The situation in Zen is often compared to people riding a donkey yet not realizing. They see a gray mass and they do all sorts of things with it, yet they do not realize it's a donkey. How do you make them realize? Some people like Huangbo tell you straight ahead: "Hey dude, It's all a donkey and there is nothing else." People might be able to form a concept of it, but they still don't realize first hand their own donkey. Now that situation is a little bit absurd, so I think that's why many cases involve masters hitting monks or just showing them some donkey: an ear, some fur, etc. There is really no perfect technique to make you realize.
Now that is also why practices are rejected. You can agitate yourself as much as you want on the donkey, it won't help you realize, or not in an predictable way anyway. So when you say that sitting straight and quietly on the donkey is practice-realization of the donkey, it is obviously big BS. So yes, Dogen is a fraud, fuck Dogen seriously. There are people pushing it to the extreme, meditating for years, becoming very nice and still donkey riders, thinking they are following the way. Yet they haven't realized what they are riding and are making absolutely no progress towards it. Their stillness-compassion donkey rider teachers have no clue either. It's simply a completely fraudulous teaching, or something to be regarded merely as a way to help very agitated people calm down on the donkey, but it is not directly related to donkey-realization.
Now I've slandered quite a bit, because it actually isn't a donkey. No one has a fucking clue what it is... yet we are all riding it. It's always been there and will never go. What can be said about it?
Submitted November 02, 2018 at 04:14AM by koalazen https://ift.tt/2PyL3ql
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