In some forms of Buddhism, for example, Pure Land (Jodo-shu), Nichiren, and other schools, worship of the deity is encouraged through the practice of devotional Buddhism. In Japanese, the term "tariki" (other power) invests in the belief that Amitābha Buddha will help the individual attain the Pure Land after death. Followers believe that saying(chanting) the Buddha's name over and over will get you Enlightened, and will achieve other benefits along the way, i.e., material wealth, health, etc. The Japanese Zen term "joriki", however, suggests we can experience the Enlightened mind through "self power". Joriki and tariki are essentially after the same thing, two sides of the same coin, but their paths follows different lines of practice. Zen leans towards "self power", and so there is no worship of any deity. There is no "holy", no "spiritual merit", no "God", no nothing. Thus the expression, in the form of a koan, "When you see the Buddha, kill him!"
It is reminding us that looking for Enlightenment outside of ourselves is a fruitless exercise, when we ourselves are the Buddha. Our daily life is the Pure Land, and when we no longer identify with an ego-centred reality, this becomes clear. Well, this practice proved a bit too hard for the masses, perhaps too elite. So an easier path to the Pure Land was devised.

Repetition of the Buddha's name through the use of chanting does two things. It creates the container or form that provides "set and setting".
And secondly, it helps to break down the ego's defenses and habit of attachment to a fixed way of perception. The mind and body becomes fatigued, the willfulness of the ego to constantly promote and identify with a separate self begins to crack, and for some, deep spiritual experiences occur. One didn't have to be a monk or a priest to experience it. The common folk in the agrarian societies of the East fell in love with this idea. There was a wide spread religious movement to embrace the practice.

As far as the accumulation of wealth and health and other human motivational forces are concerned, Zen would suggest that to become overly attached to either wealth or poverty, health or sickness, etc. misses the point. Through the path of joriki, the Middle Way of Mahayana Buddhism is followed. But life is complex. The impoverished homeless person may have hardship because of various social issues, and other conditions that make up his life, etc. Yet, conversely, the wealthy person may also be agonizing over the need to maintain his wealth. If you doubt this, one only has to follow the demise of the world's financial markets to see how it looks to suffer with money, or its loss. Perhaps there was abuse of other people and the planet to achieve that wealth, and the fallout from that finally caught up. His health may suffer from the stress, or other debilitations may surface. Who's to know....we simply don't. Suffering is a condition of life...but there is a way to understand this truth.

The person who understands the Zen way of life shows compassion to both human conditions. A person who practices Zen may suffer less because they are not attached to either extreme, and through the wisdom of joriki(self power) they understand that we truly are the change we envision. We are more likely to suffer when we are attached to the outcome of what life offers up.

J.

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone--
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance--
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love--
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world--

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

~Mary Oliver

Ah, work is over for the winter, and play begins.
I am off to the Kootenays with a truck full of stuff
to help make my home....

Good bye City.

Yes, I have had the experience of an entity, or being, or some force enter my body while being very open after long periods of meditation. If you consider that there are those who have "dropped body and mind" altogether, it is not so strange that manifestations of various sorts exist beyond our range of comprehension. The ones who master this are not limited by the appearance of a body or remain trapped in the senses or perceptions of phenomena. Walls are no longer walls to them, distances are no longer distances. Because they are not burdened with the same perceptions of reality that we are, they are free to play with phenomena as if it were a parlour trick. And yet, in Zen (and perhaps other schools of Buddhism), the main point is that it doesn't matter. It is indeed a type of parlour trick. The manipulation of phenomena is nothing. The true enlightened state is very ordinary, without embellishments. This is because anything the mind can interpret, any experience, any event, is still a concept or ideation of the experience. In other words, if you believe in ghosts, they exist. If you don't believe in ghosts, they don't exist. One's own mind decides this. It also decides if a certain thing is evil or good. As in, "good" entity or "bad" entity.
In our normal day to day reality, the perception of things through our senses comes from One thing. It looks like many separate things to us, but it isn't. That is the mind that is addicted to dualism. If you are a realized being and cultivate that realization, because you know that everything is Oneness, you can become anything or travel anywhere, without restrictions or limitations. That is to say, read minds, and know the future, possess super hearing and seeing ability, etc. These special powers are mentioned in Buddhism. They are super-natural Buddha powers. However, there is nothing super-natural about them. They are normal! Ha ha! And we all possess them. We are all Buddhas, but we don't know it. We are asleep, mostly. So called ESP, or various psychic powers are the tip of the iceberg. Everyone has them. But some people have sharper antenna than others. But through arts and practices such as meditation, we can drop our bodies and minds and have these same "powers" at our disposal. My teacher always said, "There is nothing strange under the sun". Dharma has no "strange" or no "not strange". It is our minds that determine these states.

J.

the first of all my dreams was of
a lover and his only love,
strolling slowly (mind in mind)
through some green mysterious land

until my second dream begins --
the sky is wild with leaves; which dance
and dancing swoop (and swooping whirl
over a frightened boy and girl)

but that mere fury soon became
silence:in hunger always whom
two tiny selves sleep (doll by doll)
motionless under magical

foreverfully falling snow.
And then this dreamer wept: and so
she quickly dreamed a dream of spring
--how you and i are blossoming

e. e. cummings

Out beyond the ideas of right-doing or wrong-doing there is a field- I'll meet you there.

~Jelaluddin Rumi

I pretty much say the same thing every time...
Meaning and no-meaning are just concepts and distinctions created by our minds.
If one wants to believe in something, such as the concept of "meaning", then it exists for them. If they don't want to believe in meaning, it doesn't exist. But even the idea of "not believing" in the concept of meaning takes the form of an opinion too. So, Zen Buddhists don't attach to either side of the argument. Sometimes there is negation(life has no meaning), and sometimes there is affirmation(life has meaning).
Yet even to understand the above sentence requires us to think and choose a side in the matter. So Zen laughs at the exercise. When you look closely at nature, for example, there is no "meaning" or no "no-meaning" in the sun rising or setting each day, or the tides rising and falling, etc. They just do, from our perception(also a function of mind consciousness). When the sun rises, the farmer knows that this means his crops will thrive, because that is what his experience tells him. This is the "affirmation" side of meaning. It is our reality, but it shows only one side.

However, Nature just as it is, doesn't "think" one way or the other about it. It is our minds (thinking, beliefs, opinions) that decide that something has, or does not have meaning. Is there really any "meaning" to global warming? Science may think so and explain it to us in various ways, but does Nature have an opinion either way? Does Nature think it matters? In the 15 billion years of evolution in the Universe(another concept), does global warming have any meaning? That this is a good event and that is bad, that this is tall and that this is short, or that I am right or wrong in even writing this reply, etc. The human mind, when empty of thought and at rest, can experience phenomena(Nature) in the same way, without the thinking process, various mental discrimination, and the constant habit of seeing everything in terms of dualism, separating us from the pure experience. Subject and object then become One thing. Being and non-being become One thing. Death and Life become One thing, etc. This is the negation side and is experienced through Satori(or Enlightenment).
But it too shows only one side of reality.

So if you say "...all is One thing", then you are attached to that idea also. If I insist that there is no meaning to life, then I am attached to that opinion. When we are able to walk through life understanding the two sides of reality, negation and affirmation, we have the choice to believe and follow what ever we wish to. So there is not One, and there is not Two, and there is no "meaning" and there is no "no meaning". It is a state of mind. When we are free from the attachment to the way our minds want to catorgorize the experience, we see the truth of this.

John

Suffering is a condition of life, for all beings in the world sentient enough to know the reality of it.
But from a fundamental point of view, there is no suffering and no not-suffering. Why?
Because those conditions are developed from man-made thinking, and thinking is
an endless dualistic exercise where we are constantly compelled to label, name, and explain the phenomena around us.
The other experiences in life are conditions equally so, yet we collectively determine that love and beauty are not suffering and pain, and so forth. But the dualism derived from thinking, something that we live with everyday, is faulty thinking. The opposites that we collectively name and label, for example, ugly is the opposite of beautiful, good is the opposite of bad, love is the opposite of hate, are actually "opposites" that come from one and the same source. Hate and love are both passions of the mind, and are closer to each other than one might "think". How about the guy who says to the police, "I loved her so much, I just had to kill her". Mercy killing is when we kill someone, or something, because we we cannot stand to see them suffer. In that case, is killing "good", or "bad"? It is one's point of view and opinion
that makes the difference. But entire wars and other disasters are caused because someone has a different opinion and point of view.

It is our mind consciousness(thinking) that makes these "opposites" appear different. But, in a purely fundamental way, ugly is the same as beautiful. If there was no "ugly", how could there be "beautiful"? If there was no "hate", how could there be "love"? And so forth. It is our minds and the way that we think about the world that makes these distinctions. But Buddhists(from the Yogacara school) say:
"Form is emptiness and emptiness is form". The phenomena we see, taste, touch, hear, smell, and the consciousness of our minds, attach meaning to the world of phenomena. We attach to our ideas and concepts, feelings and experience, such as this is suffering, and that is not suffering. This is good and that is bad, etc. But the experience is different for everyone (unless we collectively agree), and depends on one's mind state, experience of the event, and other conditions. We may think of death as a bad experience, but others may not feel and think about it the same way. We may love the strong winds and storms coming off the ocean, but the same storm may devastate a farmer's crops 100 miles inland. My girlfriend is beautiful to me, but another may not feel the same way about her. The persecution of the Tibetan people causes suffering and hardship, but those in the Chinese government may not feel so. This is the reason why there is suffering in the world.

Okay. Then you are asking, how do we not suffer? The historical Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree and figured this way about it: 1. Life means suffering. 2. The origin of suffering is attachment. 3. The cessation of suffering is attainable. 4. There is a path that leads to the cessation of suffering. I suppose he knew just as well that we can experience a beautiful sunset, or the love of another human being. But when he looked around, he saw that people don't suffer in those particular ways, people suffer in other ways, and he made a vow to help them.

But the Buddha in his profound Enlightenment also saw that there is suffering and no-suffering. There is negation of the truth, and affirmation of the truth. In other words, both aspects of reality exist, and do not exist. When you empty the mind and experience "nothingness", these conditions do not exist. When you live life conscious (thinking) of the aspect that there is a condition called suffering, it does exist. So there are two sides to reality, Ying and Yang, dark and light, being and non-being, etc. The wisdom that comes from the enlightened mind understands that the two aspects are actually Oneness, and it is only our habit of dualistic thinking, living with distinctions and discrimination, that makes it appear as two separate things.

This was a pretty radical observation, the Buddha thought. How can I suggest to a man whose house just burned down, that lost his family in the fire, that there is no suffering? If we stay on the side of negation (nothingness), we cannot life in the world of phenomena(affirmation).
Because we have bodies and a mind that thinks, we will experience all the conditions that go along with the territory. In other words, we will suffer. Thus, he said...life is suffering. He explained it this way to the masses because to dwell constantly on the side of negation(Enlightenment, Satori) was beyond the experience of most people. Enlightenment to the truth of what he experienced cannot be put into words or thought. To try and do that is to attach to what the mind and its habits of making distinctions and discrimination wants to constantly do. One can become attached to the concept and idea of "enlightenment" too. So, he was a spiritual genius. He said the things he did to try and get the message out. It may seem puzzling, but it is deep, deep wisdom. My teacher always said, the enlightened mind is like a gate, it can swing one way into the realm of negation, and it can swing back the other way into the realm of affirmation. So, to say suffering does not exist is like a man carrying a board on his shoulder. He only sees one side. If he says there is only suffering, he also sees only one side. The thinking mind is what makes it appear one way or the other.