Dizang asked Fayan, “Where are you going?”
Fayan said, “Around on pilgrimage.”
Dizang said, “What is the purpose of pilgrimage?”
Fayan said, “I don’t know.”
Dizang said, “Not knowing is most intimate.”
We did it r/zen, I’ve been home in Mexico for almost a month and I'm ready to talk about my spring abroad which I put to very good use for my Zen study.
First of all I want to talk about why I even write this. Do I not come here to talk about what the Zen record says? Who cares about what I lived and how my travels went? Well, I think the Universal AC view of r/zen1, where we are disembodied word creatures who experience only thought and are only capable of communicating via abstract ideas is, though admittedly fun at times, ultimately limited in scope as to how we can talk about our study of the Zen texts.
Because that’s what we are here to do, right? We are here to talk to those others in the world that want to study the words of Zhaozhou and Yuanwu and Wansong and all of their friends.
I said before somewhere else that that very simple ideal is what I thought university life was gonna be like. Everybody there wants to talk about the same things I’m interested in AND about the people who have studied those same things throughout history? Awesome!
So I’m here. A person with a body whose only interest here is to talk about the books I read and how they impact my life. Because they do. Who are we kidding? These books have affected my life in a way no other books have. No other books or tradition have come even close.
So I decided since I am a serious student of Zen, and I was never interested enough in anything else to travel to a fancy research center and study for a semester or a summer in another country, I would take it upon myself to make my own Study Abroad Program, and I would use it for Zen Study and hands-on practice.
Were there goals to this study program? Tangible ways of measuring success? What’s the criteria for it?
Honestly, I have no idea. I just wanted to see what would happen.
1 https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf
Before Departing Ithaca
I’m gonna take advantage of telling this story to talk about what happened before I left.
Once upon a time, u/astroemi was trying really hard to understand Zen. He read as much as his interest allowed, and started to understand a bit more about what the people of old were saying in these old books. However, something eluded him. As much as he engaged with the texts he wasn’t finding what he was looking for. His friend u/GreenSage45 encouraged him to keep going. astro generally didn't trust lawyers, but that sounded like good advice, so he kept his studies. At some point, astroemi read something that went, “study the living word, don’t study the dead word,” so he changed the way he was approaching his study. Instead of waiting to see what the books where saying and seeing if what they were saying applied to him and his life, he started to read the books and the words in them as living things. Not literally of course, but rather he would study what the books were saying to him, the living one in the interaction which by extension would make the books come alive all on their own.
Rather quickly, he started to see he was close to finding what he was looking for. He started to go beyond his own questions and see what questions were left until eventually he ran out of questions. There was nothing else he wanted to explore. BUT the feeling of doubt remained. Only he had no way of exploring it, since he was used to exploring it via his always pressing questions. He was confused. Even frustrated. He made a post, as he always did, to tell the other students of Zen about what was happening.
Fortunately, there were people who, like him, had been studying Zen. u/ewk told him,
The call is coming from inside the house.
Of course you wouldn't be satisfied if you keep searching around outside the house. I imagine you bringing to bear the full force of the FBI and your search of your neighborhood and the surrounding area... Tapping satellite cell towers, installing spy cams on pet collars, comparing serial numbers on bank robbers dollars...
It will never get you anywhere if the call is coming from inside the house.
The looking is it. Buddha is awakened, awakenedness is Buddha.
Baseball isn't the rules of baseball. Baseball is not a play where you try to figure out whether the guy was out or whether he stole home.
You have to watch people play baseball and to understand what baseball is.
The umpire is inside the game.
https://old.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/qrgj9n/am_i_done/hk6k07s/
At first it didn’t make sense. Not the first part, about the call coming inside the house, which is pretty self-explanatory, but the second part. He read it over and over until astro realized he was Mexican and he didn’t know how to play baseball. The comment made no sense to him. He went and looked up what an umpire was. Only then, and by putting it all together did he understood everything. ewk was right, the looking was it, and astro had always had it with him.
So astroemi, who has been known to get really excited about stuff, saw the looking for what it was, and started looking around him. Not only in real life, but in the online forum he had been studying in and at the people he’d been studying with. He thought that since he always had the ability to look, that meant other people did as well.
So he went around the forum telling everyone that they were exactly like the people he was reading about, on account of being able to look as well. He saw some people had developed tools for talking to people about the stuff he wanted to talk about, so he started talking about “AMA’s” and “book reports” and all the rest of it. Nevertheless, it was obvious to himself and to everyone who was paying attention, that those were not his tools, and his interests demanded other stuff from him.
That video is a representation of how it feels right now to me. I actually went back and looked at those interactions and that’s not how it felt back then at all. My interactions with linseed at the time felt like passing a stone through my digestive system. I think he felt it too. But I think we both wanted to see where it was all going. Just look at this classic OP and video2 by him. I still don’t know if he got anything out of that interaction, but I definitely did. Funnily enough, it was Lurkersim who helped me snap out of it. I couldn’t keep pretending like Odysseus. I had to venture out into the sea.
Video: I had to answer the call.
2 Btw, linseed, I didn’t answer you back then about the fish. How do you like this answer? Took me a while, huh?
Journey to the West
Fully confident in myself I crossed the ocean from my native Mexico all the way to Spain. I won’t bore you with all the details, but I was on that side of the globe for three full months and managed to visit four of the biggest countries of the Shengren area (Spain, France, Germany and Italy).
So what happened? Did I manage to obtain the sutras and come back after much tribulation and suffering? No, not really. But I did learn a bunch of stuff about who I am and about the world around me.
1. Work
Baizhang famously said that a day without work is a day without food. My trip started with a big worry that I didn’t have enough money to stay in Europe for three months. I even made a video about it just before I left. When I went through customs the official told me I didn’t have enough money to stay. I had about a third of what I needed.
So I surprised myself in the months just before I left by doing absolutely nothing to gain more money than I already was. Instead, I looked up through the internet farms I could work for room and board at, and stayed in two of them for about the first month and a half of my stay, which was in Spain. That was really helpful since I didn’t spent a cent there. But also, I learnt a lot about how working affects my brain, and about how physical labor leaves me with more energy to use my brain afterwards than the intellectual labor I had historically engaged in ever did.
It also gave me a lot to think in regards to what actually constitutes work. Work sometimes leaves no profit. And not all profit-driven enterprises are actually work. So now that I’m back home I’m gonna experiment with how much work I can do while doing as little profit-driven activities as I can. I want my next season abroad to be towards my neighbors up north, so I definitely need a bit of cash just to even enter.
2. Conversations
One time the Master said, "If you would experience that which transcends even the Buddha, you must first be capable of a bit of conversation."
A monk asked, "What kind of conversation is that?"
"When I am conversing, you don't hear it, Acarya," said the Master.
"Do you hear it or not, Ho-shang?" asked the monk.
"When I am not conversing, I hear it," replied the Master
With whatever money I had I spent two weeks in France staying at hostels. The start of it was a little rough. I was traveling by myself and had no easy way to establish a mutual context with people to initiate conversations. But after a day spent not really understanding how to make conversations happen out of nowhere, I decided to take it step by step. I would start by saying hi to people. And bam, problem solved, after I started being friendly suddenly everyone wanted to be my friend. I had some fun adventures thanks to that, and it was a good skill to learn.
I even met r/zen’s very own u/RickleTickle69 who introduced me to his friends and to French customs. I had a great time and will never forget my time over there.
3. Literature
For some mysterious reason the Zen Masters were totally versed in the literature of their time. So a lot of my travel time was spent in libraries and parks reading not just from the Zen record, but whatever I deemed most efficient to my energy in the moment. I managed to start and finish Don Quixote while over there (wrote about it here), among a bunch of other stuff that I can tell you about if you are interested.
4. Sangha
I spent another twenty days or so in Germany staying with friends there. One of which I met right here on this very sub of r/zen. u/elaborateandwise graciously allowed me to stay with him and even took me to explore a bit of Germany whilst we talked about anything and everything. Those were some really awesome days.
Talking about this also gives me a chance to say that this Zen community that communicates over radio waves with the interface of letters and pixels, is very real. Some of you reached out to help me out asking how I was doing and keeping tabs on me, but also to send me a bit of money. That made a significant impact on my trip and I thank everyone immensely for that.
To me, the fact that this community had a significant, material impact on my trip is proof that it is a real thing that is happening in the world. I am lucky to be a small part of it.
My One Practice
Two weeks ago I posted a case from Dahui's Treasury that included this bit,
If in all places whether walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, your pure unified direct mind does not move from the site of enlightenment, truly making a pure land, this is called absorption in one practice.
I was asked about what that one practice was, and I think it's fitting to talk about it here, since this is all about my own practice.
It's not a practice in the sense of practicing towards something. It's a practice in the sense of doing something.
In that sense my one practice is to not draw a line between false thoughts and truth. It saves a lot of energy.
And to end this, I am very interested in hearing about your own experience with Zen, where it has taken you, and what your practice is. Any comments are welcomed, and that includes complaints.
See you in the comments!
Submitted July 31, 2022 at 03:33AM by astroemi https://ift.tt/jsFzPvC
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