SO TO ZEN - Shasta Abbey

104 Appendix I: Western Interest in Buddhist Meditationand has lost his basic humanity. Man, surrounded by machines,mass communication and organized systems, has becomealienated from freedom and spontaneity. Buddhist religiouspractice based in meditation seems unusually well-suited tobreak the deadlock facing modern man. Science has nowemerged into the atomic age and entered the space age. Originallybased on humanism, science gradually came to be consideredall-powerful and autonomous from religion and humanity.In this way, it moved in the wrong direction, luringmankind toward destruction. Buddhist meditation seems tohave a vital role in correcting this false tendency of science.Although the world is said to be moving toward a thaw, the twoideological camps are still in sharp conflict. The Third Worldnations are caught in the middle, wavering from left to right.Buddhism offers the possibility of basically undercutting thisdualism. It can help man overcome the conflict of ideologiesfor the first time. The West tends to emphasize the individualover the group. But even in individual man, there are twofacets. They are the false self and the True Self. No matter howmuch the individual is emphasized, it does no good if theemphasis is on the false self. Through the True Self the dignityof man emerges. In Christianity, God is worshiped as Òanabsolute other.Ó He is separated from man. Zen, on the otherhand, returns man to this original wholeness and shows him hisTrue Self. In Buddhism, the True Self is called Buddha Nature.