Foyan on Freedom and Independence

One who is not a companion of myriad things has departed the toils of materialism. The mind does not recognize the mind, the eye does not see the eye; since there is no opposition, when you see forms there are no forms there to be seen, and when you hear sounds there are no sounds there to be heard. Is this not departing the toils of materialism?

There is no particular pathway into it, no gap through which to see it: Buddhism has no East or West, South or North; one does not say, “You are the disciple, I am the teacher”. If your own self is clear and everything is It, when you visit a teacher you do not see that there is a teacher; when you inquire of yourself, you do not see that you have a self. When you read scripture, you do not see that there is scripture there. When you eat, you do not see that there is a meal there. When you sit and meditate, you do not see that there is any sitting. You do not slip up in your everyday tasks, yet you cannot lay hold of anything at all.

When you see in this way, are you not independent and free?

Thomas Cleary, Instant Zen: Waking Up in the Present

https://terebess.hu/zen/FoyenCleary.pdf

Commentary

Foyan sounds a bit different than Huangbo, but it is clear that they are both pointing at the same thing — that is, nothing. “Not being a companion to myriad things” is the equivalent of dropping all concepts.

Yet, when he describes being it he chooses very different words. How could he not? I get a feeling part of being a Zen Master is being able to put the experience in your own words. Religion is what happens when someone tries to imitate a Zen Master and does the teaching by using someone else’s words.

But words are just VHS tapes: they make a copy of a copy of a copy, and somewhere down the line, they have lost all their meaning. Squeezed out like old toothpaste tubes, they do little but scratch and squeeze you, and bully you into compliance.

The solution, once again, is finding the “off” switch, except the switch as such does not exist.

There is no particular pathway into it, no gap through which to see it.

The one thing Zen Masters can’t do: point out the switch. They only point into the fog, saying “somewhere out there (in there) is a place without conceptual thought, without subject or object, without judging or naming, and that place is where it’s at.

When you read scripture, you do not see that there is scripture there. When you eat, you do not see that there is a meal there. When you sit and meditate, you do not see that there is any sitting.

But they can’t tell you how to get there, because you’re already there, you just don’t know it, because you’ve painted half of it black and half of it white. And then you hung your head on it, and you called that a life. Until it suddenly, inexplicably all of it began to die...

Submitted June 19, 2019 at 08:02AM by Joe_DeGrasse_Sagan http://bit.ly/2MY6d19