(Welcome link) (ewkwho?) note:(stuff I should have posted in the last month in response to something or other I read around here but never got around to, summed up)
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All the people who talk about working with the Mu Koan in a modern setting are religious nutbakers who are praying and/or meditating "over" mu, like it was a magic word. That's anti-mu. 24/7 Zen mu is like a whip, and anybody approaching a person who is "working on the mu koan" would have the whip turned on them. It's not "quiet time".
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Mu means no. Zhaozhou was outright rejecting a Buddhist doctrine that other Zen Masters had already rejected, so it wasn't the rejection that was interesting... it was the naked NO of the rejection that Wumen was both extracting and celebrating. A no without qualifications or arguments, differing even from the Case as it is written.
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To work with the Mu Koan, just say no. No to beliefs, ideas, doctrines, methods, practices, values. But not nihilistic no. "The sky is blue" doesn't become "no it isn't", but rather "there is so such thing as The Blue, thus blue is just a relative statement and you might as well say "not green" and "not aquamarine". No to blue.
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Wumen supposedly studied the Mu Koan more than any of the modern day Mu Koan Posers. Wumen wrote Wumenguan. If somebody tells me they worked on Mu, let alone passed Mu, and they don't have a Wumenguan comparable text that they've jotted down, then they are a poser. Wumenguan is barely 49 Cases with a poem and a couple of lines of "no he didn't". If you can't do that, you can't tell people to "worked with the mu koan".
Submitted October 20, 2020 at 02:58PM by ewk https://ift.tt/34gnM3j
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