Foyan continues

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Students nowadays all consider question and answer to be essential to Zen, not realizing that this is a grasping and reject­ing conceptual attitude. (...) Even if you have a little perception, you still shouldn’t stop; haven’t you heard it said that the path of nirvana aims at absolute liberation?

You have to be able to monitor yourself. When people pro­ceed on the path because they are confused and do not know their own minds, they come to mountain forests to see teachers, imagining that there is a special “way” that can make people comfortable, not realizing that the best exercise is to look back and study your previous confusion.
If you do not get this far, even to go into the mountain forests forever will be a useless act.

Confusion is extremely accessible, yet hard to penetrate. That is why ancient worthies said, “It is hard to believe, hard to under­stand.”

In recent generations, many have come to regard question-and-answer dialogues as the style of the Zen school. They do not understand what the ancients were all about; they only pur­sue trivia, and do not come back to the essential. How strange! How strange!

People in olden times asked questions on account of confu­sion, so they were seeking actual realization through their ques­tioning; when they got a single saying or half a phrase, they would take it seriously and examine it until they penetrated it.
They were not like people nowadays who pose questions at ran­dom and answer with whatever comes out of their mouths, mak­ing laughingstocks of themselves.

People who attain study the path twenty-four hours a day, never abandoning it for a moment. Even if these people do not gain access to it, every moment of thought is already cultivating practical application. Usually it is said that cultivated practice does not go beyond purification of mind, speech, action, and the six senses, but the Zen way is not necessarily like this. Why? Because Zen concentration is equal to transcendent insight in every moment of thought; wherever you are, there are naturally no ills.
Eventually one day the ground of mind becomes thor­oughly clear and you attain complete fulfillment. This is called absorption in one practice.

Nowadays people only work on concentration power and do not open the eye of insight. For them, stories and sayings just become argumentation, unstable mental activity.

Zen study is not a small matter, you do not yet need to tran­scend the Buddhas and surpass the adepts; but once you have attained it, it will not be hard to transcend and surpass them if you wish.

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Submitted May 10, 2019 at 01:39AM by UhExistence http://bit.ly/2WHpIva