Zen vs Western Buddhism/Evangelical Christianity: A flashlight vs an altar candle

The altar candle of Western Buddhism/Evangelical Christianity barely illuminate the space around the sacred. You can take a Zen flashlight anywhere and see clearly whatever you point it at.

Zen encourages questions curiosity doubt.

• What do they teach?
• Why did Bodhidharma?
• What is the dharma?
• Is there? Why do? What is the?
• Zen is famous for great doubt, where nothing is out of bounds... not even doubting doubt.

Western Buddhism and Evangelical Christianity are about blindly accepting

• They don't care that they don't know who wrote the sutras or when, or even that they don't know the little that is known.
• They don't ask questions about historical accuracy or doctrinal conflicts in the sutras.
• Western Buddhists are famous for not knowing their catechism, and Evangelical Christians are famous for not knowing the Bible bits that are inconvenient.

How can I illustrate this simply?

• r/Zen sidebar: Four Statements of Zen
• r/Buddhism sidebar: Links to Buddhist Sutras and Tricycle Magazine
• r/ZenBuddhism: Zen is Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism

The Four Statements link directly to texts: https://www.mediafire.com/file/363z0v74coxf739/2nd_Ed_-_Four_Statements_of_Zen.pdf/file

The sutras were not intended to be the doctrine of a single religion, and Tricycle Magazine starts off with Buddha taught 8FP and 4NT, which is obviously historically inaccurate. Nobody can define "Mahayana" historically, and nobody has ever linked Zen to Taoism.

Anybody who can ask questions is going to immediately run into problems, except in r/Zen.

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^Yo͞ok  Welcome! ^{Meet me}  My comment: The Zen flashlight goes everywhere that you go. you don't need any altar. And you can see anything you point it at.

Flower Ornament Scripture:

• The Buddha is called Light Illumining All the Space of the Cosmos.
• The Buddha is named Brow-Light Illumining Everywhere.
• The Buddha is called Sound of Light Illumining All Space.

Foyan:

• Linji said, “ Your eyes radiate a light that shines through the mountains and rivers.”
• Suppose a man with clear eyes goes into a jewel mine but does not know how to go about it; in other words, suppose he thinks he can go in without a torch to light the way. Then when he bumps his head and hurts himself, he thinks it to be a dangerous cave, not a jewel mine. An intelligent person going in there would take a lamp to light up the mine to view; then all kinds of jewels could be selected at will and taken out.

Submitted May 06, 2023 at 06:12AM by ewk https://ift.tt/czONVF0