It has been two years since the pandemic started and I’ve been staying at my mom’s house for most of that time. Starting this week I left home for the second time (the first one was back in 2010, when I was 15). I’ll be traveling around for a bit, so I won’t be around the forum as much.
Granted, I am a student of Zen, and I've heard about when Zhaozhou said that leaving home was not aspiring to acclaim and not seeking after defilements. So leaving my mom’s is not important. In fact, Linji talked about this matter by describing someone who is on the road yet not away from home, and someone who is away from home yet not on the road. Still, it gives me a superficial connection to talk about the things I’ve seen in my study.
On the subject of Zhaozhou’s teachings, he once said, when asked about his family custom, that from the time he left home as a young man he has lived as an ascethic, and never worked for a living. That is the way of our school. The children of Shakya are poor in the body, but not in the Way.
The shackles of having to eat meat, having to drink alcohol, ascribing value to owning things, to comfort, to being productive. That’s not the way of Bodhidharma.
A master of our school said that simple food is quite filling, just chew thoroughly, you’ll hardly hunger. We know this. Do you want to know what they teach where I come from? One of the things my grandpa always says is that there’s nothing wrong with eating a tortilla by itself when you are hungry, you could even put salt in it if you can find some. White salsa, he calls it. How is that different from Zhaozhou saying that rice is cheap and salt expensive?
In one of his letters, Yuanwu talks about the early sages and how they “lived with utmost frugality, and the ancient worthies overcame hardships and lived austerely. They purified their will in this, forgetting food and sleep. They studied with total concentration and accurate focus, seeking true realization. How could they have been making plans for abundant food and fine clothes and luxurious housing and fancy medicines?”
If you are a genuine person of the Way, what would be right? Another time, Foyan addressed the assembly like this,
What do you people come to me for? Each individual should lead life autonomously—don't listen to what other people say. An ancient declared, "I knew how to lead life by the time I was eighteen." You people must learn to live independently.
You say, "Lead what life?" Just do not seek elsewhere. Most people today are compulsively active; this is already not knowing how to lead life. This is called abandoning home, scattering the family, and becoming a drifter. Clearly this is not understanding. Just searching and seeking, studying a bit of intellectual knowledge, memorizing a few sayings, is called "hauling manure inside."
When Zhaozhou traveled around was he a home leaver or not? What about before, when he stayed at Nanquan's?
If being on the road or not being on the road doesn't tell you who's a home leaver, how do you determine it? Where do you make your home? What's the thing you can't live without? I'm not sure, but that seems like a good place to start.
References
Zhaozhou on leaving home: https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/al7wxm/leaving_home/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Song of Enlightenment: https://terebess.hu/zen/sodoka.html
Foyan: https://zenmarrow.com/single?id=14&index=foyan
Yuanwu: https://terebess.hu/zen/Yuanwu.html
Submitted March 12, 2022 at 03:46AM by astroemi https://ift.tt/hPCwLfk
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