Here is a new passage (for myself) about Huanglong that I discovered while reading Treasury of the Eye of True Teaching, volume 1, Translated by Thomas Cleary, earlier this morning:
13.Master Huanglong Nan said to an assembly, Master Dazhu said, ‘Purity of conduct, speech, and mind is called Buddha appearing in the world. Impurity of conduct, speech, and mind is called Buddha becoming extinct.’ A good message—the ancient’s temporary expedient opens up an entryway for you.
Once you have found an entryway, you then must find a way of exit. When you climb a mountain, you should reach the peak; when you dive into an ocean, you should reach the bottom.
If you climb a mountain but don’t reach the peak, you won’t know how immense the universe is. If you dive into an ocean but don’t reach the bottom you won’t know how deep the abyss is.
Once you know immensity and depth, you kick over the four oceans with one kick, slap down the polar mountain with one slap, then go back home with your hands free, unrecognized by anyone: sparrows twitter, crows caw, among the cedar trees.
I wasn't reading Dahui here with the intention of stumbling into Huanglong, or of making a post; thankfully, Huanglong knew how to stumble into me, directly catching my eye.
This passage directly reflects my understanding of myself today, and the actual role of the day itself, and its environment, that put me in the exact mood to hear this passage in a manner that gave me insight into my self nature.
Which was what I already knew waking up this morning, and peering out the window: fluffly clouds, blue skies: I will be going on a walk, to seek out the empty places with no people. Lucky me. It could have been raining. I would have been stuck inside cleaning, and never heard this quote from Huanglong.
As my comment I'm just going to give this quote from Foyan, from just few pages earlier in the same book, that no doubt triggered the priming of the shapes Huanglong leapt through however many minutes later it was he did so, and got my attention for a second. Here is the passage:
4. Master Foyan said to an assembly,
A thousand talks and myriad explanations are not as good as seeing once in person. It is clear of itself, even without explanation. The allegory of the king’s precious sword, the allegory of the blind men groping the elephant, in Chan studies the phenomenon of awakening on being beckoned from across the river, the matter of the crags deep in the mountains where there are no people—these are all to be seen in person; they are not in verbal explanation.
Notes
The allegories of the king’s precious sword and the blind men groping the elephant come from the Mahaparinirvana scripture. They both refer to the observation that subjective descriptions are not objective realities.
So you can see how Foyan here, who I have read and studied before, has prepared me for the Huanglong quote before I got to it, and in an important manner: such that I could see the clear link between my own previously followed (self) natural path of study and my current one, verifying that there is some self in here that finds itself seeing in a certain manner, and recognizes that.
The most interesting thing, to myself while here in r/zen, to note about this, is that what it really shows me is that the recomendations to study Layman Pang and Huanglong that came from other users on r/zen, were very insightfully offered by a couple of individuals I've spent a lot of time conversing with.
I would have been incapable of leading myself to a similar course of study focusing on two new particular Zen masters, it never would have occurred to me (not to mention the name Huanglong wasn't even in my memory, so he must have never stood out before now), but the discussions here helped me both unveil my own educational and paradigmatical tracks, develop a visual language for translating it, and make certain interlocutors aware of my progress in study and a good enough understanding of how my mind works to make very useful and (I find) insightful suggestions.
Just observations on my personal experiences studying these Zen masters and passages, as well as on my experiences engaging in discussion of Zen on this forum, which I do find to be germane subjects of conversation in this forum, certainly.
But these are just a few remarks. The point is and was actually the passages. Huanglong! Cedars!
Submitted May 02, 2020 at 01:34AM by BlindYellowSage https://ift.tt/2z4er1q
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