenment.
What’s the catch, who will help to understand?
***
It all depends on the specific school and specific people.
There are schools of qigong, which practice just a few exercises, and there are schools of Zen, where you will be tortured with hundreds of practices: praying, meditation, rituals, cold perfusion (misogi), daily trips to the nearby town to collect alms (it is also a practice of working with pride), “Medical Zen” (similar to “medical qigong”), all sorts of bodily practices, hours of training in BI. In general, masters of Zen initially tried to get rid of “minor” practices and emphasized the achievement of “silence -> relaxation -> pause -> wisdom”, in a quiet meditation only, but gradually they returned to normal (nowadays) practices.
In addition, Zen schools were added with different martial arts and began to incline to this direction. At last, the idea of a traditional Japanese religion – Shinto – was also heavily influenced by contemporary Zen.
With regard to specific people. If a person is just a beginner and suffers of different mental and physical nature problems (no pathological disorder, but simply a “normal” human problems), then firstly it makes sense do not forget about the basic techniques to quickly remove the aggravation of these problems. But someone advanced in practice of any tradition can simply sit cross-legged, and he will immediately get to the “pause”. Why, then, do we need all those auxiliary things in our practice? Is just helpful to have a daily warm-up set for 15-20 minutes.
In yoga – exactly the same. An apprentice tortures himself with many hours of ligaments asana, while his teacher does none of this, just dwells in silence. Sivananda often went away from his pupils across the river, and they ran after him to spy, for a secret technique that he practiced. They thought that may even there he will start doing some secret asana. And they were very surprised when Sivananda just sat on the beach and got up only for dinner.
I am not Sivananda 😉 I started practicing Qigong more than 10 years ago, went through all the steps, then I met yogic and Zen practitioners, as well as with several other qigong related schools, which practice meditative direction of qigong. Today, I know thousands of exercises and techniques, and sometimes it even hurt me 😉 Because I already practice for 4 years like this: half an hour in the morning of “Surya Namaskar” (this is a good solid complex) and silent meditation (za-zen analogue, ie just sit quietly and watch your body, thoughts, emotions, or void, if all the thoughts and emotions become silent). In the evening, 30-40 minutes exercise of “self-control” (also known as “spontaneous movements”) and then silent meditation. “Quiet meditations” do not take more than an hour each, and not even always every day. But I am constantly practicing “24-hour Practice”. Plus 3-4 times a year independent marathons, and trying every year to get out for one and a half to two weeks to practice in retreat mode.
And I feel good 
One of my first teachers said once, “If you can practice it, you will not need anything else; all other practices have been lead up to this one“. He said that regarding “self-regulation” and the ability to reach “pause” through this practice of “quiet meditation”. Sometimes I can’t enter in the “quiet” through Chantszo (za-zen), then I will firstly use some other quiet exercises (for example, skin breathes, practicing “transcendental energy” or yang-qi), and gradually and naturally turn to Chantszo – and so on…
