Received an email asking about a post from Tuesday, March 19th on Suzuki's use of validity and universality and how validity can
be acquired thru right meditation, do I have
more to say on this, and what did he mean by universality means in
this arena, and what is meant by right meditation?
Glad I rarely get a query - the blog isn't set up for that. But this one came from a person who sits with my dear ex Daya Goldschlag in Spokane who has a back channel connection.
This is one of a number of excerpts from a lecture on the meal chant. One could read the lecture, the name and location of which is located after the quote. There's a link to shunryusuzuki.com there, but not a link to the lecture, so here's that. I see there's no edited version. Just the verbatim and the audio. But that might not help in answering the questions.
Right meditation is #8 of the Eightfold Path (if The Buddha Guy is right). Suzuki goes on to talk about it in this lecture such as with today's excerpt. It's not something that can be described so we spend a lifetime trying to do it.
As for his use of the terms universality and validity, yes, an unusual choice of words. Looks like he'd been thinking of another way of expressing what he wanted to get across and was maybe consulting with a dictionary. In the lecture he's saying that you can get
a lot out of experience but not enlightenment, to wake up to the
truth one must practice zazen, or as other gurus might say,
insight or dropping body and mind. Validity there to me just means
waking up to immediate reality which is beyond yet identical with
phenomena, universality. Or we could try appearance and reality. The same stuff keeps coming back in different wrapping. It's all incomprehensible.
Things like this can't be figured out. Figuring things out is an
experience. Good luck to us all.