Does anyone practice Buddhism?”
I’ve been practicing Zen Buddhism for about 17 years. There are several different strands of Buddhism practiced in the world, and most have made it to this country by now, some with greater followings than others. Zen is one of the better established, having taken root here back in the 60’s. It’s the only form of Buddhism with which I’m familiar first-hand, though I have some sense of how the other traditions vary. Because of the nature of Buddhism itself, there has been very little strife among its various branches, and each views the others as equally valid. That’s possible because Buddhism is a method, not a belief system. There is no Buddhist “doctrine” per se, no set of beliefs that one must accept. There are countless Buddhist “scriptures”, the sutras, but even they are viewed as secondary to the practitioner’s own insight into the truth. What Buddhism offers the practitioner is a method for focusing her own powers of inquiry onto what Zen Buddhists call “the Great Matter”, the f
