Disaffection and surrender: essential attitudes of Zen-Buddhist meditation and their resonance in the thoughts of Eckhart and Heidegger

Abstract

The science and media had opened great space for meditation, showing especially the physical and mental benefits into mechanic daily life of our age. Although it is not possible to deny these benefits, the meditative practice, especially the Master Dōgen’s Zazen, has indeed much more to do with a little less visible and attractive side. In the place of quick benefits, there is pain and the strangeness, but also the slow transformation as expressions of continuous exercise of two basic attitudes of Way’s practitioner: the detachment of things’ delusive stability and the surrender to things’ emptiness. These attitudes have amazing parallels with Master Eckhart’s mystic and with Martin Heidegger’s thought, which have stimulated, in general sense, the dialogue between West and East and, in particular sense, have been the great focus of Japanese thinkers from Kyoto School as well as of an expressive secondary literature from there resultant.