You don’t rest in a restroom, so a buddhist monk isn’t necessarily a buddhist

You don’t rest in a restroom, so a buddhist monk isn’t necessarily a buddhist

What is a buddhism?

The translators use buddhism for buddha-dharma as I understand it.

Buddhism is an easily understood, energy-saving teaching; people strain themselves. Seeing them helpless, the ancients told people to try meditating quietly for a moment. These are good words [...]

Foyan

I think one idea is that McCleary is wrong. Maybe so wrong that he should be hostilized as some enemy of the buddha-dharma.

People who distort buddhism or that are enemies of the buddha dharma have recently been a topic in the forum

If I don't die in the next four or five years, I’ll get these exterminators of Buddhism and break their legs!

Yunmen

Here exterminators of buddhism are seen as deserving of physical harm.

They spend their life in a rathole, sit under a dark mountain where ghosts roam, and say, 'I found a way in.' Do they see it even in a dream? What crime would it be to beat ten thousand people of this kind to death?

Yunmen

Here people who don’t follow the buddha-dharma properly, it is not seen as a crime to kill countless numbers, infinite numbers of people like this. Ten thousand is a number in chinese that basically means all. “The ten thousand things” means everything in the universe.

One way to deal with this is to say that this is hyperbole. That in some way this doesn’t matter - these are only words. Yunmen was not a serial killer. Yunmen was famous not as the author of a massacre, but as a teacher, as a Zen Master.

How do I see this?

In a comment regarding why people were being toxic over at another forum a user cited Bukowski and Dostoievsky:

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day

from Bukowski

The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.

from Dostoievsky

And I’d like to add those to this quote from Foyan

You want to listen attentively to Buddha; why doesn’t Buddha listen to himself? If you seek a formal Buddha outside the listening, it will not resemble you.

So if there is a real buddha that we all naturally are it doesn’t exclude the ugly parts of us. The parts we would like to ignore. The saltiness, the aggressiveness, the toxicity - even in those things there would be some redemptive quality. As if all hate in truth were tough love. The devil at the heart of man also himself, an evil impulse also a thing of love. I’m not entirely sure tho, this is a tentative explanation. That’s how I see this. How do you see this?

Submitted March 19, 2021 at 09:58PM by 2bitmoment https://ift.tt/38WQzMi