A few months ago I was experiencing some chronic paranoia and found myself compelled to look up dharma vids to try and find some kind of magical cure. Eventually I came across Shinzen Young’s YouTube channel “expandcontract” and pretty much just marathoned most of his vids in deep agony/terror.
It was not a fun time.
However, one of his videos really struck me. Too lazy to try and go find it but bottom line, at some point in the video he described a stubborn monk who isolated himself on a mountain, away from the traditional Zen Sangha at his time. Not sure how long his hermitage endured but one day, after a long time of suffering with no progress, someone came up to visit him. Shinzen describes his reaction as just straight up blurting out, “The mountain is enlightened.”
The reason I decided to post this was because out of everything I’ve read about Zen, one of my favorite techniques has been the Hua Tou meditation. Literally I’m pretty sure it just translates to “word head” but some people prefer the term speech exhaustion meditation. Anyway, the core focus is to just find a phrase or question or whatever, i.e. “What is this?” “Who is dragging this corpse around?” “What is it?” and just pour yourself into it.
Well, pretty recently I found another miscellaneous Zen line (again, too lazy to cite, might be a comment on the Diamond Sutra) that goes, “All problems are caused by nothing other than the process of questioning and answering itself.”
This leads me to my (hopefully) final Zen/Cha’n/Dhyana thesis:
Speech will never exhaust itself. Changedaworld.pdf.jpg)
Oh also, AMA.
Submitted May 08, 2020 at 08:00AM by toastghost2000 https://ift.tt/35HUXvN
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