Architecture
While the exteriors of the centers often fit in with the areas they inhabit the interiors tend to have Asian influences. While not required, most Zen centers have a zendo or meditation hall. Zen centers may have residents, also known as monks (for males) and nuns (female), who may live in the center's residence area. Most have kitchens and communal areas.
Some centers do not have mirrors in the bathrooms. This is to assist the practitioner from focusing on unimportant parts of zen practice, such as facial appearance.
Read more about this topic: Zen Center
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
“Polarized light showed the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)