I don't like the term "meditation" used in reference to sitting. Zen "sitting" might be a term of art. I wonder if it's a specific thing to the Zen school that can be considered meditation, but not solely identifiable as meditation. Maybe in Tibetan Buddhism, meditation is something more specific, so the term may be appropriate.

And as I've said before, I think of Zen as only a tool for Buddhism; Zen does not equal Buddhism. Zen is learning how to hammer a nail straight into a piece of wood. Buddhism is something you can build using Zen. If you only learn and follow Zen, you're just continually hammering nails into a board.

But even this isn't right, because in ways Zen is Buddhism just fine. In some ways, it's all just looking at the same thing from different angles and perspectives. I actually don't know a whole lot about Tibetan Buddhism, and so I defer a lot in terms of respect and sophistication. And that isn't always fair to the tradition that resonates more clearly with me.

I sometimes think of Tibetan Buddhism as like a particle accelerator, where scientists can take a single atom and zip it around this circular course and control it to smash into another particle and learn about it from the ensuing collision.

Zen is more like neutrino hunting, whereby scientists take this huge vat of super pure water, so pure that it's undrinkable, line it with special sensors, and bury it deep in a mine or under water to eradicate all other sources of cosmic and terrestrial radiation. Then they wait for a chance neutrino to pass through the earth and through the vat of water, setting off the sensors. Neutrinos are notoriously hard to detect because they would be able to pass unhindered through hundreds of thousands of miles of solid lead, or something like that.