A Minute Of Meditation

“To find a buddha, you have to see your own nature. Whoever sees his own nature is a buddha. If you don't see your nature, invoking buddha is useless. Reciting sutras, making offerings and keeping precepts are all useless. Cause and effect is nonsense and Buddhas don't practice nonsense.As long as you look for a Buddha somewhere else, you'll never see that your own mind is the Buddha." --Bodhidharma (Ch’an master) No matter where you live in the world, you have heard about Zen Buddhism, but most people don’t know it was derived from Chinese Ch’an Buddhism of the 6th century AD. The Chinese version, in turn, came from India. In fact, the words “Zen” and “Ch'an” are both corruptions of the Sanskrit Dhiyan, meaning “focus” or “concentration.” The first Chinese Ch'an master, Bodhidharma, arrived from South India with the major Buddhist teaching of his homeland -- the Lankavatara Sutra. He became the first of a series of leaders who each taught its basic message of consciousness through self-realization. Bodhidha