Then bow once before leaving. These two religions, Shintoism and Buddhism, are non-exclusive and now exist in harmony. Maybe this tolerance of other religions is the reason why Japanese people find no problem whatsoever with enthusiastically participating in events of both and even incorporate events from other religions or countries into their lives easily. Below are some of the most famous shrines and temples in Japan that you may want to visit.
Ise Jingu Shrine Mie Prefecture. Itsukushima Shrine Hiroshima Prefecture. Izumo Shrine Shimane Prefecture. Fushimi Inari Shrine Kyoto Prefecture. Meiji Jingu Shrine Tokyo Prefecture. Mount Koya Wakayama Prefecture.
Todaiji Temple Nara Prefecture. Ginkakuji Temple Kyoto Prefecture. Horyuji Temple Nara Prefecture. TripleLights offers customers a service of matching them with a tour and guide. All of the guides create their own tours so all of the tours are unique. You can also send messages directly to the guide to ask questions or convey requests before actually booking a tour.
All of the guides in the area of your choice will be able to see these requests and the guides that are available during your requested date s will recommend a customized tour itinerary just for you. Most of the tours are walking tours, created so that you can use the public transportation system while sightseeing and experience moving around the city like a local.
There is also the option of hiring a private car and driver. So having a car just for you is pretty convenient. This important step will make your tour even more enjoyable. At most tour companies, your guide is chosen for you and you meet them for the first time on the day of the tour. But having a companion that you chose for your tour is an important aspect in having a great day.
Learn more about Buddhism in Japan, as well as Shintoism, from a local guide while seeing the many temples and shrines in Japan.
You can send me a message to get a customized itinerary and quotation for an unforgettable experience. I'll be waiting for you, so please check my profile and get your trip plan now. With Go Guide. Heavier themes come into play in fantasy shows , anime , and video games using ideas like the concepts of karma, meditation, rebirth, and the six Buddhist realms.
When traveling in Japan, it can be an especially fun thing to look for all the little hints and signs of old customs and traditions that have made their way to modern Japanese society. Gion, Kawaramachi, Kiyomizu-dera Temple.
Umaisushikan Sendaihigashiguchishiten. Different From Back Home? Tokyo to Narita Airport in 14 Min Possible?! Must-Try Local Cuisine when you visit Hakodate! Celebrating New Year in Japanese Buddhism.
Driving Demons away with Beans. O-bon: Honoring the Ancestors. Japanese Buddhism in Pop Culture. Discovering Ancient Customs. Japan Travel Encyclopedia. Share this article.
The everyday lifeworld for most people is an evanescent transforming stage in which living is consumed, philosophically speaking, by an either-or, ego-logical, dualistic paradigm of thinking with its attendant psychological states such as stress and anxiety.
Zen demands an overcoming of this paradigm in practice by achieving a holistic and nondualistic perspective in cognition, so that the Zen practitioner can celebrate, with stillness of mind, a life directed toward the concrete thing-events of everyday life and nature. In other words the thing-event is disclosing its primordial mode of be ing such that it is as it is. It also understands a specificity of the thing-event to be a recapitulation of the whole; parts and the whole are to be lived in an inseparable relationship through an exercise of nondiscriminatory wisdom, without prioritizing the visible over the invisible, the explicit over the implicit, or vice versa.
In the context of Zen Buddhism, the perfection of nondiscriminatory wisdom Jpn. Only secondarily and derivatively does it mean theoretical, intellectual knowledge. This is, Zen believes, because ego-consciousness is fortified by the shield of a dualistic conceptual paradigm with all its attendant presuppositions and conditions.
The ego-consciousness of a given cultural and historical milieu accepts that paradigm to be true in order to live a life anchored in the everyday standpoint. This is a method of meditation predicated on the belief that the Zen practitioner engages in the practice in the midst of the original enlightenment.
This is because they both follow the same practice of sitting meditation. The practitioner follows these adjustments in the order mentioned when he or she begins. When concluding a sitting session, the procedure is reversed so that he or she can return to an everyday standpoint. We now briefly explain these three steps in the order mentioned. To do so, the practitioner needs to have a proper diet, engage in appropriate physical exercise, and avoid forming habits contrary to nurturing a healthy mind-body condition.
Specifically, however, when Zen mentions the adjustment of the body, it has in mind seated meditation postures. There are two postures which Zen recognizes: the lotus-posture and the half-lotus posture. A long Zen tradition takes them to be effective for stilling the mind and dissolving various psychological complexes and psychosomatic disorders.
However, if a lay practitioner cannot at first assume these postures, they can be substituted initially by sitting on a chair with the spine straight, as it can bring about a similar effect. The adjustment of the body is necessary for the practitioner in order to experience the practical benefits of doing meditation. The benefits of Zen meditation are closely tied to the practice of breathing.
In this exercise, the practitioner counts an in-coming breath and an out-going breath. Before counting the breath, the practitioner breathes in through the nostrils and breathes out through the mouth a couple of times. Then one starts counting breaths, but this time breathing in through the nostrils and breathing out through the nostrils.
The breath count is performed while performing an abdominal breathing: one brings in air all the way down to the lower abdomen, and breathes out from there. For this reason, it must be done in a place where there is ample ventilation. A key to performing breathing exercises successfully is just to observe the in-coming and out-going breath.
Though these are simple instructions, they are difficult to execute because the neophyte tends to become distracted. Present concerns, worries, fears, and past memories often surface. If one wants to make progress in meditation, this is one of the first things that the practitioner must learn to overcome.
We now turn to the psycho-physiological meaning of the breathing exercise. Ordinarily, we breathe sixteen to seventeen times per minute, which we do unconsciously or involuntarily. This is because under ordinary circumstances, breathing is controlled by the autonomic nervous system.
Neurophysiologically, the center where breathing is controlled is found in the hypothalamus, in the mid-brain. The autonomic nervous system is so-called because it functions independently of our will. Zen breathing is a shift from unconscious, involuntary breathing to conscious, voluntary breathing.
This means that Zen meditation is a way of regulating the unconscious-autonomic order of our being. Psychologically, counting the breath trains the unconscious mind and neurophysiologically, it trains the involuntary activity of the nerves that control the function of the various visceral organs. Here we find a reason why Zen recommends abdominal breathing.
Nerves are bundled in the upper part of the abdominal cavity, and the abdominal breathing exercise stimulates this bundle. As it does so, parasympathetic nerves still the mind. This point is significant in learning to control emotion. Ordinarily, we are told to control our emotion by exercising our will. This is, for example, what Kant recommends. This method works to a certain extent, but we expend our energy unnecessarily in exercising our will.
Think of a situation where one tries to submerge a ball in water. When the size of the ball is relatively small, this can be accomplished with little effort. But as the size of the ball becomes larger, it becomes increasingly difficult. There comes a time then when one can no longer hold them down. Consequently, one may end up exploding in various ways, ranging from personal fits to violent social crimes. On the other hand, if we observe a person in a peaceful state, the breathing is deep, smooth, slow, and rhythmical.
Zen breathing has a way of naturally heightening the positive correlation between the activity of the autonomic nervous system and emotion. Neurophysiologically, it happens that the center where breathing is regulated and the region where emotion is generated coincide. This means that the conscious breathing psychologically affects the pattern of how one generates emotion, and at the same time it also has a neurophysiological effect on how the autonomous activity of the unconscious is regulated.
We will now move on to the third step involved in meditation. Once the bodily posture and the breathing are adjusted, the practitioner next learns to adjust the mind. This means that the practitioner consciously moves to enter a state of meditation. In so doing, the practitioner learns to disengage him- or herself from the concerns of daily life.
That is to say, one tries to stop the operation of the conscious mind. In other words, it is practically impossible to stop the mind by using the mind.
Instead, Zen tries to accomplish this by the immobile bodily posture and the breathing exercise. In this connection, it will be informative to know how the practitioner experiences breathing as he or she deepens meditation. We can identify three basic stages: initially the practitioner can hear the audible sound of the in-coming and out-going breaths.
This is followed by the second stage in which he or she can feel the pathway of the in-coming and out-going breaths. In the third stage there is no more feeling of the in-coming and out-going breaths. When this occurs, the practitioner can settle into a deeper meditational state.
Also, it is significant to note that as the practitioner enters a deeper state of meditation, the interval between inhalation and exhalation is prolonged, i.
These are mostly things of concern that have occupied the practitioner in the history of his or her life, or things the practitioner has consciously suppressed for various reasons. Initially, the practitioner experiences recent desires, anxieties, concerns, ideas, and images that have surfaced in his or her daily life.
A psychological reason that the practitioner experiences these various things is due in part to the fact the practitioner has lowered the level of conscious activity, by assuming the meditation posture, and doing the breathing exercise.
This mechanism is the same as when one has a dream at night. When the level of consciousness is lowered, the suppressive power of ego-consciousness weakens, and consequently the autonomous activity of the unconscious begins to surface. However, these desires, images and ideas are distractions insofar as meditation is concerned. This is because in meditation you must learn to focus your awareness on one thing. One must learn just to observe without getting involved in them.
That is, one must learn to dis-identify oneself with them. In the process of deepening meditation, one can roughly identify three distinct stages: the stage of concentration, the stage of meditation, and the stage of absorption. In the stage of concentration, the practitioner concentrates, for example on the lower abdomen, establishing a dualistic relationship between the practitioner who is concentrating and the lower abdomen that is the focus of concentration.
This dualistic relationship is broken gradually as the practitioner moves into the stage of meditation. The activity of the ego-consciousness is gradually lessened, and the barriers it sets up for itself are gradually removed. There will be no separation or distancing between an object of the mind and the activity of the mind itself. As the practitioner repeats this process over a long period of time, he or she will come to experience a state in which no-thing appears.
No-mind does not mean a mindless state. Nor does it mean that there is no mind. It means that there is no conscious activity of the mind that is associated with ego-consciousness in the everyday standpoint. In other word, no-mind is a free mind that is not delimited by ideas, desires, and images.
No-mind is a state of mind in which there is neither a superimposition of ideas nor a psychological projection. That is, no-mind is a practical transcendence from the everyday mind, without departing from the everydayness of the world.
Since then, various Western philosophers have attempted to capture human nature with this goal in mind by using ego-consciousness as a starting point as well as a destination in philosophy. See Yuasa , — For this reason, Zen contends that physical nature and human nature must be sought in an experiential dimension practically trans-descending, and hence transcending, the standpoint of ego-consciousness. As a result, paradoxes, contradictions, and even what appears to be utter nonsense abound in Zen literature.
Therefore, we can say that Zen is an anti-philosophy in that it is not a systematization of knowledge built on the use of a discursive mode of reasoning anchored in the alleged certainty or transparency of ego-consciousness, one that follows an epistemological paradigm built on an ego-logical, either-or, dualistic mode of knowing.
This standpoint, as mentioned in the foregoing, relies on the discursive mode of reasoning to understand reality, while presupposing an ego-consciousness as the standard referential point. From this perspective for example, a distinction between the outer and inner worlds emerges, using a sensory perception as the point of reference.
One of the salient characteristics of this standpoint is that the world appears to be dualistic in nature, that is to say, it recognizes two and by implication, many things to be real. Epistemologically speaking, Zen observes that this renders opaque, or at best translucent, the experiential domains beyond the sensible world as well as ego-consciousness, both either taken naturalistically or by means of theoretical speculation.
The inability to go beyond these experiential domains occurs because ego-consciousness is physiologically rooted in the body and psychologically in the unconscious.
This points to a philosophically important consequence.
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