Rinzai Zen School
Hollow Bones is an American Rinzai Zen School. This school provides a clear, open channel for awakening our body, mind, and spirit. This school is specifically tailored for contemporary Western culture. It is Zen stripped bare and separated from its Japanese cultural identity. It is Zen investigated, understood, and practiced deeply. It is a pragmatic, non-sectarian spiritual discipline and way of life that awakens us and transforms our lives. From this perspective to consider Zen a religion is to miss the point.
A Hollow Bones practitioner experiences a deeper, clearer insight into the real nature of our minds. As insight develops, the student becomes aware of a deep emptiness within mind that is always present. Within this emptiness, consciousness, thoughts, emotions, and sensations—all activities of mind—are arising and passing away like clouds drifting across this empty sky. Ego confusion arises because we attach to the misguided belief that our ego's dualistic point of view is all that we are. We have learned from our parents and culture to believe this confusion. From this basic ignorance, we unconsciously believe that this conceptual "me," this "figment of divine imagination" is a permanent separate self rather than a temporary perspective, a momentary reference point within the interplay of self-reflecting mind. As our mind becomes more clear and stable, we realize we are also this deeper purity and not just the "thinking that thinks it’s a thinker”.
Hollow Bones Five Elements Training
- Sacred Stewardship
- Cognitive Re-Orientation
- Emotional Maturity
- Conscious Embodiment
- Genuine Insight
In this way Hollow Bones Rinzai Zen offers a lucid and innovative method for enlightening our minds and bodies. We see how the ordinary and the sacred are in fact one and the same. Beyond the state of Samsara—the realm of human ignorance, confusion, suffering and conflict—we experience glimmers of light. We begin to embody the state of Nirvana—the liberated realm of Pure Awareness, compassion and love. Practitioners of Hollow Bones Rinzai Zen learn to walk poised with a pure peaceful heart and a clear, empty mind. As the Zen saying goes: "Before awakening, chopping wood and carrying water; after awakening, chopping wood and carrying water." This ordinary mind is the way!
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