Instant Zen | (Thomas Cleary?) Notes
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Facing It Directly
Yunmen (d. 949), was one of the latest and greatest masters of the classical era, known for exceptional brilliance. He said, “Why do you traipse around with your luggage through a thousand towns, over ten thousand miles? What are you missing? You are fine; who has no lot?
If you can’t even manage to take responsibility for yourself on your own, you shouldn’t accept deception from others, or take people’s judgments. As soon as you see old monks open their mouths, you should shut them right up; and yet you act like flies on manure, struggling to feed off it, gathering in threes and fives for discussion.”
He also said, “Ordinary phonies consume the piss and spit of other people, memorizing a pile of junk, a load of rubbish, running off at the mouth wherever they go, bragging about how they can pose five or ten questions. Even if you pose questions and answers from morning to night until the end of time, would you ever see? Where is the empowerment?”
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Yunmen was one of the first Zen masters known to have given overt instructions for contemplating Zen stories and sayings as an expedient method of cultivating Zen consciousness:
“The ancients had a lot of complications to help you, such as
Xuefeng’s saying, ‘The whole earth is you,’
Jiashan’s saying, ‘Pick out the teacher in the hundred grasses; recognize the emperor in a bustling market place,’
and Luopu’s saying, ‘As soon as a particle of dust arises, the entire earth is contained therein; the whole body of a lion is on the tip of a single hair.’
Take these up and think about them over and over again; eventually, over time, you will naturally find a way to penetrate. No one can substitute for you in this task; it rests with each individual, without exception.”
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This is quite different from the highly artificial standardized and pressurized “koan study” as practiced in many present-day Japanese and American Zen cults, most of which does not follow the teachings of the original Zen masters, but actually dates only from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yunmen was outspoken about the futility of cultic attitudes of emotional enthusiasts; he said,
“You rush here pointlessly; what are you looking for? All I know how to do is eat, drink, piss, and shit; why do you make a special interpretation? You travel around to various places studying Zen, inquiring about the path, but let me ask you a question: what have you learned at all those places? Try to bring it out.”
Submitted May 27, 2019 at 11:15PM by UhExistence http://bit.ly/2QumUzf
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