Master Yangqi said to an assembly...
No state of being in any realm can contain you. There is no special doctrine besides. This radiant void is unobstructed, free: it is not something you can attain by embellishment. From the Buddha and from the Chan founders, all have transmitted this teaching, whereby they attained liberation; the doctrines of the whole canon just put it in orderly arrangements.
You are people of the present time; don’t seek somewhere else. Even if Bodhidharma were to come here, he would just tell you to be without affectations; he would tell you not to be contrived. Dressing, eating, excreting, there is no more ‘birth and death’ to be feared, and no nirvana to be attained, no enlightenment to be realized. You’re just an ordinary individual, without affectations.
Most important of all, don’t fold your hands and pretend to be a Chan teacher, looking for a place to appear in public, talking cleverly to seduce the younger generation in hopes of getting people to call you an Elder. Totally alienated from your real self, you only know a flood of subjective consciousness, hoking up oddities day and night, never ceasing, claiming famous names, titles, and heritage. I am not one of your gang: If I see a great master failing to discern good and bad, I criticize him for it.
As for you, just don’t get obsessed with thoughts of reputation and appearance, terminology and rhetoric, maxim and meaning, objective representation, function and principle, good and bad, ordinary and holy, grasping and rejection, focus on objects, defilement and purity, light and darkness, being and nonbeing. If you get it this way, only then are you an unaffected individual. Then even Buddha cannot compare to you; even the Chan founders cannot compare to you.
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ewk note: The fundamental belief of all religions is because church; because church has supernatural knowledge, because church has figured "it" out, because church messiahs are teh only ones who can save you from yourself.
Meh.
Obviously Zen Masters have a different view.
Who here is going to say "Chan founders cannot compare to me"? Certainly not the people too ashamed to name their church. Certainly not the people too full of hate and fear to quote a Zen Master. Certainly not people who hope that through practice they will earn merit, redemption, wisdom, or freedom, "someday".
Yet if you can't say "Chan founders cannot compare to me", then what's the point in studying Chan? To become a follower, a hanger on? A clever head monk that can ask a question or give an answer without immediately embarrassing themselves?
Those goals are pretty shabby. With goals like that you might as well join a church that promises supernatural wisdom or something... anything. Magic powers. Magic sky man virtue. Something. Aim higher, people.
Zen: Go big or go home.
Submitted December 20, 2018 at 09:07AM by ewk https://ift.tt/2UY1cFW
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