The word Zen means “to sit” and refers to a practice of meditation. The purpose for this meditation is to reach what Zen people call “enlightenment”—a leap in consciousness to a sudden awareness of the essential nature of “being.”

the general practice of Buddhism, which is to free the mind from its habitual confusion of words, ideas, and concepts with reality, and from all those emotional disturbances and entanglements which flow from this confusion. Thus the ego, time, the body, life, and death are all viewed as concepts having neither more nor less reality than abstract nu