This lie is subtle. It relies on specific interpretation. It's a misapplication of the Zen teaching that all is fundamentally whole and complete. It's a misunderstanding of Zen masters' admonitions of attachment to practice and seeking of gain or loss. It's an excuse to forfeit practice and settle into a nest of confidence in understanding. Zen is not like this.
Yuanwu said:
Some people hear this kind of talk and jump to conclusions, claiming, "I understand! Fundamentally there is nothing to Buddhism-it's there in everybody. As I spend my days eating food and wearing clothes, has there ever been anything lacking?" Then they settle down in the realm of unconcerned ordinariness, far from realizing that nothing like this has ever been part of the real practice of Buddhism.
Zen is constant work. Settling is failure. Those who settle into complacency interpret the teachings subjectively, without a direct understanding. An ancient worthy said:
When you speak of realization, you cannot show it to others; when you speak of the truth, you cannot do it without realization.
Zen practice is twofold: attaining realization and refining realization. This is illustrated repeatedly throughout the record.
Hongzhi:
Where everything is correct and totally sufficient, attain the pure eye that illuminates thoroughly, fulfilling liberation. Enlightenment involves enacting this; stability develops from practicing it.
Realization of enlightenment is the first subject of practice...enacting the pure eye. It's not a matter of a thing being attained...it's realizing the source directly. It takes concentrated effort.
Zhongfeng:
If you want to be a genuine wayfarer, there is no other expedient but to be single-mindedly sincere. It just requires you to proceed with vigorous practice one time around, not sparing your life, mindless of death. When you get to the point where you cannot apply effort, when you cannot apply your mind, that is just right to apply your mind. Keep at it this way for a long time, practicing this way for a long time, and ten out of ten will “make the grade, mind empty.”
It requires vigorous practice to make the grade. If the way isn’t realized, it isn’t Zen. Master Jing said:
Only when you’ve seen the Way do you practice the Way - If you don’t see, what do you practice?
Do those who say there is nothing to practice not see the way? Have they passed through Wumen’s barrier? These folks say Zen masters didn’t prescribe method. They say there is no specified practice. Dahui disagreed:
Just take the mind, so long-lasting, and bring it together with the saying “A dog has no Buddha-nature.” Keep them together till the mind has no place to go—suddenly, it’s like awakening from a dream, like a lotus flower opening, like parting the clouds and seeing the moon. When you reach such a moment, naturally you attain unity.
This is concentrated, focused use of a koan to spur the mind into realization. The same practice Wumen prescribes. It worked for him. He worked on it for six years:
When I was in the congregation of my late teacher in the past, I just contemplated the word “no.” For six years I couldn’t say anything; I made up my mind that if I didn’t understand this saying I’d burn my body if I went to sleep. Whenever I felt tired I’d go walk in the hallway and bang my head on a pillar. One day I was standing beside the teaching seat when suddenly I heard the sound of the drum signaling breakfast time, and thereupon understood this saying. The next day I went to the teacher’s room to convey my attainment; my late teacher took one look at me and said, “You’ve seen a spirit, seen a ghost.” The teacher drew himself up and shouted. I also shouted. The teacher shouted again, and I too shouted again. Henceforth I never backed down.
Who can say this isn’t dedicated practice? The guy banged his head against a pillar to stay awake so he could focus his mind. Those who wave away practice as an unnecessary hindrance are truly lost. Wumen would laugh them out of the monastery. So would Yuanwu:
You should train your mind and value actual practice wholeheartedly, exerting all your power, not shrinking from the cold or the heat. Go to the spot where you meditate and kill your mental monkey and slay your intellectual horse. Make yourself like a dead tree, like a withered stump. Suddenly you penetrate through- how could it be attained from anyone else? You discover the hidden treasure, you light the lamp in the dark room, you launch the boat across the center of the ford. You experience great liberation, and without producing a single thought, you immediately attain true awakening. Having passed through the gate into the inner truth, you ascend to the site of universal light. Then you sit in the impeccably pure supreme seat of the emptiness of all things.
Who has actually done this? What person here who claims to understand can say they’ve gone through what is described here by one of the greatest Chan masters to ever teach students?
Here he continues and describes practice after this initial realization:
But this is not yet the stage of effortless achievement. You must go further beyond, to where the thousand sages cannot trap you, the myriad conscious beings have no way to look up to you, the gods have no way to offer you flowers, and the demons and outsiders cannot spy on you. You must cast off knowledge and views, discard mysteries and marvels, and abandon all contrived actions. You simply eat when hungry and drink when thirsty, and that’s all. At this stage you are never aware of having mind or not having mind, of gaining mindfulness or losing mindfulness. So how could you still be attached to what you have previously learned and understood, to “mysteries” and “marvels” and analyses of essential nature, to the fetters of names and forms and arbitrary opinions? How could you still be attached to views of “Buddha” and views of “Dharma”or to earth-shaking worldly knowledge and intellect? You would be tying and binding yourself, you would be counting the grains of sand in the Ocean—what would there be to rely on?
All those who are truly great must strive to overcome the obstacles of delusion and ignorance. They must strive to jolt the multitudes out of their complacency and to fulfill their own fundamental intent and vows. Only if you do this are you a true person of the Path, without contrived activity and without concerns, a genuine Wayfarer of great mind and great vision and great liberation.
Post-realization practice is striving. Effort. Progress. It’s a constant casting off of knowledge and views, and abandoning of contrivance. It’s shedding habit and conditioning. Yuanwu clarifies:
Once you merge your tracks into the stream of Zen, you spend your days silencing your mind and studying with your whole being. You realize that this Great Cause is not obtained from anyone else but is just a matter of taking up the task boldly and strongly, and making constant progress. Day by day you shed your delusions, and day by day you enhance your clarity of mind. Your potential for enlightened perception is like fine gold that is to be refined hundreds and thousands of times. What is essential for getting out of the dusts, what is basic for helping living creatures, is that you must penetrate through freely in all directions and arrive at peace and security free from doubt and attain the stage of great potential and great function. This work is located precisely in your own inner actions.
This isn’t taken lightly either. Even true, authentic realization needs guidance and refinement. How much more so false understanding? Baiyun Duan said:
When you’ve realized enlightenment, you have to meet someone. If you don’t meet someone, you’re just a monkey without a tail—the moment you act out, people will laugh.
Linchi was a good person to meet. He described learning to put a stop to thoughts, without purposefully trying to do so. It takes practice. He met someone who taught him how. He talks of his own practice of probing and polishing:
Followers of the Way, those who have left household life need to study the Way. I myself in past years turned my attention to the vinaya, and I also delved into the sutras and treatises. But later I realized that these are just medicines to cure the sickness of the world, expositions of surface matters.
So finally I tossed them aside and sought the Way through Ch’an practice. Later I encountered an excellent friend and teacher, and then my Dharma eye at last became keen and bright and for the first time I could judge the old reverends of the world and tell who was crooked and who was straight.
But this understanding was not with me when my mother gave birth to me - I had to probe and polish and undergo experiences until one morning I could see clearly for myself.
He had to practice and struggle to become a genuine wayfarer. He had to teach his mind to cease its habitual grasping until not a single thought arose:
When your mind has learned to cease its momentary seeking, this is dubbed the state of the bodhi tree. But while your mind is incapable of ceasing, this is dubbed the tree of ignorance. Ignorance has no fixed abode, ignorance has no beginning or end. As long as your mind is unable to cease its moment-by-moment activity, then you are up in the tree of ignorance. You enter among the six realms of existence and the creatures of four types of birth, clothed in fur and with horns on your head. But if you can learn to cease, then you’ll be in the world of the clean pure body. If not one thought arises, you’ll be up in the bodhi tree, through your transcendental powers taking different forms in the threefold world, assuming any bodily shape you please, feasting on Dharma joy and meditation delight, illuminating things for yourself with the light from your own body.
Post-realization practice is the constant mindfulness of what has been realized. Any departure from the source into being deceived by mental activity is not to be tolerated. It is to allow oneself to be led astray...the practice is to be continually absorbed in the source.
Huineng:
If you want to develop knowledge of all kinds, you need to attain absorption in unity, absorption in one practice. If in all places you do not dwell on appearances, do not conceive aversion or attraction to any of those appearances, and have no grasping or rejection, do not think of such things as benefit, fulfillment, or destruction, and you are at peace, calm, open, aloof, this is called absorption in oneness. 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.
The mind does not move from the site of enlightenment. How can this be practiced if one doesn't know what the site of enlightenment is? When someone truly has a moment of realization, their understanding needs to be refined and cultivated.
Guishan:
If people awaken truly, realizing the fundamental, they know instinctively when it happens. The question of cultivation or not is two-sided. Suppose beginners have conditionally attained a moment of sudden awakening to inherent truth, but there are still longstanding habit energies that cannot as yet be cleared all at once. They must be taught to clear away streams of consciousness manifesting habitual activity. That is cultivation, but there cannot be a particular doctrine to have them practice or devote themselves to.
The cultivation is the clearing of habit-energies. It's the use of mindfulness and virtue to strip away the conditioned mind and teach it to stop grasping objects as a default mode of operation. It's done in the moment. Guishan again:
Inwardly strive to develop the capacity of mindfulness, outwardly spread the virtue of not being contentious. Shed the world of sense objects to seek emancipation.
The framing of Zen as not something to be practiced is a misunderstanding of teachings meant for advanced practitioners. It's a misapplication of devices used to shake people free of their attachments to gaining something from practice. It's complacency. When people grasp these teachings and use them wrongly, they form them into a nihilistic view and use them as an excuse to forego their own work and instead keep analyzing teachings, looking for more reassurance that they are correct in their lazy indulgences. Zen is a dedicated practice, and is not to be taken lightly. It requires constant attention. It requires inner work. It requires single-minded effort and the application of Zen devices.
Hanshan:
When ancient worthies taught people to work on Zen study, they first required them to shed body and mind internally and forget the world outside, letting go of everything, keeping nothing at all in mind, and solely bring up a single case or saying, like Zhaozhou on whether or not dogs have Buddha-nature, saying that they don’t have it, or “Myriad things return to one; where does the one return?” Or clarifying the reality of who it is that recites Buddha’s name. Whatever example you bring up and set out in your chest, it’s like a diamond sword cutting off all cogitation and errant imagination, like severing tangled threads. Not letting anything out from inside, not letting anything in from outside, it cuts off the essential ford and blocks off your throat, not allowing you to breathe out. Applying effort like this, take a look at what this is, ultimately, that brings up the saying. Wondering like this, questioning and questioning, doubt to the point where the mind is like a wall, not allowing a second thought to occur; the moment there is a subliminal stream of errant thought, you notice right away and immediately bring up the saying again with all your might, reapplying doubt, discerning and doubting, blocking your mind with this mass of doubt. When thoughts do not occur and errant imaginations do not go on, this is a state of empowerment. Remain stable like this, walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, active or at rest, at leisure or in a hurry, gritting your teeth determined not to let go, not letting up even when asleep dreaming, only having one thought, the saying. This is your root of life; you are like a dead person still breathing. Only when you grapple intensely like this are you one who is working on Zen study. When your effort reaches the ultimate point, without question of days or months, suddenly in the cold ashes a particle bursts into flames; this is a time of great joy. If you are easygoing, indulgent, and inconsistent, you may never gain power.
Submitted May 06, 2023 at 04:21AM by RobePatch https://ift.tt/JCiIrFl
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