because dogen and hakuin actually wrote we have a much better idea of what they said, also in hakuin's case we have his drawings and paintings and they come across as real people, uneven in what they say, but at their best very interesting and unique
with them there's not much in the way of transcription or copying errors, though i feel dogen is not well translated
this is not the case for earlier chinese masters who were often illiterate and "the records" were in fact transcriptions or stories collected in some cases over hundreds of years, in other words the degree to which what we read is by those supposed people can be quite questionable
there's no bottom turtle in the sense that the blue cliff record and mumonkan are in fact literary works, in some sense no more real than the game of thrones
when you do get to real works like dogen and hakuin they are still substantially "literary", however they also come across as so idiosyncratic you can't really find a bottom turtle that is "zen"
that's why you can't successfully make a scriptural religion out of zen or ch'an, the bottom turtle swims away the moment you put any pressure on it
i like this talk by brad warner, it doesn't need a bottom turtle, its the reality of a contemplative look in every day life and in fact you see this approach constantly recommended in "the records" to look to everyday life and work out what is going on for yourself and others and don't waste your time with "scriptural" nonsense
it seems to me that r|zennists don't understand themselves at all in the way recommended, that they are engaged in the absurdity of projecting their inanities onto gobbledegook and this is done to avoid any of the real contemplative work required, which to be fair is a difficult life long process and destructive and tedious at times
just my writing this is going to make no difference to the attitudes here of course, its game of thrones fantasy that is sought
Submitted May 18, 2019 at 05:41AM by zaddar1 http://bit.ly/2JoeMjr
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