I have had some conversations with u/golden_eyebrow and u/surupamaerl2 about the difficulty of understanding ancient Zen texts without knowing what it was like to be immersed in their historical culture with all of its idioms, allusions, symbols, geography, science, and politics. And can't we modernize this stuff?
For example, do you know what it means to drop an entangling vine? To be an iron hammerhead with no hole? To go into the weeds? To put a mountain in a mustard seed? To have seeds planted in the mindground? To reside in the Western Lands? To roar like a lion? That even a butcher can follow the way? To be be like a useless Qin Dynasty drill?
Some of these are Zen idioms, some refer to Taoist classics, some are Buddhist sutra references, some are just commonly understood cultural events. In the same way that I might say “I lost my wallet in El Segundo” and expect u/astroemi to know I am making a Tribe Called Quest reference, Fengxue says “The partridge chirps among the scented flowers” and he is making reference to Du Fu, one of the great Chinese poets of the Tang dynasty era. The reference doesn’t have to be used as originally intended either, nor is it necessarily an endorsement, nor a critique. You only understand what the reference means if you both know the reference source, and how it is being utilized in the current context.
With all of the references in the Zen texts about the moon and the polar star, have you ever wondered just how advanced their understanding of astronomy was at the time? Did they know that we live on a spherical planet? Did they have a heliocentric view of the universe? If you have ever read any of Joseph Needham’s or Robert Temple’s books about science and technology in ancient China, you would have a sense for how advanced the Chinese people were back in the time of the Zen masters. Yet scientific understanding is much more advanced, or at least complicated, nowadays. What parallels are to be drawn between Zen and quantum physics, and is it useful to make such connections?
But this is all just a background introduction to get to what I really want to discuss, which is how do you make Zen teachings from ancient China relevant to modern life? What is Internet Zen? How can you reinvigorate the tradition in a modern internet-based context without losing sight of what the old masters were always going on about?
It is said that a student should surpass their teacher and if a Zen student’s expression of realization is only equal to that of their teacher, the teacher’s teaching is diminished by half. How will you bring life to the ancients?
u/insanezenmistress made a point recently about the difference between biomes of the Zen masters and many of our modern contexts. If you can relate the material to your own shared local flora and fauna, and the local pop-culture and folklore symbols, you provide a deeper sense of what someone is talking about. To this end, someone like linseed makes videos about whales that he can see spouting right in front of him, and brings forth an Alaska chan born out of his surroundings. I have tried to use some local nature in my own poetry, at times. But the strange thing about the internet, is we have a variety of contexts here: Brazilian, Australian, North American, German, etc. I don’t really know what is common to everyone here, other than bitching about the forum. Perhaps my writing could say more about a cornucopia of advertisements, news, and pop culture; or maybe it should just reject all that. If r/zen is really a sangha, how do we make use of its pan-cultural context and historical place in time? What can you point to in your daily life in the same way as a zen master would point at a fly whisk? What is Internet Zen?
Submitted July 16, 2022 at 05:23AM by jungle_toad https://ift.tt/za7lOKL
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