'two kinds of sickness' and different expedients for different eras

yunmen, foyan and wu-chun all asserted that:

there are not more than two kinds of sickness

i think foyan gives us the context:

Buddha explained fifty kinds of meditation sickness... In my school, there are only two kinds of sickness. One is to go looking for a donkey riding on the donkey. The other is to be unwilling to dismount once having mounted the donkey.

so what is he talking about?

i-ch'ing says: 'Try, and you're as far away as sky from earth; give up, and you'll never attain'

pao-chih says: 'the inner view and the outer view are both wrong.' pai-chang gives an example of the inward view: 'to cling to oneself as buddha' and the outward view: 'attainment by causes and conditions, practice and realisation.'

there are countless different examples that illustrate the two sicknesses. i think it's important not to get stuck on the idea that it's about effort vs. non-effort, or confidence vs. humility.

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there's another trope i want to talk about, which is something like:

students in the old days were way better than students today

you get this kind of talk from zen masters of pretty much every era. so what, were they just reactionaries?

my hypothesis: as culture changes, the previous generation of teaching becomes less effective. rather than 'turning the wheel,' students start to think the way is found in a certain position on the wheel.

so where does that leave us in the 21st century?

well, i think our time is unusual in that 'the self' is more popular than it's ever been in history. christopher lasch talks about 'the culture of narcissism.' lots of other present-day thinkers have diagnosed the sickness of our time along similar lines.

so while zen masters in china had to nudge students in different ways, towards the self or away from the self, today the situation is different.

the vast majority of us are absolutely repulsed by the idea of sacrificing ourselves for something bigger than us. very few of us need to be taught to look for the individual. it's pretty much all we see.

so when we study, we occasionally read things that challenge our narcissism and occasionally read things that reinforce it. my petition is that we work to overcome our own tendency to prefer the pro-self content, and look more closely at our reactions.

Submitted March 18, 2021 at 02:41PM by jeowy https://ift.tt/3qZImNc