Does zen even have enemies?

Just today there are OPs that would suggest zen can have enemies or that would suggest that zen is a branch of this or that, and the ensuing comments that include claims such as "Zen is the most complete and final understanding of Buddhism."

Followed by many conversations of course, warnings of building nests, reminders that a cloud cannot be pinned to the sky, and also questioning if the kind of understanding that is suggested even has anything to do with zen. Zen is more experienced than understood, and a shortage of the kind of understanding built on reason and deduction and piles of information may be inherently suspect as far as the zen characters are concerned. Literati zen was not especially popular among the early zen characters, but there is no doubt that the writers Foyan, Yuanwu, Dahui, Mumon, and Wansong were literati themselves.

For zen to have enemies or for it to be the ultimate outcome of the Mahayana tradition, you would have to be able get a bullseye on it. You would have to have someone who could actually recognize zen when they saw it. Someone who could match eyebrows with Yunmen, ZhaoZhou, Deshan, Danxia, Baiyun Shouduan (Baiyun Duan).

Those who hold up a bullseye they claim is zen are not the enemies of zen. There is no zen institution, doctrine, canon, or practice to defend. The experience of zen isn't being attacked, zen isn't being altered. Zen was never a party to such activities, instead, individuals ranting their ideologies are not even close.

In an OP from today https://old.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/11la137/baiyun_duan_18_the_price_of_luling_rice/ (I can't comment in this OP) Baiyun Shouduan (1025–1072) says

Stop using bushels to reckon how near or far.

I plead guilty to having tried to apply the terms of an irrelevant yardstick, a conceptual unit, to the matters of zen. Bringing these gimmicks doesn't bring us to zen, it takes us away.

I have spent some time looking into these conceptual measures, having realized these models cannot be forced any more than you can put a square peg into a round hole. With what do we recognize the zen characters? No one knows how that happens, but time and space are suddenly bridged, and not by any of the bushells that we have accumulated. Those bushells are worth knowing about, and having constructed them, they can be as well known as the price of rice, which is to say, you can know a lot about the stuff that humans invent. You can understand a lot about our measures. But that doesn't mean they apply to the freedom of zen characters or the way it looks from where they are.

I seriously doubt they really believed that Bodhidharma brought zen from somewhere to somewhere or that zen had enemies. These are beliefs some hold onto because they want to ground their world view in a narrative. Those narratives are not that hard to deconstruct. What is hard is people will hold onto them even when shown to be nonsense. Its like they have set themselves a taboo against going there. They would rather stay connected to what they think they have than risk cutting loose and falling into endless space. The recognition we talk about is happening in that endless space. Its more tangible than any of the stuff we claim to possess, less fragile.

To wrap it up, we see these zen characters who were insiders into the greatest jokes of all. Who in their own way were invincible, immovable, and yet mostly uncatchable. Everything in our world up to now was something we could take stock of enough to decide to join in or not. Not so with zen. We can recognize it and let that grow, but we can't jump from the outside to the inside with a collection of skills and effort.

There is no zen to join. We could spend the rest of our lives trying to make it fit, but the fit is not on the old terms. You can CAN'T measure it in bushells. You are always going to have to operate from where you are, in any given moment or place. Realizing that we are not going to get zen "in our sights" like any other cultural artifact can be. Its always going to happen from square one.

Submitted March 08, 2023 at 03:37AM by unreconstructedbum https://ift.tt/wCHrN2z