Hello New Persons! Weekly Info-link-aggedon!

Hellooo new person!

Welcome to the intersection between history, pop culture, social media, and literacy!

There is too much. Let me sum up:

Welcome

Useful links for new people: https://old.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/swltt2/rzen_wiki_pages_for_new_people/

I wrote this in mind for people who visit r/zen with ideas about what Zen is:

www.reddit.com/r/zensangha/wiki/ewk/welcome

Some people want to talk about specific subjects they think are Zen related, but turn out not to be. There is LOTS of confusion about what Zen is generally, and much of this comes from religions claiming to be Zen, and historians trained in those religious traditions who treat religious narratives as historical truth.

In that sense it is important to recognize that Western Christianity is much more advanced than any kind of Buddhism when it comes to the availability of facts and the range of public discourse from different views.

I wrote this piece about the history of claims about Zen over at r/askhistorians. Nobody wanted to ask me about it.

Textual Tradition

Here is the juice stuff: https://www.reddit.com//r/zen/wiki/famous_cases

The Zen tradition has a long history of discussion, debate, and argument which is very involved with it's own history. This means that somebody who died in 850 is likely to still be frequently discussed in 1250. So there is a lot of "getting to know people" in Zen.

r/zen spends a lot of time talking about the textual tradition that forms the basis of Zen, for which there is unanimous agreement! That's the easy part. Zen began in China around 550 and vanished in a cloud of war around 1450. During that time the Zen lineage produced a massive amount of texts all of which collectively form the Zen canon.

Here is an introduction to it: www.reddit.com//r/zen/wiki/getstarted

I'm also trying to generate some interest in the r/zen wiki with "Wiki Wens", which is embarrassingly one of the "big three" internet academic resources on Zen teachings, the other two being Terebess and theZensite.

Modern Zen

Lots of people are curious about the various Buddhist religions claiming to be Zen, mostly from Japan. These religions have many difficulties internally and lots of conflicts exist in their historical claims. In general, there isn't an argument to be made historically or textually that Japan has any Zen lineage of it's own, or ever did.

Check out /r/zen/wiki/fraudulent_texts, now with publication dates! The cultural misappropriation is so thick you can eat it with a fork!

What's up with Buddhism?

• Buddhism is a set of religions based on a kind of ten commandments called Eightfold Path (8FP).
• Buddhism has a concept much like sin called karma (very popular in movies and tv)
• Buddhism (mostly in the West) have religious practices involving meditation that they believe help them with their 8FP and karma problems.

Zen Masters reject BOTH the beliefs of Buddhism and the interpretations Buddhists have of things like karma and meditation.

Why is r/zen so full of arguments and disputes?

1. Zen's history in China is full of argument. Zen records are full of dialogues which are really just arguments; disputes are part of the tradition.
2. Buddhists and other religious groups (internet gurus, cults) get a lot of their street cred from claiming to be associated with Zen and they don't like to have that challenged.
3. Zen's natural contentiousness combined with social media has produced in r/zen something of a "lighthouse", and while lighthouses can guide people, bright lights also attract confused bugs of all kinds.
4. We are rapidly approaching a time in which there are more translated primary source texts translated from Chinese to English than any person outside Zen academia could ever be expected to be familiar with. This represents a "sea change" that occurred in less than fifty years, when people like Alan Watts and Shunryu Suzuki were writing popular books.

.

Questions? Comments? Confusions? Concerns?

Somebody finished the first translation in English of Mingben's Illusory Man! It's a pretty big deal. And it happened on Reddit. In r/Zen. I bet r/buddhism is just kicking itself for not linking to us in the sidebar. But why should r/buddhism acknowledge a reddit community of 115k that contributes scholarship?

If that doesn't tell you about the state of Zen academics in the West, idk what will...

Survey question of the week:

What's your least favorite Zen teaching?

Submitted May 31, 2022 at 08:33AM by ewk https://ift.tt/XxhjcsY