Culture

Culture is created and conserved by cultivation of body/mind/world. As Zen, of all Zazen (sitting Zen), has been practiced by the Buddha and Buddhists, cultivation is the crucial core of Buddhism (cf. Striving, and the Fourfold Application/Effort). Bhāvanā (cultivation) is the causative form (cause to become) of bhava (ordinary natural becoming, caused by karma), intentionally made, first to still karma, and cultivate it to the better and the best. Cultivation enables us to verify its results (nirvana-bodhi, awakening, prognosis. Zazen is the unique primary practice of "cultivation itself becoming verification" (witnessing nirvana/awakening). Dogen said that cultivation itself is the verification. Cultivation can make one freed from karma and enjoy nirvana and awakening therein, individually, and free from karma society with the triple poisons, socially, and free from the karma world, ecologically, and function fully throughout these different realms. Cultivation can make the paradigm shift from karma-being to dharma-being through and thanks to nirvana individually, from Pyramidal Civilization to Indra-net Culture socially, and from Nature (regarded as source/sink resources to exploit and exterminate) to Nurture (lived as inseparable dynamic life system/process to enhance and engender) ecologically - throughout all these levels and lines (mainly ego, economy, and ecology shifts) the paradigm shift penetrates and pervade the fivefold bliss based on nirvana-awakening replacing the five calamities based on karma-delusion.