One day the community went out to work in the fields. When a monk heard the drumbeat , he held up his hoe, laughed heartily and returned to the monastery.
(Seeing this) Baizhang said, ”What a remarkable thing! This is Avalokiteśvara’s Dharma-door to enlightenment.”
Afterwards Baizhang sent for the monk and asked him, ”What have you seen today?”
The monk replied, ”I did not have any rice gruel this morning and when I heard the drum beat I returned to take my meal.”
Thereat, Baizhang gave a loud roar of laughter.
This whole case is so ridiculous: it shatters the expectations of anyone who says Zen Masters have anything important to say about enlightenment and leaves the matter of what the monk saw on everyone’s tongue.
Specifically, we get three expressions that make it thorny:
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“This is…Dharma door to enlightenment”— Which is wholly incompatible with how Buddhists talk about enlightenment as a set of rituals to engage in—over long periods.
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“What have you seen today?”—Public testing isn’t something you escape from in Zen. That escape is what religions uphold and aspire to.
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“Thereat…roar of laughter.”—The whole case is an overturning of what occurred before. I think the temptation for people unawares of zen cases is to suspect that the monk got enlightened when there was some loud noise and he started acting weird: and leave it at that .
But the laughter on the part of Baizhang after questioning him should be deeply concerning to people seeking approval for their experiences or conceiving of ready-made enlightenments. The monk, after all, is still unnamed.
Ask away.
Submitted June 13, 2022 at 04:49PM by ThatKir https://ift.tt/3lZYxuR
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