We have seen frequently in Zen passages shared here the word "Dao" appearing and in some translations it is turned to 'Way'. The way is possibly the Eight-fold path, the "way that leads to the cessation of suffering", and/or it is in fact the Dao, as mentioned in "Daoism", because of course, Buddhism merges with where it takes its home, and when it came to China from India, it mixed with the native Daoist belief.
I noticed that the "Path" or "Buddhist Path" is called in Chinese Marga. Marga, apparently can be translated as 'Way', or 'Dao' as well...
Anyways, I was consequently looking at Paths to Liberation: The Marga and Its Transformations in Buddhist Thought, which features various writers including our beloved John R. Mcrae. I skipped right over them all to Robert M. Gimello's Marga and Culture: Learning, Letters, and Liberation in Northern Sung Ch'an, and I wanted to share the following little snippet, as some people around here are hung up on the secular view of Zen (and they also seem to reject the Daoist and Confucian influence on Zen). This is helpful and clears things up:
The Northern Sung was a period when Buddhism, true to the implications of Mahayana's distinctive acceptance of the secular world, and emboldened by its previous accomplishment of considerable feats of sinicization, could venture outside the monastery and take its public place in the larger world. The era's major monasteries were not forbidden cloisters but grand and open public institutions. The leading Ch'an figures of the day enjoyed eminence not only within clerical circles but also at court and among the secular elite generally. Both Buddhist images and Buddhist concepts and values abounded as never before in Sung art and literature. And much of the teaching of Buddhist monks was directed toward the laity rather than toward fellow monastics alone.
As Ch' an monks during the Northern Sung pondered questions of Ch'an's continuity or discontinuity with the rest of Buddhism, and as they weighed the corollary questions of miirga and soteriology, they did so not only under the influence of earlier Ch'an and Buddhist reflection on these topics but also with attention to the concerns of the wider secular culture of which they were now an integral part. This proved to be a very consequential broadening of perspective. It meant that controversial issues like those sketched above could no longer be adjudicated according to exclusively contemplative or clerical criteria. Because Ch'an had chosen to speak to laymen as well as to monks, it had to speak to the problems that concerned laymen-problems of education, aesthetics, literary theory, public morality, politics, civil service examinations, bureaucracy, economics, even foreign relations. Having entered so wide an arena, Ch'an monks had to attend to the traditions of discourse that were customary there. Confucianism, for example, could no longer be kept at arm's length as mere wai-hsueh (extrinsic, worldly learning); nor was it likely to be, as more Ch' an monks came to number among their closest friends and dearest students scholars and bureaucrats steeped in the revived and once again vigorous Confucian heritage. Thus we find Confucian terms and concepts occurring more and more frequently in Ch'an discourse and, by the same token, Ch'an discourse focused more often on traditional Confucian issues. In other words, the things that the literati took seriously Ch'an teachers also were required, and indeed inclined, to take seriously. Of course, this does not mean that Ch'an simply sloughed off its Buddhist identity and capitulated to secular culture; rather, it brought to its lively engagement with that culture the uncompromising and often critical values of Buddhism. In the frequent conversation or correspondence between eminent monks and eminent statesmen, for example, the role of the Ch'an interlocutor was usually to remind the layman of the transience of the world in which he lived and of the insubstantiality of the goals for which he strove.
Then later in the book there's a work by Carl Bielfeldt who says of Zen that...
"It looks like a kind of "secular mysticism" for skeptical modern man: no dogma, no faith, no ritual; just a frankly utilitarian psychological technique for achieving an "altered state," a "peak experience" of raw reality that will radically and permanently transform our relation to ourselves and the world (presumably for the good). Perhaps so. Perhaps this is all there is to Zen Buddhism."
Submitted January 25, 2018 at 06:00AM by Dillon123 http://ift.tt/2DKz9E3
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