2bitmoment’s take on wikipedia: Dongshan, monkhood, “Leakage”

link to the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongshan_Liangjie

Was Dongshan Buddhist or Zen (if these are separate and different things)? Could he be a buddhist monk and have taken the precepts and yet have no reverence or give no importance to the buddhist “institution”? Does this make sense? (I directly reference u/oxen_hoofprint ‘s post https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/go4l99/zen_masters_are_buddhist_monks_and_thus_buddhist/ where he speaks of buddhist monk and preceptor being “buddhist” and therefore these zen masters and Zen itself necessarily “Buddhist”)

At the village cloister, Dongshan showed promise by questioning the fundamental Doctrine of the Six Roots during his tutor's recitation of the Heart Sutra.[1] Though aged only ten, he was sent away from his home village to train under Lingmo (霊黙) at the monastery on nearby Wutai Mountain (五台山). He also had his head shaved and took on yellow robes, which represented the first steps in his path to becoming a monk, ordaining as a śrāmaṇera. At the age of twenty-one, he went to Shaolin Monastery on Mount Song, where he took the complete monk's precepts as a bhikṣu.

Regarding Dharma transmission this is said:

He obtained instruction from Nanquan Puyuan (南泉普願),[1] and later from Guishan Lingyou (溈山靈祐).[1] But the teacher of preeminent influence was Master Yunyan Tansheng, of whom Dongshan became the dharma heir.

Is Dharma transmission a couple of words with the same meaning as “inheriting the dharma” from a person? It seems to me that dharma heir here at least means the main inheritors or continuators of the school of that line, much in the sense of my previous post on Dharma transmission: a bureaucratic transfer of power.

A perhaps funny when out of context line in the article is:

Dongshan inherited from Yunyan Tansheng the knowledge of the Three Types of Leakage (三種滲漏, shenlou)

Do you want to know about the Three Types of Leakage? Do you already know about them?

The wikipedia page quotes two poems by Dongshan one is here:

Students as numerous as sands in the Ganges but none are awakened.

They err by searching for the path in another person's mouth.

If you wish to forget form and not leave any traces,

Wholeheartedly strive to walk in emptiness

From the external links, the jewelled mirror of samadhi:

Penetrate the root and you fathom the branches,

Grasping connections, one then finds the road.

To be wrong is auspicious,

There's no contradiction.

1. What is the use of commenting or criticizing flawed sources such as wikipedia? Is there any?
2. When people come with knowledge from flawed sources or with pure ignorance, what is the position of an enlightened being? I think Dongshan, someone who questioned a head monk to death, for example was not of the opinion that a gentle welcome was necessary, right?
3. Why isn’t Terebess linked to in the external links of the wikipedia article? There is a huge page on Terebess on Dongshan, and it has multiple links to good sources. https://terebess.hu/zen/dongshan-eng.html Are there problems with Terebess in terms of copyright violations? Are there problems of another sort?
4. What is missing from the article that should be there? I think being called “the Master who questioned head monks to death” is pretty relevant. And it’s totally absent.
5. Anything else? Feel free to come up with your own questions.

These questions and this post are food for thought. I offer them up, I do not claim these are untainted or perfect foods for thought. I do not say these are "Zen words", these are my attempts to study some questions in zen and some questions of sourcing or scholarship. What is Zen? What is proper scholarship? What does Zen have to do with proper scholarship?

I thank you for reading whatever amount you read. Feel free to do as you wish, comment with answers or questions or different points or view or even nonsense or offtopic ramblings: "you do you".

Submitted May 24, 2020 at 03:10AM by 2bitmoment https://ift.tt/3edjonB