From a PM: Good, evil, meditation, and Zen Practice

ewk***

Each of the questions you asked are huge questions, with history lessons and texts and philosophical structures... so I'll try to give some bullets and if you want more history or texts or philosophy stuff, I'll drill down:

1- Good and evil in Zen.

1. Zen doesn't have good and evil
2. There are numerous examples of this
3. This view has been misinterpreted in Buddhism as nihilism, samurai stone cold killerism, and so on.
4. Zen practice is about self examination, not transcending morality

2- Meditation in Zen, meditation v/s zazen

1. Zen Masters aren't big on meditation: https://www.reddit.com/r/zenshangha/wiki/notmeditation
2. There are no Cases/koans that I know of where someone got enlightened by meditating.
3. meditation is good exercise, and can aid in self examination.
4. meditation can also be abused, like when people lift weights and injure themselves
5. Zazen prayer-meditation was invented by Dogen. It has no connection to Zen at all. Dogen fused a Tientai Buddhist meditation manual (that he outright copied word for word about 40% of FukanZazenGi from) - with the idea of prayer. Zazen prayer-meditation is about being a buddha but only while meditating.

3- Zen Practice v/s Buddhist practice

1. Buddhists are guided the 8FP and interpret life in terms of 4NT, that's the foundation of their practice.
2. Zen Masters have no doctrine, and thus no "practice" as Buddhists conceive of it.
3. Zhaozhou/Joshu talks about practice several times (I'm using Green's trans.) and it's a different idea of practice from Buddhism. It's more like manifestation than it is like alteration...
4. Buddhists are doing an alteration practice, whereby the change from who they are to who they want to be using their faith and doctrines as a map.
5. Zhaozhou/Joshu is showing in his text a manifestation of something that isn't studied, learned, or obtained through alteration... it's a manifestation of isness. Now, that can be called a "practice", but it's not in any way related to religious practice of alteration through activity.

Zhaozhou's ALIVE

Here is my version of Green's translation of a Zhaozhou Case on meditation practice:

100 A monk asked, "What is meditation?"1 The master said, "It is not meditation."

The monk said, "Why is it 'not meditation'?" The master said, "It's alive, it's alive!"

1 ...The character translated here refers more specifically to the act of doing meditation as a special practice in contrast to the other activities of daily life. Dhyana [Zen/Chan] refers to meditation as a state of mind that is present in all the affairs of daily living.

so, ewk interpretation, with puns explained in brackets.

A monk asked, "What is sitting dhyana [meditation]?"

Zhaozhou said, "It is not Dhyana [Zen]."

Monk said, "Why is sitting dhyana not Dhyana?"

Zhaozhou said, "Dhyana is ALIVE! ALIVE!!"

Submitted May 31, 2019 at 05:18AM by ewk http://bit.ly/2XiIJV8