2 [Body and Enlightenment] Now, practice is also science.

[국제과학명상센터]

Now, practice is also science.

Breathing practice is essential in any training group. Breathing is a very important tool for training, practice, and understanding the body and mind. Therefore, many create their own training methods to control various motions and mental actions through their own breathing techniques. They emphasize their traditional approach and claim that it has great effects, and even commercialize it. This is true to some extent, and they can also gain some experiences and understandings that most people cannot easily access. This fact becomes the basis for their claims. To expand their followers, they often promote their own methods as the only correct way and even idolize their founders, just like a religious group.

I am also writing this to promote my own beliefs, so in a sense, I may not be different from them. Then, how can we find genuine training? Due to the aforementioned reality, there are also many who are critical and hateful towards training and practice. For this reason, it would be unwise to dismiss body and mind training altogether, as readers of this book should know that it would be a basic foolishness towards life. Instead, let us consider how to find the right practice methods without being misled by the above-mentioned factors.

Attention all practitioners!

Take a step back and think deeply for a moment. What kind of world do you think we are living in now? Is it a time when a fresh godly person who has polished their Dao flies through the clouds, observing and blessing people, and performing magic? Or is it a time when tigers smoke cigarettes and foxes put on false airs? My question may have been foolish. Yes, we are living in the era of the most advanced civilization in human history achieved by science and technology. We can learn about everything happening around the world from the comfort of our homes, and individual thoughts can shape the world. In the field of medicine, researchers have made deep progress in studying the human body and even the workings of the mind, achieving significant results. It is a remarkable world where organs can be created using stem cells and even life, which was considered the domain of gods, can be created and replicated. Moreover, there are machines that can precisely examine human tissue, and endoscopes can examine every nook and cranny of the body. Is there anything else like this? We can even insert robots into blood vessels and see them on a screen, so what reason is there not to solve our curiosity about the human body? We live in a truly wonderful world where we can prove the path of enlightenment if we just take an interest and study a little.

Despite the world changing like this, the consciousness of practitioners is still stuck in the era of 2000 years ago. Our ancestors practiced in an era without endoscopes, so they could only describe the human body through words or symbols. As a result, they used various metaphors to explain it, and these were passed down orally or in writing, resulting in many misinterpretations and distortions.

However, future practitioners do not have the ability to interpret the sentences in ancient texts that contain various meanings correctly, so they have repeatedly imitated what is written in the books, leading to countless failures and collapses. We are not saying that the guidelines left by our ancestors are wrong. Studying through the teachings of our predecessors is desirable, but we must clearly distinguish between active and dead books and understand correctly what is being taught in them.

Now, we will thoroughly analyze the materials left by our ancient sages and Buddhas to understand the scientific and medical relationships. We will reinterpret them in modern terms. It is now the era when Dao cultivation must be reborn as science.