Any time someone cites Zen teaching, characterises it as this or that, or compares it with some other human endeavour

(eg. psychology; neuroscience; architecture, or flatulence), they inevitably produce claims or analogies which are based on (and vulnerable to) philological scrutiny.

To illustrate: if someone reads somewhere (eg.) that Zen is dhatu-vada, it's pertinent to know that the word "dhatu-vada" is a modern derogatory term peculiar to the Critical Buddhists, who are famously anti-Zen. And it's pertinent to know what the Zen texts actually say about dhatu-s or -vada-s, before we have any useful referents for "Zen" or "dhatu-vada" to make any sense at all of the question we are asking.

The answer might as well be a lost cause at that point. The solution to that quandary is not mental health triage or a cosmological "theory of everything", and it's not trying, halfcocked, to be "Zen" per se. It's boring old philological scrutiny.

Submitted January 01, 2019 at 08:18PM by grass_skirt http://bit.ly/2QZ3Lci