At Ease!

The master [Dazhu Huihai], having taken the high seat, said, “You men have the good fortune to be men who have nothing to do. Yet you work yourselves to death, striving, only in order to fall into hell wearing a cangue on your shoulders. What for? Every day from morning to night you travel restlessly about, saying, ‘I practice meditation, I study the Way, I comprehend the buddhadharma!’ Thus you more and more lose contact with it. In the end this is only pursuing sensory pleasures. When will you ever take your ease!”

I love how Dazhu frames the situation as us having "good fortune," like it's just a lucky coincidence we had no way of bringing about.

According to him, whatever efforts we might have come up with to improve the situation are unnecessary... not just in the sense of being redundant or superfluous, but in a way that is both wasteful and ruinous.

It would seem he thinks we are in a good situation where there's nothing we need to do, but that it can still be ruined by our striving for it, or making it out to be something special about us.

The question was asked, “What is the cultivation of the Way?” The master [Mazu] said, “The Way is unrelated to cultivation. If you speak of gain through cultivation, then what is gained can be lost. That is the same as the śrāvakas. If you speak of no need for cultivation, that is the same as the common person.” [Again] the question was asked, “Through what understanding can we penetrate the Way?” The master said, “Your own nature is originally complete. Only one unimpeded by good and evil can be said to cultivate the Way. To cling to good and reject evil, to contemplate emptiness and enter samādhi— these are all concerned with striving. Furthermore, if you run around seeking outside, you will only get further and further away.”

"Unrelated to cultivation," he says. "The same as the common person," he says. No "contemplating emptiness," or "entering samādhi" required. Just to be unimpeded by erroneous notions of needing to "cling to good" and "reject evil," or any other form of "striving". So "the common person" is "originally complete". That doesn't sound very special. What if we wanna be extraordinary?

“Virtuous monks, just be ordinary. Don’t put on airs... [He who has] nothing to do is the noble one. Simply don’t strive— just be ordinary." -Linji

Does anyone take this as a letdown? That the best we can do is not make any difference? That the worst we can do is try?

And even if we accept Linji's proposition of "just be ordinary," how else might we screw it up? How about thinking "common people are not ordinary; I'm more ordinary than common people. You know, you'll really only get good at 'being ordinary' if you cultivate it for 30 years." Sounds like a lot of useless effort for nothing.

[Huangbo] said, "The hundred-odd kinds of knowledge do not compare with nonseeking. This is the ultimate. The person of the Way is the one who has nothing to do, who has no mind at all and no doctrine to preach. Having nothing to do, such a person lives at ease."

Submitted March 23, 2023 at 05:23AM by Surska0 https://ift.tt/UAK5S17