The Warning on Adherance

From Wumen's Warnings aka. Zen Prescriptions

循規守矩。無繩自縛

“To adhere to rules and guard regulations is to be bound by an imaginary rope.”

What I see here is a warning against adopting the belief that provisional rules we encounter in our day-to-day lives have an absolute quality to them. For example, society’s rules against murdering and raping people obviously don’t come from a supernatural source or form a part of a cosmological justice system—there are practical and empirical benefits such rules offer civilization, but such benefits themselves don’t render them into an absolute “good”.

Another Zen Master, the 3rd Patriarch Sengcan, once said in his Faith in Mind poem, “To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.” So long as you try and find some fixed principle to guide your actions, you are creating a division of your preferences into “good” and “bad” where none originally existed. Operating on the imagined existence of essential qualities is the imaginary rope of Wumen, the disease of the mind of Sengcan.

Submitted March 22, 2023 at 12:52AM by ThatKir https://ift.tt/xVHh0nA