“The book tells us very little about the practice of what, for want of a better translation, is often called meditation or contemplation. Unfortunately both these words are misleading as they imply some object of meditation or of contemplation; and, if objectlessness be stipulated, then they may well be taken to lead to a blank or sleeplike trance, which is not at all the goal of Zen. Huang Po seems to have assumed that his audience knew something about this practice—as most keen Buddhists do, of course. He gives few instructions as to how to ‘meditate’, but he does tell us what to avoid. If, conceiving of the phenomenal world as illusion, we try to shut it out, we make a false distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’.
So we must not shut anything out, but try to reach the point where all distinctions are seen to be void, where nothing is seen as desirable or undesirable, existing or not existing. Yet this does not mean that we should make our minds blank, for then we should be no better than blocks of wood or lumps of stone; moreover, if we remained in this state, we should not be able to deal with the circumstances of daily life or be capable of observing the Zen precept: ‘When hungry, eat.’ Rather, we must cultivate dispassion, realizing that none of the attractive or unattractive attributes of things have any absolute existence.”
Intro to “The Zen Teaching of Huang Po”
Avoidance is a practice, as is its cultivation. Can someone explain what HP practiced or is Blofeld blowing smoke?
Submitted March 04, 2022 at 11:59PM by nesta_es https://ift.tt/Dre1ovZ
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