Teachings

Why We Sit by Zen Master Seung Sahn

Buddhism teaches us that we make our own life. We’re quick to blame other people. We’re quick to make a dream life of our likes and dislikes. We fall into a fantasy, and sometimes it’s said, “like a drunken stupor”. We get lost in a drunken stupor of our likes, dislikes, our opinions, our conditions.

Each one of us brings all of our conditioning right into this moment, but we don’t see it. We see a reflection of it in the world around us, so we judge, and we try to fit the world into our image. What doesn’t fit, we don’t like, and what does fit, we like. So in that sense, we make our own suffering. Or in that sense of urgency, you might say we make our own hell. We think of hell as something that comes to us after we die, but really we’re making our own hell right here, right now. We are all guilty of it, nobody escapes. Through practice, we can find our way through it. Through practice, through wisdom, through our own experience, we can begin to break out of the hell that we make when our conditions make the hell of our lives.