Regarding a place to meditate

1.The place should be clean and quiet.
2. Its temperature should be comfortable during all seasons.
3. It should be well ventilated.
4. The place should be neither too dark nor too light.
5. It should not offer any any view that might be distracting.
7. Beginners in meditation should avoid association with either well-known or           argumentative people.
8. Beginners should avoid those who are competitive.
9. Beginners should avoid all places and situations such as fire , flood, and the haunts of criminals.
10. Beginners should not meditate by the sea or in the vicinity of popular resorts.

-Buddhism and Zen, Nyogen Senzaki, Ruth Strout McCandless

Please add any suggestions you think may be appropriate.

Zen; the monk's dream

Once there was a disciplinarian monk who had kept the precepts all his life. As he was walking one night, he stepped on something that squished, which he imagined to be a frog, a mother frog laden with eggs. Mortified at the thought of having killed a pregnant frog, when the monk went to sleep that night he dreamed that hundreds of frogs came to him demanding his life. He was utterly terrified.

Come morning, the monk went to look for the frog he had squashed, and found that it had only been an overripe eggplant. At that moment, the monk's perplexities abruptly ceased; realizing there is nothing concrete in the world, for the first time he was really able to apply it practically in life.

Now I ask you, when he stepped on it by night, was it a frog or an eggplant? If it was a frog, yet when he looked at dawn it was an eggplant; if it was an eggplant, yet there were frogs demanding his life the night before. Can you decide? I'll try to decide for you:

Feelings of frogs may be shed;

but the idea of eggplant remains.

If you would be free

of the idea of eggplant,

strike the evening chime at noon.

-Foyan