On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 12:47 PM, Ben Lau <alphaseer@gmail.com> wrote:
The word ” Zazen”, like everything else in our times, has been badly misunderstood. Folks often have a picture of some monks in Japan sitting in a hall doing nothing but chanting all day long, or otherwise listening to a higher- ranked guy unwind his ego-trip. The truth is, most of such practitioners,– if not all, are pretty dumb,– idiotic lambs being led to the slaughter, if that is a direct way of putting it…!
So let’s hear straight from the great master Huineng, the Founder of Zen, a.k.a. the 6th Patriarch of the Dharma. With regard to my translation ( from Chinese to English), my concern is that it may not be as expertly as I had wanted it to be,– thereby creating even more misunderstandings for the readers. So please use your own discretion, folks, when trying to understand anything!
The great master Huineng, a.k.a. the 6th Patriarch of the Dharma:
Zazen is just a state of mind!
He also said that In the Dharma of “No Duality”, if there is ever achieved in one the correct state of no obstruction, such that outwardly no reaction arises upon the scenarios of good or evil, or that the being is as anchored as ever throughout the episode, –then such a state of mind is called Zazen.
What is Zen-anchored?
It is actually the same state of mind viewed from a different angle: Outwardly one has achieved a state of no attachment to all scenarios, thereby retaking the State of No Chaos, and gaining Inner peace. Such a state of mind is called Zen-anchored.
If outwardly one is attached to the scenarios, chaos is a certainty. Chaos occurs where thinking is attached to the scenarios. (To help understand this better, the Alpha Seer must interject this: even our own life can be called “scenario”,– or a state of the Dream… . Huineng is not the first one to call life a scenario or a dream, neither was the Gautama Buddha… . (In fact, thousands of great sages before them had expressed somewhat similar view, that life is but a scenario, an episode, or a dream,–to emphasize the unreal nature of it all! Even the Chinese Sage Zhuang-tsu, someone coming from a completely different background than either of them, had composed a poem in which he said he was unsure whether he had one day dreamed of being a butterfly, or just the other way round, i.e. that the butterfly had dreamed of being Zhuang-tsu!) And finally, what does it mean to “attach ones thought to a scenario?” That can be illustrated by the examples of a billionaire attached to his billions,–a former celebrity to her golden years in her past, or some professor attached to his previous learning or training, etc. …)
According to the Sutra of the Bodhisattva Abstinence: The Inner Being is pure, perfect, beautiful and unpolluted in and of itself.
***************************************************************
Look inward then, from one thought to the next,– in a continuum of thoughts,– one is eventually able to see the Inner Being.
There is no other way of coming into contact with reality.
Gods or demons are just fabrications of wishful thinking… .
That is why they are called the wrong views by Huineng or Buddha alike, views that will lead to chaos.
—
THE ALPHA SEER
The word ” Zazen”, like everything else in our times, has been badly misunderstood. Folks often have a picture of some monks in Japan sitting in a hall doing nothing but chanting all day long, or otherwise listening to a higher- ranked guy unwind his ego-trip. The truth is, most of such practitioners,– if not all, are pretty dumb,– idiotic lambs being led to the slaughter, if that is a direct way of putting it…!
So let’s hear straight from the great master Huineng, the Founder of Zen, a.k.a. the 6th Patriarch of the Dharma. With regard to my translation ( from Chinese to English), my concern is that it may not be as expertly as I had wanted it to be,– thereby creating even more misunderstandings for the readers. So please use your own discretion, folks, when trying to understand anything!
The great master Huineng, a.k.a. the 6th Patriarch of the Dharma:
Zazen is just a state of mind!
He also said that In the Dharma of “No Duality”, if there is ever achieved in one the correct state of no obstruction, such that outwardly no reaction arises upon the scenarios of good or evil, or that the being is as anchored as ever throughout the episode, –then such a state of mind is called Zazen.
What is Zen-anchored?
It is actually the same state of mind viewed from a different angle: Outwardly one has achieved a state of no attachment to all scenarios, thereby retaking the State of No Chaos, and gaining Inner peace. Such a state of mind is called Zen-anchored.
If outwardly one is attached to the scenarios, chaos is a certainty. Chaos occurs where thinking is attached to the scenarios. (To help understand this better, the Alpha Seer must interject this: even our own life can be called “scenario”,– or a state of the Dream… . Huineng is not the first one to call life a scenario or a dream, neither was the Gautama Buddha… . (In fact, thousands of great sages before them had expressed somewhat similar view, that life is but a scenario, an episode, or a dream,–to emphasize the unreal nature of it all! Even the Chinese Sage Zhuang-tsu, someone coming from a completely different background than either of them, had composed a poem in which he said he was unsure whether he had one day dreamed of being a butterfly, or just the other way round, i.e. that the butterfly had dreamed of being Zhuang-tsu!) And finally, what does it mean to “attach ones thought to a scenario?” That can be illustrated by the examples of a billionaire attached to his billions,–a former celebrity to her golden years in her past, or some professor attached to his previous learning or training, etc. …)
According to the Sutra of the Bodhisattva Abstinence: The Inner Being is pure, perfect, beautiful and unpolluted in and of itself.
***************************************************************
Look inward then, from one thought to the next,– in a continuum of thoughts,– one is eventually able to see the Inner Being.
There is no other way of coming into contact with reality.
Gods or demons are just fabrications of wishful thinking… .
That is why they are called the wrong views by Huineng or Buddha alike, views that will lead to chaos.
—
THE ALPHA SEER