Bankei! Famous Japanese Zen Master known for shutting down Confucian Scholars alongside Hakuin—Dogen Buddhist “Masters” day and night with his questioning.
Haven’t heard of him? Not surprising. Dogen and Hakuin “Masters” quote him even less than Linji & Dongshan and THAT is saying something.
The conversation here on /r/zen isn’t that different from Bankei and previous. Zen isn’t whatever doctrines Shenxiu taught nor what Dogen or Hakuin taught either.
Anyways, “Bankei Zen” by Peter Haskel is a delightful collection of lectures, public cases, letters, and the odd public safety alerts about smoking and gossip about Bankei’s toilet paper preferences.
Naturally, with any of these “attributed sayings” collections there will be a non-insignificant amount of weird Buddhist stuff thrown in there by other people. As far as I can tell, part of this collection is just a crowd sourcing of stuff unrelated people claim Bankei said.
Enough of my blabbing.
A certain monk said: “For a long time now I’ve been working on the case ‘Hyakujo and the Wild Fox’ but in spite of all my efforts, I still haven’t solved it. I suspect this is simply because my practice isn’t pure. I beg your Reverence to instruct me.”
The Master said: “Here in my place we don’t engage in such studies of old wastepaper!”
Then, a monk who was nearby asked: “In that case, are the cases of the old masters useless and unnecessary?”
The Master said: “The responses of the old masters were only to shut off questions from individual students by confronting them immediately, face to face; they have no particular usefulness. There’s no way for me to say whether they’re necessary or superfluous, helpful or useless. When people just abide in the Unborn Buddha Mind, that’s all there is to it, and there is no longer any way they can be sidetracked.”
”So abide in the Unborn!”
Old wastepaper! Study that! Ha!
When all is said and done though, who can point out to me the “pure practice” of the Ancestors? What direction could possibly be given?
Submitted February 10, 2020 at 07:22AM by ThatKir https://ift.tt/2UFN9Hs
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