Every once in a while I return to reading zen texts and also enjoy lurking on r/zen because y'all put on a great show. It seems things are a bit more chill than they were a few years back.
My interpretation (yeah you could say "let's not interpret things", I'll go ahead anyway) of the reason this sub is so controversial/confrontational is that one one side people say it should only be a discussion of Zen texts, while others think this is fundamentalism, literalism etc. and it should be about Zen itself, whatever that may be, not the texts, about various deep insights about the mind and people one-upping one another on who's more enlightened, expounding novel teachings on "Zen as a thing out here today", not as a concrete group of people centuries ago and so on.
I feel like the first group does have a more sophisticated view than first meets the eye of someone new on the sub. It's just that they already realize that trying to formulate this view usually comes out as gibberish, as something that has no real content that would improve over what has already been written. You can not pin it down to a set of beliefs, because it's really not about that. It's the ideas of "there is nothing to gain" but simultaneously feeling as if you were gaining something, various opposites like that and then noting "hmm, how curious. that's okay. or not okay! -- silence -- let's move on!"
I could already go ahead and write the answer to my own post, that this is all too intellectual etc. etc., everyone has to experience these types or other types of thoughts by just reading the original texts etc.
Submitted June 06, 2020 at 01:22PM by SadistNirvana https://ift.tt/2YaBD73
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