Deshan went south as an expert student in the Diamond Sutra. He was schooled by an old woman who likely had only heard a bit of the book. Metaphor or no - she didn’t need more than that line about the past, present, and future mind to stump Deshan
I suspect many arrived here thinking:
“ah zen probably is the thing that explains <this thing>!”
Or maybe:
“Ah I see these conversations. What they haven’t realized is <this thing>”
Perhaps some of you arrived with a lot of experience meditating. Perhaps some of you came with years of engaging in a local sangha
Maybe some of you arrived with a bookshelf of philosophers, and maybe some of you arrived with a backpack of scientific textbooks, and maybe you even have your name on a few papers to boot
Maybe you came as a poet, a swordsman, or a rickshaw
Maybe you even came as nothing.
Isaac Brock once wrote:
I came as ice, I came as a whore
I came as advice that came too sure
I came as gold, I came as crap
I came clean and I came as a rat
To begin, I’ll say I came with a lot of ideas about the nature of the universe. I came with some knowledge of physics and an idea about a fundamental theory that explained the universe by viewing of how information itself behaves
I hit some intense “writer’s blocks” at the time, and I was hoping zen would help. Watts had made me feel a bit better after I hit a point where I couldn’t find anything to prove the existence of existence. I was confident that zen was the “floor” I was looking for upon which everything else was both built and “lit up”
What did you guys bring?
Submitted January 22, 2019 at 11:07AM by NegativeGPA http://bit.ly/2Dp97VN
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