What's good with Huangbo? A continued investigation on the inherent goodness of the path of Zen.

The building up of good and evil both involve attachment to form. Those who, being attached to form, do evil have to undergo various incarnations unnecessarily; while those who, being attached to form, do good, subject themselves to toil and privation equally to no purpose. In either case it is better to achieve sudden self-realization and to grasp the fundamental Dharma. This Dharma is Mind, beyond which there is no Dharma; and this Mind is the Dharma, beyond which there is no mind.

Mind in itself is not mind, yet neither is it no-mind. To say that Mind is no-mind implies something existent. Let there be a silent understanding and no more. Away with all thinking and explaining. Then we may say that the Way of Words has been cut off and movements of the mind eliminated. This Mind is the pure Buddha-Source inherent in all men. All wriggling beings possessed of sentient life and all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are of this one substance and do not differ. Differences arise from wrong-thinking only and lead to the creation of all kinds of karma.

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Huangbo Xiyun, On the Transmission of Mind

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Wandering Ronin commentary and questions: I think we're getting a little closer to the fundamental inherent goodness of the path of Zen with this one, but devils will of course have their say. Can it really be argued that following Zen isn't good? I think that many of the false prophets in this forum settled for copper when they were looking for gold; if you don't approach Zen with a mindset of goodness, or even worse a selfish one, then one's belief merely falls into a sort of eastern-influenced nihilism instead. That is most certainly not Zen.

Sure, Zen negates everything that approaches it, but there has to be something there that is revealed and affirmed at the end, and that is One Mind. One Mind is beyond such concepts as 'good', but how can the source-substance not be good? For those that understand, it gives us our very existence and meaning. I'll definitely take that over nothing, so it is good. Zen study and practice aside, have you perceived the absolute beauty of this world? Have you loved or been loved? What is that, something somehow apart from One Mind? No; love is quite literally the closest we'll get in the temporal world to One Mind, delusions be damned. Love obliterates the subject object split as well.

Submitted May 03, 2019 at 05:27AM by WanderingRoninXIII http://bit.ly/2WkNptj