As the debate around meditation might still be a relevant one to many here, I think this extract from the portion of Sam Van Schaik's book "The Spirit of Zen" where he discusses gradual vs. sudden enlightenment might be interesting:
There is a popular Zen story about the eighth-century master Mazu and his teacher, which challenges the idea that meditation leads to enlightenment:
Mazu was sitting down, when Huairang took a tile and sat on the rock facing him, and rubbed it. Mazu asked, ‘What are you doing?’ Huairang said, ‘I’m rubbing the tile to make a mirror.’ Mazu said, ‘How can you make a mirror by rubbing a tile?’ Huairang replied, ‘If I can’t make a mirror by rubbing a tile, how can you achieve buddhahood by sitting in meditation?’
Now, this story could be read as a warning against the practice of sitting in meditation. But anyone familiar with the mahayana sutras would recognize in it the familiar act of cutting through the conventional understanding of a practice. To think of any practice as the cause of becoming awakened is to categorize awakening according to our conventional way of thinking, and this itself separates us from awakening. Practitioners of Zen engage in meditation without thinking in terms of meditation as the cause and awakening as the result.
In Zen, meditation is not meditation and enlightenment is not enlightenment. This is not just a paradox: meditation is to be practised without a fixed idea of what meditation is; enlightenment is the goal of the bodhisattva, but there is no essence or definition of enlightenment. Getting stuck in such ideas is a mistake. Therefore to practise meditation with the idea that it is the cause of enlightenment is wrong, because the Buddha is right here as the true nature of our own minds.
This does lead to a kind of contradiction that underlies Zen and other Mahayana traditions: if enlightenment is already right here and now, why meditate or do any other practice? Such questions are often answered through images and similes: consider, for example, a poor family who don’t realize there is a treasure chest hidden beneath their floorboards; or someone travelling in search of a gem that is sewn inside his clothes. That is to say, we don’t know what we have. Meditation and other practices are the means by which we weaken the hold of the habitual grasping and distraction that hide our own nature from ourselves.
One might ask, if this is the case, what is the point of doing meditation or any other practice? Why do Zen monks spend a lifetime in monasteries? This brings us back to the difference between those experiences that allow a glimpse of reality and the state of enlightenment itself. Even if we are able to let go of our mental grasping and emotional distraction for long enough to have an ‘enlightenment experience’, our habitual patterns tend to reassert themselves fairly quickly. Thus practice continues. As Zongmi wrote: ‘The sun rises all at once, but the frost melts step by step.’
It is not that experiences of awakening are unimportant, but they are just that: temporary experiences. They are not the end of the path, and the practice that may last a lifetime is the gradual dissolving of those habitual patterns. We could say that the Zen path always exists in this state of uncertainty, suspended between the ever-presence of enlightened awareness and the need to gradually train so that we can live it.
Submitted October 05, 2020 at 08:18PM by RickleTickle69 https://ift.tt/34t7ZwK
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