One of the things I love about exposure to the ideas and stories about Zen is that themes emerge and recur, begging for attention.
From, "The Director" - Instant Zen: Waking Up in the Present Trans. Thomas Cleary
When you were first conceived in your mother’s womb, what did you bring with you? You had nothing whatsoever when you came, just mental consciousness, with no shape or form. Then when you die and give up the burden of the physical body, again you will have nothing at all but mental consciousness. At present, in your travels and community life, this is the director.
Now let me ask you something. We receive portions of energy from our father and mother through their sperm and egg; clinging to what we receive, we call it our body. From the time of birth, as it gradually grows and matures, this body always belongs to the self. But tell me, does it belong to you or not? If you say it belongs to you, when first conceived you had nothing with you; when did the sperm and egg of your father and mother ever belong to you? Life can last a hundred years at most, furthermore, before the corpse is abandoned; when did it ever belong to you?
And yet, if you say it doesn’t belong to you, right now there is no possibility of taking anything away. When it is reviled you anger, when it is pained you suffer; how could it not belong to you? Try to determine whether you have anything there or not, and you will find you cannot determine, because your root of doubt is not cut through. If you say you have something there, while during the process of growth from birth up to the age of twenty, there is no change in this certainty, but when you get to be forty or fifty the body changes and deteriorates from moment to moment, so you cannot say it is definitively there. But if you say there is nothing there, nevertheless you can perform all sorts of actions, so you cannot say there is nothing.
[...]
What I am talking about now is the marrow of Zen; why do you not wonder, find out, and understand in this way? Your body is not there, yet not nothing. Its presence is the presence of the body in the mind; so it has never been there. Its nothingness is the absence of the body in the mind; so it has never been nothing.
Do you understand? If you go on to talk of mind, it too is neither something nor nothing; ultimately it is not you. The idea of something originally there now being absent, and the idea of something originally not there now being present, are views of nihilism and eternalism.
wrrdgrrl: These terms, nihilism and eternalism, came up in a conversation I overheard recently. In the interest of clarity, I looked them up on Wikipedia:
Nihilism is the philosophical viewpoint that suggests the denial or lack of belief towards the reputedly meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism, which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.
Eternalism is a philosophical approach to the ontological nature of time, which takes the view that all existence in time is equally real, as opposed to presentism or the growing block universe theory of time, in which at least the future is not the same as any other time.
When Foyan talks about the body being neither there nor not-there, he slices through those "-isms" that seem to be divided into "all" or "nothing". Is it true what he says, that we are nothing more than mental consciousness? Is our existence simply Mu?
It might seem like I'm staring at the head of a pin, but I'm piqued by this distinction (or lack thereof) because I have, once or twice, been accused of subscribing to Eternalism, and I wish to know what "ism" I actually believe in, and to pull apart my assumptions.
Food for thought: How do you know what you believe? Where did you get this idea? Did you take a leap of faith? Did you experience something (perhaps a psychedelic drug trip) that changed you inside forever? Is this all an ongoing hallucination?
Interested in what other think about this. I'm going to re-read this lecture and check back later.
Stay fresh, cheese bags!
Submitted February 03, 2019 at 07:52AM by wrrdgrrl http://bit.ly/2t3XY76
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