Religion has traditionally been hard to define. There has been a lot of discussion about it for a while now. Weird stuff, hey, we even have christianity often saying “it’s not a religion, it’s a lifestyle”.
One thing that gets out to the side a lot is the need for it to not be a single instance of belief, or a personal belief. Like "religion is the belief in God". That is unless you are coming from the angle of what is religion to an individual, as some have.
Religion defined well requires more than personal belief. It requires a structured and passed on set of spiritual beliefs that essentially are assumptions that the religion characteristics partly form from, alongside a culture lens. If we don't do this, then we lose the delineation of religion from non structured belief systems, even if they are supernatural ones.
What I mean is, believing ghosts are real does not make you part of a religion.
In the same way believing that hell is real does not make you part of any religion.
Do zen masters mention things like hell and demons? Yes. Is there any indication by their words that hells and demons are part of a shared and passed on structure integral to the religion?
No. There are two arguments:
1. They say so themselves
This refers to a story of a man who saw a running rabbit happen to collide with a tree stump and die; the man took the rabbit for food, and, thinking to obtain another rabbit; he foolishly stood by the stump, waiting for it to 'catch' another rabbit for him. This is used to describe those who cling to words or images, thinking them to be a source of enlightenment. - yuanwu , bcr
A passing on of assumptions and believes requires relying on the written word, it requires literal attachment, clinging to words and images and symbols. It saying "this is the zen belief; this is the zen catchescim that is relevant towards enlightenment".
There is more to comment on zens disruption of how spiritual things are normally viewed, but this is sufficient for now
Also if we find proof of the opposite in their words, that will just further prove a point of not being one doctrine.
2. The way storytelling functioned in tang china
Demons, hell, people turning into beasts, ghosts are extremely integral to Chinese story telling at the time of the zen masters. People fathered in ins and basically "gossiped" about public figures and their private lives, creating stories, but more importantly changing and borrowing myths to suit the new morals. You can read more about this in the great book "Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore In Narratives From Tang Dynasty China” by Sarah Allen
If you read some t]Tang stories, you can look for the Taiping Guangi, which was the first imperial compilation of Tang fiction, you'll find the exact same style of using mythical and cosmological metaphors and memes as you do in zen, which shows that they are a culture phenomena and shows that they are not by default of use being used religiously.
If we say gods and demons and hell are being preached as a religious principle and not as a culturally sensitive device then all metaphors are subject. Dogs, people turning into foxes, dragons with snake tails, etc.
Zen is a hodgepodge of memes and devices, if you don't believe me try to spot them all in the bcr, good luck, used, not a comment on cosmology or mythological grounded transcendental believes.
There's more convo to have, Oxford dictionary provides a list of “is this thing a religion” that has some checks from zen.
Also, is spirituality necessary and what do we mean by spirituality - another topic to go into in this linger discussion.
I'll leave with this:
The attempt to describe religion as a separate and independent sphere of human activity did not appear until the nineteenth century. Schleiermacher’s On Religion was one of the first books to regard it as an isolable subject. Prior to that a religious tradition was identified with the cultural tradition that provided the fundamental means of individual and social identification. Traditionally, religion referred to the basic guiding images and principles of an individual and a culture. Religion was identical with style of life. - Joseph D. Bettis
We are really just defining what everyday life was like for zen masters when we look at the things that seem to point to a religion, which certainly brings up the necessity for a special and specific definition that is built around what exactly you want to do with it.
Is it to prove modern ideas and lineage legitimate or at least correlated to what the zen masters say?
Submitted January 01, 2020 at 11:33PM by TFnarcon9 https://ift.tt/35bbu9D
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