Mazu's Practice

Your own nature is originally complete; just do not linger over good and bad things, and you can be called a practitioner of the path.

There you have your "zen practice". Including some further instructions:

To grasp good and reject bad, contemplate emptiness and enter concentration, is all in the province of contrived effort. If you then seek outwardly, you will become further estranged, increasingly remote.

This is what you shouldn't do, followed by what you should do:

Just end mental calculation of the world.

As in "Don't have a view/ form an opinion"? What is the difference between the "indifferent" and the "enlightened" one? Isn't it that the former one is attached to the principle, but the latter one is only interested in the function?

A single moment of thought is the root of birth and death in the world. Just don't have a thought, and you remove the root of birth and death.

I really doubt that he is talking about a "thought-thought" here, given the context of the rest of the text. It's not thinking in general that Mazu suggests to avoid. In my opinion it's rather a "view-thought", "opinion-thought", "judgment-thought" - any thought which derives from a predefined understanding and concept - a "mental calculation".

What would be the right way to stop this sort of thoughts? Mazu made a short suggestion earlier in that section:

So the Lankavatara Sutra has Buddha's talks on mind as it's source; the method of denial is the method of teaching. ... there is no separate Buddha outside of mind, no separate mind apart of Buddha.

It's funny that Mazu is talking about the "method of denial" followed by a statement about what mind is,(Buddha), just to be cited later by Wumen in case 33, stating that mind is not Buddha, which is another demonstration of the forementioned method of denial.

Would that be a good enough practice for you? You can begin right now:

Does a dog have buddha nature?

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Submitted September 09, 2017 at 08:48PM by dec1phah http://ift.tt/2wP70s1