Huff Post

It may be a surprise to many Americans, and even to American Buddhists, to hear that the vast majority of the world’s Buddhists do not meditate. But it is true. Among the 250 million or so Buddhists alive today, only a tiny fraction have a regular meditation practice; this is true not just for Buddhist laypeople but even for many of the Buddhist monks, nuns, and priests in the various Asian countries where Buddhism is the main religion. Were things different in the past? Yes, there were times and places where millions of monks and nuns lived and practiced in monasteries where meditation was the norm, but the West’s assumption that Buddhism and meditation are one and the same is a selective understanding. There is much more to Buddhism than meditation. Meditation is only one branch of the eight-fold path taught by the Buddha–a path which includes ethical teachings, intellectual study, and transformation of personality and character through wholesome attitudes and deeds.

When I first came to meditate in the late 1960s, it was at Sokoji temple, a Soto Zen temple in San Francisco originally founded by Japanese-Americans many decades earlier. The abbot there, Shunryu Suzuki, had come a few years earlier to tend to its Japanese-American congregation. At that time in San Francisco the counterculture was in full swing, and the city was awash in young

These days, monks in Asia, weighed down by centuries of tradition and custom, have in some cases lost touch with this universal aspect of sitting, and no longer have a clear understanding of why to do it. One Zen monk from Japan who was visiting a Zen retreat center in America observed the enthusiasm and numbers of meditators with astonishment. “How do you get them to meditate without beating them?” he asked. In his training temple in Japan, the young monks disliked meditation, and saw it as an unpleasant burden.

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