This post is long. TLDR here's my history of interaction with Zen texts, with some digressions that come back around to that theme, along with some questions I'm interested in hearing people respond to, if anyone is interested. Thanking any readers in advance.
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I caught an interest in Zen Buddhism around 1993 or 1994 when I was sixteen, via a book titled Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by philosopher and cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstedter. The book is a long argument concerning how minds can exist, and how minds must work, in a purely physical universe, and what early twentieth century developments in mathematics and logic can teach us about this.
In that book Hofstedter quotes and in a few cases briefly discusses some Zen Koans. He does not in that book take them seriously as revelatory or informative, instead using them as a bit of something like "comic relief" illustrative of some funky stuff he believes happens when we think about thinking. In things he's written about the reception of that book since then, he's explicitly said he finds it a little troubling when people read his book and gain a non-ironic interest in Zen as a result, because he doesn't think there's anything there worth thinking much about. The zen koan stuff was just supposed to be a silly side thing in the book.
But I was one of those people who gained a non-ironic interest. I don't remember exactly which stories he used but I'm almost certain one of them was the "if you call this a staff" story. That's the one that hooked me.
Like many sixteen year olds who latch onto an interest in Zen, I had this feeling that I "got it" when I read these stories, but I wanted to try to figure out what exactly it was that I had got. I believed at the time that this was somewhat backwards (how can I have got it if I don't know what I have got?) but that was part of what fascinated me--this feeling that I get it, together right alongside with a feeling that I don't understand at all.
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About that I have a question--those of you who feel you've got some real insight into Zen, is it likely that this feeling of "I get it, and I don't understand anything at all" has some substantial relationship to Zen?
I think this feeling can often lead to no good because an ignorant person might sieze on someone's such experience to provide a subsequent "understanding" to capture the "I get it." I imagined Zen (and still imagine it) to be an insistence on a refusal to accept any such capturing, while also insisting on not ignoring the initial insight.
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At the time I was a Christian in the white (yes I said white) evangelical tradition, and I took that very seriously though I also took seriously a feeling that I, like Christ was said to be, needed to be transgressive of religious teachings to be truly up to what Christ had been up to. So I explored other religious traditions (at the time I assumed Zen was a school of Buddhism, an assumption I held up until literally yesterday, at which point I entered "I don't know and I'm not sure I should care" territory). I also explored gnosticism--another area in which I often felt simultaneously like I "got" it but still needed to "figure out" what I had got--in other words, an experience I could only express by saying "I understand everything and I don't understand anything." Also various other cults and religions but those were the two that really stuck as ongoing interests--zen and gnosticism.
I bought and read a few books about Zen including Zen Flesh Zen Bones, and a book or two by Suzuki. Once I became an internet person in college several years later, I read a lot of different translations of the same stories I'd read in Zen Flesh Zen Bones. I do not believe I read anything else--I didn't really know what there was to read, and once things started getting into lineages and which school said this or that, I'd read with some interest but not with any retention. It was academic and nothing caught me.
Over the next twenty years or so I dropped my religion (Christianity) after going through stages including an embrace of Universal Salvation, then an embrace of an idea that though I was a Christian, everything I believed could be literally translated into terms independent of reference to anything biblical or religious. My final takeaway from Christianity was the following summary of what I decided the main significance of the gospel and epistle teachings was, that made them grab people:
- Every rule is just a tool
- Every jerk has equal worth
- Presence trumps precedent
- Everything matters and nothing will last.
This relates to Zen because I'm going to ask you a question: do the above four summary "precepts" for lack of a word, remind you of Zen at all, if so how, if not why not? I ask this in a state of utter ignorance, but also because all along I have felt my understanding of Christianity was in some way affectetd or shaped, over time, by that "I get everything and I understand nothing" feeling I got as a kid from reading Zen stories. And the above four statements each reflect this feeling in some way. (If you know the rules, and rules are just tools, then by knowing the rules, you get everything, but because rules are just tools, you understand nothing. If every jerk has equal worth, then in knowing a person well enough to say what he is, I understand everything--but by evaluating him, I show I understand nothing. Etc.)
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I never meditated because I hate meditation and I felt like I "get it" without meditation. I knew many zen buddhists would not approve of this attitude so I didn't talk much about it. I also had no confidence that I had really "got it" I just had that feeling. I was careful not to let this feeling give me a big head, because I thought it was nonsense to think I had got anything.
I didn't think explicitly about Zen for most of the years from about 2005 to 2018. In the last year or so it's returned to my mind a lot. I re-read Zen Flesh Zen Bones (only discovering yesterday that some consider it to be an adulteration of Zen) and other translations of the stories and koans which I could find online. Armed (lol) with the intervening decades of education and effort at writing and thinking (I am a professor of philosophy, a teacher of critical thinking and logic, and a poet and muscian), I came to these stories with an intention to discern themes, to find a way to articulate what I felt I "got" from them.
To that end like my "christian precepts" above (which btw I did not at the time nor do I believe now were exclusive to Christianity) I felt I could see four main ideas reflected in the stories I was reading, to wit:
- An important insight occurs at the onset of emptiness
- An important insight occurs at the onset of absurdity
- An important insight occurs at the onset of an attempt at the impossible
- An important insight occurs within the ordinary continuation of everyday life.
On request I can list (at least some) of the stories I read that I thought illustrated these ideas. One point of clarification: When I say "an important insight occurs at/within" I mean by that wording to cover both cases in which that important insight occurs _within_ the story (i.e. to a character) and cases in whcih it is supposed to occur _outside_ the story (i.e. to the reader or listener).
This relates to Zen because I want to ask, do you feel you recognize these ideas in Zen in any way, even some "kind of but not really" way?
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So, an important insight? What important insight? Right now I think Zen constitutes the articulation of that insight to be impossible. But, talking around it, we can draw an implication (assuming it's the same important insight in all cases) that:
Everyday life is impossible, is absurd, is empty.
Well that sounds bleak right? But for whatever reason it doesn't feel bleak to me. It feels like a gate to freedom.
I recognize that this is existentialism, but I'll just be blunt about that: I feel like my early experiences with Zen pretty much made me (before I knew what it was) an existentialist. My guess is that existentialism in some way came out of an interaction with Zen. So that's a historical question for you--is it true? Did existentialism get some of its ideas out of an interaction with Zen?
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Why isn't it bleak? It's not bleak because of a fifth precept I didn't list above:
- Everyday life is unavoidable.
That doesn't make it even more bleak though it may seem to, because from this taken with the others, we see that we must go on being impossible, absurd and empty. That's not bleak, that's awesome! This means we don't have to drop attachments, because doing so is impossible, absurd, empty. But nor do we have to be controlled by them, or even have them--because being controlled or even having attachments is impossible, absurd, empty.
The current result of this line of thinking, for me, is that at every point, we are able to take on or reject commitments as we please--_including our commitments to please ourselves_.
I wanted to say something cooler and more concrete about it than that.
Anyway another question: Do you think Zen empowers (lack of a word)? If so, in what way? For me, to count as "empowering" something must make it possible for something to happen that could not have happened in its absence. Does Zen have that characteristic?
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I started participating on this sub yesterday and probably got on a couple of people's radar with my novicial blunder stumbling and their expert blunder stumbling causing a few crashes.
A few issues I have become alive to during that brief period, which I list below with questions:
- Zen might not be buddhism. Okay, I have no dog in that fight that I know of but I'm curious about whether it's being stated here that the earliest Zen masters explicitly saw themselves as breaking with the teachings of the person called the Buddha or if it's being said that Buddhism itself is that break, and Zen preserves a connection with what Buddha taught. I don't... actually... care about this... but it's the thing that I'm curious about right now. I think this probably stems from my younger days being interested in questions of doctrine and lineage in Christianity.
- Zen doesn't require meditation. Awesome! But funny story. Two days ago I decided to start (next week) going to a local Zen center (in the Kwan Um school--I know about the scandal btw) to be taught how to do meditations and prostrations _precisely because I am very much predisposed against such practices_ (yet also have been advised by many a person including medical professionals that meditation might be good for me for various reasons including Depression and ADHD). Zen doesn't require meditation, but aside from any possible medical usefulness, can it be a valuable part of exploring Zen?
- Zen doesn't come on the basis of reading things. Great! But it's been emphasized to me that a direct semantic relationship with certain texts is really important. I'm okay with that as well I mean, I'm a philosophy guy, I like reading and thinking and shit. But part of my philosophy concerning the significance of texts is this: It is impossible to read a text uncreatively, and there is no such thing as "the meaning" of a text. A text is a physical object or a physical complex, and what it means has as much to do with the shape of the perciever as the shape of the object or configuration of the complex. Attempts to constrain things to a particular dictionary and interpretive framework get at a meaning, often an important one, but we can't escape the freedom to accept or reject such tools at will. In each case the importance of those tools will be contextual. Basic question: Do you think that's okay?
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One or two days ago I wrote on facebook: "My holy trinity--Logic, Absurdity, Compassion.
Please help me understand the place of compassion in Zen.
Thank you!
Submitted January 03, 2020 at 11:03PM by Porn_Steal https://ift.tt/36oPZ6v
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