TheFacelessFace

TheFacelessFace wrote

A reason to ask what is Buddha. A reason to ask what substance is man.

Uhh .... "mind". It says it right there.

You do have one of those, right?

Which in turn raises questions about why would people have difficulties with these if they were as simple as the statement suggests.

Someone can write a "simple" and "direct" book about quantum physics ... that doesn't mean that everyone will understand it without difficulty.

If they're really so simple, why do they need to continue with the rest of the lecture and questions, if not for the fact that people don't believe them?

They don't.

The only do it because people don't believe them.

This is also explained:



The ancients had no choice but to make provisional explanations where there is no explanation, skillfully employing expedient means where there are no expedients.

~ FoYan



If you talk about the three treasuries of the Buddha's provisional teachings, you could talk for countless eons without exhausting them -- like links in a chain [that] never ends. But if you realize the enlightened mind, there is nothing else.

~MaZu

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TheFacelessFace wrote

HuangBo's text literally starts with the explanations.

Later on, he says:

In the teaching of the Three Vehicles it is clearly explained that the ordinary and Enlightened minds are illusions. You don't understand. All this clinging to the idea of things existing is to mistake vacuity for the truth. How can such conceptions not be illusory? Being illusory, they hide Mind from you.

If you would only rid yourselves of the concepts of ordinary and Enlightened, you would find that there is no other Buddha than the Buddha in your own Mind.

When Bodhidharma came from the West, he just pointed out that the substance of which all men are composed is the Buddha.

You people go on misunderstanding; you hold to concepts such as ‘ordinary' and ‘Enlightened', directing your thoughts outwards where they gallop about like horses! All this amounts to beclouding your own minds! So I tell you "Mind is the Buddha".

As soon as thought or sensation arises, you fall into dualism. Beginningless time and the present moment are the same. There is no this and no that. To understand this truth is called compete and unexcelled Enlightenment.

What more do you need?

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TheFacelessFace wrote (edited )

Zen Masters get to the point in the majority of their texts.

HuangBo's text, for example, jumps rights to it: https://terebess.hu/zen/huangboBlofeld.html

LinJi's text is replete with quotations where he explains the whole point of Zen: https://terebess.hu/zen/J.C.Cleary-Linji.pdf

I think you probably just need to look a little more closely.

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TheFacelessFace wrote

I love that this has been the top post for 2 months.

I'm hoping to get back to a more consistent stream of content creation and then I can cross post here.

But ... ya know .. "Life" ... we'll see how that goes.

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TheFacelessFace wrote

You're no more a "man" than you are a "dude", dude.

Words are flexible.

I'm not a man and if you truly think that downvoting and absurdist wordplays are the same as anti-trans bigotry, then just fuck off. There's really nothing more to say. We simply don't occupy the same reality.

If this is your attitude towards bigotry that doesn't affect you personally, then fuck off.

I have a feeling you're not gonna fuck off though. I have a feeling you're going to continue your support of bigotry towards Zen and pretend like it's justice.

That's called "righteous hatred". It leads to lynching.

Enjoy!

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TheFacelessFace wrote

Nobody here, on raddle, is oppressing you because of your zen.

That's debatable, but, fortunately, that has nothing to do with my point.

I believe that is known as a "red-herring".

For us, bigotry is not some intellectual exercise but lived reality and it's deeply offensive to see how forcefully you contort yourself into a position of a victim whenever fool cracks a dad joke.

I don't think that is a fair characterization of the interaction.

Fool said:

Zazen is not zen, too many characters used when spelling. Two extra in Roman letters, one extra in Hiragana and Kanji.

Ewk said:

What's interesting to me is how people try to cover for racial and religious bigotry and by playing word games to make it seem like a bigotry is as casual a thing as spelling.

Fool has a history of doing exactly that.

It would be like ... as Ewk alluded to ... someone continuing to make bathroom jokes to a trans person.

Your (plural) reactions to fool's comments are absolutely unhinged and only demonstrate how little you understand what bigotry is and what type of effects it has.

Yeah, well, ya know, that's just like, your opinion man.

For all the talk about how zen followers were oppressed, it's in fact the two of you who make an absolute mockery of this injustice.

See above.

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TheFacelessFace wrote

No ... if I'm understanding Ewk correctly, the "bigotry" there is "zazen"; namely: the claims by Eihei Dogen regarding "zazen", the Japanese word for "zuochan"--originally a Zen meme--which Dogen misappropriated in order to prop up his own esoteric Buddhist religion, placing "zazen" at the center of it and claiming that his concentration exercise was the practice of Buddhas and Zen Masters and fabricating a direct lineage to them.

Furthermore, in both Japan and China, Buddhist meditation-worshipers of all kinds have always demonstrated bigotry against Zen students.

Being told that you have to accept "zazen" as part of your tradition because Japanese frauds said so is a form of bigotry. It's like telling Catholics that their religion is forbidden unless they acknowledge Joseph Smith as a saint.

Ewk's example is a transgender person being told to "just use" the bathroom of their [insert correct term here] assigned gender?, because "going to the bathroom" is "just a matter of standing up or sitting down."

That's the same kind of bigotry expressed when someone says "What's the big deal about zazen?" "Why not just sit?"

It's like saying, "What's the big deal with being a sex predator?" -- which indeed seems to have been the attitude of zazen churches in the West at various times.

Is it insignificant to insist, without informing yourself, that the Zen tradition is what sex-predators and frauds say it is and not what history says it is?

I don't read Ewk as saying that the dad joke was bigoted ...

What's interesting to me is how people try to cover for racial and religious bigotry and by playing word games to make it seem like a bigotry is as casual a thing as spelling.

He's saying how flippancy about the subject of zazen covers for the significance of the bigotry.

Like sitting down or standing up to piss.

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