From Seosan Daesa's (1520-1604) Mirror of Zen text.
If you attain enlightenment through live words, you will become a teacher equal to Buddha and the Patriarchs. If you attain through dead words, you cannot even save yourself. Therefore it is really only through “live words” that you can hope to be awakened to your own nature.
Dead words aren't enough to understand the doctrine of Buddha.
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If you truly wish to see Zen Master Lin-chi, you had better be a man of iron.
If you can't meet Chinese Zen Mastesr face to face you aren't a man of great stength. But what does his strength depend on?
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Merely pursuing the conceptual meaning of your kong-an is practicing “complete” and “sudden enlightenment” teachings through attachment to dead words. Such study only opens wider the road to conceptual reasoning and the path of speech, since it is mainly concerned with thinking and conceptual understanding.
"Kong-an" just means the Law, don't go and bamboozle people with names you don't understand. (~Confucius) Trying to pin a particular set of words on the law is just playing at undertanding. Zen is not the meditation of the Daoists, Buddhists, or anyone else.
Initial notes:
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This text engages with and responds to Zen Masters from China. Case 34, specifically, appears like a nod to Mingben.
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There are thematic elements of it that need to be looked over from multiple angles to see what he was responding to, how much of the translation might obscure references to Zen texts through religious intent, and what kind of conversation this text generated.
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Stylistically, this is different from what we get from texts like the Book of Serenity or the Gateless Checkpoint. The elements are a lot less consistent across chapters, but, as a whole we get something liket:
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A quote from somebody, somewhere, not always from Zen Mastesr.
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Commentary
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Verse
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Capping Phrase
The language we get is pretty different from Wansong in the 1200's and this text in particular is far closer to stuff like the various inscription-genre (e.g., Inscription to Trust Mind, Inscription of the Mind King, The Mind Inscription) texts we get get from Sengcan, Fu Xi, and Niutou.
One yellow flag is that I didn't come across any dialogues of this guy so far...but...Korean translators have been doing far more rigorous work of their texts than those of the Chinese and Japanese counterparts.
Submitted July 05, 2022 at 07:37AM by ThatKir https://ift.tt/Hf5Wci9
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