I taught a small beginner's meditation class this morning. One of the meditators was from Vietnam and gave me a dual-language Vietnamese/English book titled Thiền Meditation by Thích Chân Quang. "Thiền" is the Vietnamese word for Zen.
The book is very simple and basically instructs practitioners to cut off thoughts, in accordance with standard Zen teaching, with some discussion of why certain thoughts arise and how best to cut off different kinds of thoughts.
With regard to Sudden Awakening, I thought you all might be interested in what the Vietnamese thought is. He wrote verbatim (in other words, the capitalization of "Zen Masters" is written in the book, I haven't changed a thing):
Zen Master Linji Yixuan, the founder of the Linji school of Chan Buddhism during Tang Dynasty China, had no more thoughts after obtaining Awareness state. That means his awareness was very strong. He told about it "Last night the golden buffalo fell into the ash (smooth alluvial soil) and disappeared in it." His realization of the truth is very deep.
There were some Zen Masters who had a sudden Awareness that becomes the master of their minds, so they proudly claimed to be the owner of Buddha-Nature. They were very boastful. Many people of later generations are very excited to hear their claim, but it doesn't occur to them that for the Awareness state to be the mind's master, it requires a lot of merits accumulated from many past lives but not just in a moment.
Not knowing anything about what's taught these days in Vietnam, I thought that was interesting.
Submitted December 05, 2018 at 07:36PM by ferruix https://ift.tt/2rkEev5
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