r/zen • u/dota2nub • 1d ago
I made an extended article about some of R. H. Blyth's translation choices. Inciting incident was a conversation had in the Suzuki vs. Zen thread.
Here's the link: https://blyth-vs-zen.pages.dev/
Zen Talking: 11 years later - Bielefeldt and the debunking of Zazen
Read the History, Talk the History,
Episode #308 ,7/16/2026,
11 years ago (ish) Bielefeldt's scholarship on the origins of Zazen was recommended in the forum. I read it. A number of other people read it. The consensus has been that Japanese Zazen is a Japanese indigenous religion, not historically or doctrinally related to Indian-Chinese Zen. While Bielefeldt's conclusions were couched in apologetic language, there has been no controversy regarding his research, which lines up with the Chinese Zen record establishing Zen as an anti-meditation tradition.
We talk about what has happened over the last 11 years, how it's transformed reddit's Zen and Zen adjacent forums, as well as meditation and Buddhism forums.
Add a comment if there is a post you want somebody to get interviewed about, or you agree to be interviewed. We are now using libsyn, so you don't even have to show your face. You just get a link to an audio call. Buymeacoffee, so I'm not accused of going it alone:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ewkrzen
r/zen • u/dota2nub • 2d ago
Here you go: https://readzen.pages.dev/dict
r/zen • u/dota2nub • 1d ago
I made an extended article about some of D. T. Suzuki's translation choices. Inciting incident was a recent post about the monkey in the room case.
Here's the link: https://suzuki-vs-zen.pages.dev/
# 250 y/o baby
It can be difficult to explain time to Americans that don't study history. Zen culture existed in China for a thousand years. That's four times older than America.
That means that for four times longer than America has had presidents, China had Zen masters who publicly argued with each other and wrote books and read each other's books.
Nowhere else has this ever happened.
If we want to know what it's like, we can just read what they wrote about it. And certainly there's an element of virgins reading about sex, or newlyweds reading about a 25th anniversary that distorts the picture.
But there's still a picture.
www.reddit.com/r/zen/wiki/getstarted
# precepts and patience
Imagine a culture where there's no constitution, but instead it's the five lay precepts.
Imagine this culture is a dictatorship, with an actual living Buddha as the dictator.
Imagine that the Buddha we'll answer any question anybody asks, 24-7. A lot of these questions are repeats, but the answers can change.
Imagine that these Buddhas are very polarizing figures, but at the same time, they have devoted communities that see them as sort of quirky little leprechauns, but instead of a pot full of gold, they have a pot full of answers.
And for a thousand years, these Buddhas are going to explain to people: You have to wear your own clothes. You can't put them on someone else.
# buddhas are bad dancers
Yangshan and Zhongyi
“Regarding the analogy with which the Reverend has favored me, there is nothing I do not understand. But there is one more matter: suppose the macaque inside has fallen sound asleep, and the macaque outside wants to meet with it—what then?”
The master came down from the rope-seat, took Yangshan by the hand, and danced, saying:
“Monkey! It has met with you.”
“It is like a tiny jiaoming insect making its nest on a mosquito’s eyelash, then crying out at the crossroads:
‘The land is vast and the people are few; those who meet are rare.’”
...
They're having a good time. They know each other when they meet. But if you put that dancing on YouTube, people will not know what they're looking at.
A monk drew four lines before Mazu, one long and three short, and said:
“You may not say ‘long,’ and you may not say ‘short.’ Answer me apart from the four propositions.”
Mazu drew one line and said:
“Without saying ‘long’ and without saying ‘short,’ I have finished answering you.”
The monk later reported this to National Teacher Huizhong:
“Later the monk related this to National Teacher Zhong. The National Teacher said:
‘Why don’t you ask me?’”
There's a couple things going on here.
First of all, the monk is doing this four lines game because the only practice of Zen is public interview. Being a Zen Master means you challenge the public every day to come and ask you questions, giving you an opportunity to expound the truth of Zen Master Buddha's teaching.
Second, these questions range from philosophical challenges to psychological challenges to emotional pleas. And so it's very interesting to watch a thousand years of Zen Buddhas answer these questions in Zen Koans.
The sendmasters are encouraging people to publicly doubt them and test them.
One of the things that shines through all these tests is how genuine Zen masters are as people.
Mazu's answer is genuine. Even if it's confusing to outsiders, it's not an answer that he uses over and over again. It's really, really thought in that moment.
Huizong says, why don't you ask me? Because he's a genuine person too. He doesn't want to depend on what other people say. He wants a chance to give his own answer.
But he also wants to emphasize the importance of everyone giving their own answer. And so he does this by saying, hey, ask me. Ask anyone, ask everyone.
Be genuine.
The Chinese for the case is here, somewhere:
https://cbetaonline.dila.edu.tw/zh/X1399_001
When Yunfeng was with Dayu, one day Dayu told the assembly, "Everyone here eats leeks. But if anyone calls them leeks, they'll go straight to hell."
When Yunfeng heard this, he was perplexed and asked the abbot to explain.
Dayu said, "The food wheel turns before the Dharma Wheel. Why don't you youngsters use your sexual energy to collect some food for the monks? We don't have time to be hungry."
Red Pine: "Buddhist monks and nuns in China do not normally eat leeks, onions, or garlic, due to their power as aphrodisiacs."
Christians are currently having a moment of crisis internationally because shaming people about it is where they're hedging all their bets. Buddhists in Asia do the same thing, but it's just not talked about as much stateside. People with an education see through that crap immediately, but the ignorant, afraid, and hateful buy right into it.
The interesting part here is that Shiwu talks explicitly about sex (or the precept against inappropriate sexual relations) like 5 or 6 times which is way more than any other Zen Master seems to, so by citing this case he's obviously addressing a concern relevant to his time and place.
For us the questions are pretty much the same though:
What do you waste your time doing?
How do you support the Zen sangha?
The Master addressed the assembly:
Concerning the World-Honored Buddhas Four Perfect Truths, what he calls mindfulness becomes morality, and morality becomes the basis of meditation, and meditation becomes the basis of wisdom. But how does one become mindful? And what is morality?
.
"The Buddha's first sermon, delivered at Sarnath, concerned the Four Noble Truths: all existence entails suffering, suffering is the result of desire, the extinction of desire results in and end of suffering, and the way to extinguish desire is by following the Eightfold Path that begins with mindfulness and blameless action and ends with concentration and wisdom."
What does anyone want out of anything? Why do people go to other people to learn things? Why do people pick out something they heard once and defend that as if it were there very selves?
Ignorance is the root of suffering.
r/zen • u/CeleryCareful7065 • 5d ago
Case 3. Judi Holds Up a Finger (From Wumen’s Gate, Cleary Translation)
Whenever he was questioned, Master Judi would just hold up a finger.
Later one of the boys [in the congregation] was asked by an outsider, “What is the essential teaching of your master?” The boy also held up a finger.
When Judi heard about this, he took a knife and cut off the boy’s finger. As the boy ran out howling in pain, Judi called him back. When the boy looked back, Judi just held up a finger. The boy was abruptly enlightened.
When Judi was about to die, he told the congregation, “I got Tianlong’s one-finger Zen and used it my whole life without exhausting it.” As his words ended, he died.
Wumen said,
Where Judi and the boy were enlightened was not on the finger. If you can see into this, then Tianlong, Judi, the boy, and you yourself are all strung through on the same string.
Verse
Judi made a fool out of old Tianlong.
Holding up the sharp blade alone to test a little boy,
The great spirit lifts his hand without much ado
And splits apart the million layers of Flower Mountain.
Celery
The boy was too clever, while Judi was too lenient - I would have taken the boy’s entire arm. Sometimes, a 16-foot tall golden Buddha is a blade of grass, sometimes a blade of grass is a 16-foot tall golden Buddha. But I’ve found myself in the weeds, yet again.
Tell me - did Judi lift the boy’s finger back at him, or was it Judi’s?
Back into the weeds I go.
r/zen • u/dota2nub • 7d ago
We've had talk and mention of Bielefeldt and his argument time and again in these forums. The red thread that always runs through it all is that nobody is going to read Bielefeldt. It's a dry book, and so the argument runs on empty. Having reads vs. not having reads, and so the having reads win by default.
Let's level the playing field. I have made an article presenting the argument, here for your perusal. I've picked out and discussed various quotes from Bielefeldt's book and put them in context. It may be easier to find and link to than some old reddit post. Enjoy!
> My late teacher said:
>> “For more than ten years, I wandered about [the monasteries] traveling, seeking a foe/enemy. I had never yet encountered one. Once I arrived at Longshu, I indeed met that person; only then was my indignant, pent-up heart satisfied.”
> Good words! Few people are capable of speaking like this.
討一箇冤讎 — “seeking out an enemy/adversary.” 冤讎 is much stronger than Cleary’s comparatively mild “worthy opponent”: literally a foe, enemy, or adversary.
方契憤憤之心 — literally, “only then accorded with/satisfied the indignant heart.” 憤憤 conveys pent-up indignation, frustration, or passionate dissatisfaction.
The problem is that Buddhists believe in merit, and karma, and follow the 8-fold path consider themselves their only enemies. The Shinto Buddhists, that do Zazan and Hakouin ritual answer consider facts their greatest enemy. Both of these are reasonable given their religious beliefs.
But if there's no foe for a Zen student, I think it gets to be pretty sticky pretty fast.
Which is why we have teachers like Foyan.
Read the History, Talk the History, 7-10
Episode #: 307
Translating the Fox Case. The cursed monk as a teacher. Red beards? Cause an effect in spirituality vs physical world repeating gossip that isn't true true vs right vs absolute from Baizhang's pov: what to do when people believe you, instead of looking for themselves. food from home, the Land of Zen The myth of the sutras as records
Add a comment if there is a post you want somebody to get interviewed about, or you agree to be interviewed. We are now using libsyn, so you don't even have to show your face. You just get a link to an audio call. Buymeacoffee, so I'm not accused of going it alone:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ewkrzen
Koans are historical records of the Zen lineage; transcripts of real people having real conversations about what mattered to them in the moment.
These conversations were either held in front of an audience or within earshot of an audience when it's not group interview.
The lineage can be described by three elements: Five lay precepts, four statements of Zen teachings, the only practice of public interview.
Zen communities in China recorded the transcripts of the real life Buddhas that they lived with and worked with side by side over a thousand years, usually in the socialist farming communes that Zen masters built.
These transcripts are called koans.
So when people claim that they've created a koan, what they're saying is that you can invent history, which doesn't make any sense.
But not just that... Pseudo-koans are an attempt to rewrite history, and when Buddhist religions do this, it's for racism and bigotry reasons.
Koans aren't puzzles, but Zen Cultural is puzzling. Puzzle is something constructed to confuse you, but puzzling is something that is outside of your experience.
Consider Zen's track record:
A thousand years of socialist farming cooperatives.
A thousand years of no messiahs or dictators.
A thousand years of the five lay precepts as the common ground of the community
A thousand years of public interview records testifying to Enlightenment not found in any modern organization.
How would this not be puzzling to people from a different culture different time, different language?
Consider the founder of Soto Zen, Dongshan, and Dongshan's teaching on the bird path.
The monk said, “How does one travel it?” The master said, “You must go directly, with nothing private or personal beneath your feet.”
Are we going to understand this intuitively or culturally and how are we translated after that?
Context: Finger mutilation in China was done to express personal commitment to a sacred vow or undertaking.
Gaofeng asked Stonehouse (Shiwu Qinggong) his reason for coming.
Stonehouse said, "I've come for the Dharma."
Gaofeng answered, "The Dharma isn't so easy to find. You've got to burn your fingers [like] incense."
To this Stonehouse replied, "But I see the Master before me with my own eyes. How could the Dharma be hidden?"
Gaofeng nodded his approval and suggested he study the koan "All things return to one."
Why is Zen study so much more difficult than the alternatives?
It's both personal and public: like exchanging wedding vows, doing the post-AA apology rounds, giving testimony in court, or promising to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States.
People who take their promises seriously understand the gravity of going in front of a bunch of friends, acquaintances, and total strangers and saying they'll do something. Zen students are the same, except their promise is to come to an understanding of reality itself.
Sometimes everyone needs a reminder, so people burn the tips of their fingers. It might sound crazy, and it sort of is, but so is all the kinds of BS people come up to excuse themselves out of their promises.
Stonehouse knew his own sincerity so he shot back demanding instruction. Gaofeng obliged.
Where is there anyone like this today?
This is a short section of a much longer book. The questions are for you.
Master Lin-Chi said to an assembly,
Those who study Buddhism in the present time should seek truly accurate perceptive understanding for now. If you attain truly accurate perceptive understanding, then birth and death do not affect you; you are free to go or to stay. Don’t seek the extraordinary, for the extraordinary comes of itself.
Lin said that over a thousand years ago. Isn't this still true today?
Past worthies since ancient times all had ways of developing people. What I teach people just requires you not to allow yourself to be confused by others. Act when necessary, without further hesitation.
Lin-Chi received it from Huangbo, who got it from Baizhang, who got it from Mazu. Who are you?
Where is the ailment of students of the present time who do not attain realization? The ailment is in their failure to trust themselves. If you cannot trust yourself enough, you will frantically pursue all sorts of objects, spun around and changed by those myriad objects, unable to be free.
A described line; a ligature. What were you doing that you became so entangled in it?
If you stop your mind from rushing, seeking thought after thought, then you are no different from Buddhas and Chan masters. Do you want to know what a Buddha or a Chan master is? It’s what’s right there in your presence listening to the teaching.
If you stop, and actually read what he said, and understand it, you can stop reading right there. Lin doesn't waste any time getting to the point. Who is listening?
When students cannot trust in this, they seek outside. Even if you get something by seeking, it’s all just literary terminology and description—after all you don’t get the meaning of living Chan mastery.
It’s what’s right there in your presence, not outside. Terms and Names and Labels don't get to the living meaning. What is the living meaning? Aren't you living right now?
If you don’t find it this time, you will go on changing, experiencing different states and conditions for a thousand lifetimes over myriad eons, pursuing good and bad objects, being reborn in the bellies of donkeys and oxen.
How many times have you have been reborn in the bellies of oxen and donkeys in the last thousand years? What are you perusing? What are you pursuing?
My vision is no different from Shakyamuni Buddha’s; every day, in your various activities, what is missing? The sixfold spiritual light has never been interrupted. If you can see this way, you’ll be an unaffected individual for the rest of your life.
Never interrupted. Even if you think that it is. Even if you believe that it is. Even if you read that it is, It has never been interrupted. Why would you think it could be?
The world is unstable, like a house on fire. This is not a place you stay forever. The killer demon of impermanence is instantaneous, and makes no distinction between aristocrats and commoners, or between the old and the young.
How long have you got left?
Do you want to be no different from Buddha and Chan masters? Just don’t seek outside.
Are you still reading?
The moment the light of mind is clear, this is the elemental embodiment of Buddha in your house.
Where is your house? Who's there right now?
The moment the light of mind is free of discriminatory thought, this is the blissful embodiment of Buddha in your house. The moment the light of your mind is free of division, this is the temporal embodiment of Buddha in your house.
Is your mind dividing right now in this moment?
These three embodiments are you, the people present listening to the teaching. You have these capacities only by virtue of not seeking outside.
Are you reading now? Are you seeking?
According to academics, the three embodiments are the ultimate ideal. In my view that is not so. These three embodiments are descriptions. They are also a kind of dependency.
Are you dependent on academics? On descriptions? On definitions or divisions?
An ancient said, “Embodiment is defined depending on meaning, while the land is defined on the basis of substance. For the embodiment of the essence of things there is the land of the essence of things.” So obviously these are reflections of a light. You should apprehend that which is dealing with the reflections—this is the original source of all Buddhas; your homecoming takes place everywhere.
Where are you at this very moment? What reflects the light?
Your physical body cannot expound the teaching or listen to the teaching; your spleen, stomach, liver, or gall bladder cannot expound the teaching or listen to the teaching. Empty space cannot expound the teaching or listen to the teaching. What is it that can expound the teaching and listen to the teaching?
Who is it? It's you. You're it.
It is something quite evident, right here, an individual independent light—this can expound the teaching and listen to the teaching.
An individual embodiment, independently listening and expounding without interruption.
If you can see in this way, then you’re no different from Buddha and Chan masters. Just don’t interrupt it anymore, at any time—whatever meets the eye is “It.”
Is there anything in your way?
Yet, because “when feelings arise, wisdom is blocked; as mental images change, substance differs”—that is why you revolve in mundane routines, undergoing all sorts of suffering.
Are you blindly walking in a circle?
In my view, nothing is not extremely profound, nothing is not liberation. The element of mind has no form, but pervades the ten directions—in the eyes it is called seeing, in the ears it is called hearing, in the nose it smells, in the mouth it speaks, in the hands it grips, in the feet it walks.
Is there anything that isn't in your mind?
Basically it is a single spiritual light, differentiated into a sixfold collective. With the whole mind void, you are liberated wherever you are.
Where are you now?
When I speak in this way, where is my intention? It is just because you cannot stop the mind from compulsively seeking everywhere that you get into the idle devices of the ancients. If you take my view, you preside over the psychic and magical Buddhas; the tenth-stage bodhisattvas with fulfilled hearts are like migrant laborers; the equivalent and sublime illuminates are peasants wearing stocks and chains; the saints and solitary illuminates are like sewage; enlightenment and nirvana are like donkey-tethering stakes.
Are you still reading? Go back and read that again, see if that helps.
Why so? It’s just because you haven’t realized the emptiness of the incalculable eons that you have these obstacles. If you were real true people of the Way, you wouldn’t be like that.
Are you dividing right now?
Just be able to dissolve past habits according to circumstances, going when you need to go, sitting when you need to sit, without any thought of seeking Buddhahood. Why so? An ancient said, “If you’re going to act in contrived ways to seek Buddhahood, then Buddhahood is a major sign of birth and death.”
Are you acting in a contrived way?
Time is to be valued. You just depend on others, superficially studying Chan, studying Tao, learning names and terms, seeking Buddhas, seeking masters, seeking spiritual guides, measuring conceptually.
Are you measuring conceptually right now?
Make no mistake about it—you only have one father and mother; what more do you seek? Turn your awareness back on your self and look.
Can you see it? What do you see?
A man once saw the back of a mirror and thought he’d lost his head—only when he stopped looking for it was he relieved. Be ordinary—don’t put on appearances.
Do you see that you're looking into a mirror right now?
There’s a kind of baldy who cannot distinguish good from bad, who sees spirits and ghosts, points to one thing and describes another, makes the best of fair weather and foul—someday people like this will have to pay their debts, swallowing hot iron balls in front of the king of the underworld. Men and women of good families get charmed by these foxy devils, then hoke up wonders. Blind fools, they will be dunned for their food bills someday.
Who is laboring while you read this? Have you done your part?
It is urgent that you seek truly accurate perceptive understanding. Then you can go freely through the world, avoiding physical and mental derangement at the hands of this type of spiritual charmer. Don’t contrive anymore; just be normal. As soon as you form a mental urge, you’re already mistaken. Just don’t seek Buddhahood—”buddha” is a term. Rather, do you know what it is that is seeking?
Are you still reading?
The Buddhas and Chan masters of all times and all places only emerge because of quest for truth. People today who study the Way only do so in quest of truth. Only when you get the truth are you done; as long as you haven’t gotten it, as before you revolve in mundane states.
Have you got it? Did you ever not have it? Where did you get it from?
What is the truth? The truth is the element of mind. The element of mind is formless, and all-pervasive. It is being used right here and now, but people cannot trust it fully, so they learn terms and expressions, seeking their conceptual assessments in writings. They are as far from the Way as the earth is from the sky.
Nothing Holy or Ordinary about Truth. Do you see the way straight through the middle of them?
When I speak of the teaching, what teaching do I expound? I expound the teaching of the mind ground, which can enter into purity, into defilement, into the ordinary, into the holy, into the absolute, into the conventional; and yet is not your absolute or conventional, ordinary or holy. It can give names to all the absolute and the conventional, the ordinary and the holy, but no absolute or convention, nothing ordinary or holy, can affix a name to it. If you can lay ahold of it, then use it—don’t fiddle around anymore. Only then will you accord with the mystic message.
Are you still fiddling around?
My teaching is distinct from everyone else. Even if a Manjushri and a Samantabhadra were to come forth, each manifesting an incarnation before my eyes, and ask about the teaching, as soon as they addressed me I would already have distinguished them. How can I do this? Because my vision is distinct—outwardly I do not grasp the ordinary or the holy, while inwardly I do not dwell in the fundamental. I see through the basic reality, and no longer doubt or err.
TL;DR:
Clarity of mind has never been interrupted. It's right there. How can you look away?
你來龍門，討方便，討法門，討安樂。
龍門也無方便與人，也無一法與人，也無安樂法與人。
何故？若有方便，卻成埋沒上座，籠罩上座。
You come to Longmen [Foyan's place-name] seeking expedient means, seeking Dharma teachings, seeking peace and ease.
Longmen has no expedient means to give anyone, has not a single dharma to give anyone, and has no method of peace and ease to give anyone.
Why? If there were an expedient means, it would instead bury you, experience student that you are, and enclose you in a cage.
First, what everybody knows:
Christians with their Skyman and Muslims and Jews, Mormons and Scientologists with their weird cult leaders, and Hindus with their weird, weird gods, everybody knows by adulthood that none of that stuff works. Doesn't make the world better in the long run, and all these religions have relieved less suffering than your average food stamp program.
And everybody whose quit stoicism or Taoism or meditation or chanting or numerology knows that those things didn't work.
Foyan he's telling people, warning them, that if you embrace BS, you're going to make a corpse of your heart and you give up your critical thinking skills to join the flock of mindless spirituality sheeple.
I'm not telling you to go around making a religion of not believing in anything. Huangbo calls out that elementary school move as bogus hundreds of years before Foyan.
I'm reminding you that the disdain and scorn you feel for astrology, once you've given it up or after you admitted to yourself it was bogus, is the very same attitude you should have toward every religion and spirituality and philosophy.
Religion and spirituality and mysticism don't work. It's easy to see if you look at the ones you don't believe in
And that's before we get to Zen's other two core components of four statements and Zen's only practice of public interview.
r/zen • u/surupamaerl2 • 12d ago
Baiyun Duan included the koan of Bodhidharma facing the wall for 9 years.
壁; wall, cliff, rockface, fortification, barricade, partition
I was wondering if anyone had any of the following information:
Are there any earlier accounts of this (possibly Fenyang, who is the first to popularize the "case collection")?
Are there other masters who comment on this story, especially dividing between schools (Linji vs. Caodong, for example)?
Is there any time that a character other than 壁 is used to express the idea of a wall?
Zen Master Lin-Chi said the following to a group of gathered devotees who came to him seeking for him to give them answers:
“The Buddha Dharma is effortless: just be without concerns in your ordinary life, as you shit and piss and wear clothes and eat food. When tired, then lie down. Fools will laugh at you, but the wise will know. An ancient said: ‘Those who make external efforts are all stupid and obstinate. Just act the master wherever you are, and where you stand is real. ’ When objects appear they cannot turn you around. Though the uninterrupted hellish karma of the habit energy of your past is still there, it spontaneously becomes the great ocean of liberation. These days students in general do not know the Dharma.
They are like goats: whatever they encounter, they put in their mouths. They do not distinguish between the slaves and the free, the guests and the host. This type ‘enter the Path’ with twisted minds. Even though they cannot enter places where it’s noisy, they call themselves true leavers of home. Actually they are true conventional worldlings.
As for leavers of home, they must be able to perceive with true understanding in ordinary life. They distinguish enlightenment and delusion, true and false, ordinary and holy. If you can make these distinctions, you are called a true leaver of home. If you cannot tell deluding from enlightening influences, then you have left one home only to enter another home. Then you are called a sentient being creating karma, not a true leaver of home.
...
Seems unambiguous to me: true understanding comes about spontaneously in the course of ordinary life, effortlessly, not in the deep study or devotion to the textual representation of the Dharma. Thoughts? Ruminations?
...
“When students from all over come here, I judge them in terms of three kinds of basic capacity. When those of lower capacity come, I take away their objects but not their methods. When those of higher capacity come, I take away both their objects and their methods. When those of the highest capacity come, I take away neither the objects nor the methods nor the person. If people come with views that go beyond patterns, here I function with the whole essence, not grading basic capacity. At this point, the place where the student puts his or her energy is impervious to the wind [of deluding influences]. Like sparks struck from stone or a flash of lightning, it’s gone by.
“Whether your eye is steady or moves, there’s no contact. If you try to do something with mind, you go wrong; if thoughts stir, you go against it. For those who understand, it’s right before their eyes, nowhere else.
“Worthy people, you run around as shallow adherents with your bowls and sacks and shitty burdens seeking the Buddha and seeking the Dharma. This one right now frantically seeking —do you know him? He’s leaping with life—it s just that he has no root or stem. He cannot be hemmed in or knocked apart. He is farther away if you seek him. If you don’t seek, he’s right before your eyes, his spirit voice in your ear. If people do not believe this, they labor in vain for hundreds of years.
...
Judgement and discernment; pointed out as distinct from simple pattern recognition.
...
You people of the Path, in an instant you enter the world hidden in the lotus, you enter the land of Vairocana, you enter the land of liberation, the land of penetrating spiritual powers, the land of purity, the realm of reality. You enter among both defiled and pure, both ordinary and holy, and even among the hungry ghosts and animals. You seek everywhere, but nowhere do birth and death appear, only empty names, illusory transformations, and flowers in the sky, not worth grasping. Gain and loss, affirmation and denial, are at once abandoned.
“You people of the Path, I received the Buddha Dharma truly, following Master Magu, Master Danxia, Master Mazu, Master Gui-zong, and Master Shizhu: on a single road, we traveled all over China. No one believed in them, and all were slandered. For example, Mazu’s actions were pure and unmixed, but none of his three hundred or five hundred students saw his intent. Guizong, the master on [Mt.] Lushan, was independent and genuine, but students could not figure out the locus of his functioning: he [sometimes] went with and [some times] went against, so they all became flustered. Master Danxia appreciated the pearl [of wisdom] in both hidden and manifest forms, but when students came, they were all rebuked. Magu’s functioning was bitter as a philodendron, and none could approach him. Shizhu’s functioning was to seek people at the point of his arrow, so all who came to him were terrified. As for my functioning today, I create and destroy correctly, playing freely with spiritual transformations, entering all perspectives, unconcerned everywhere I go.
...
Coming and going freely; unencumbered and unconcerned. Knowing the taste and character of each master, while being different from every one of them. This is what true freedom looks like.
...
Objects and scenes can not turn me around. “When someone comes seeking, I go out and look at him, but sole he does not recognize me. I then put on various kinds of ‘clothes’. Students give birth to interpretations, and always go for my words. How painful! Blind monks and people without eyes take the clothes I am wearing and recognize them as blue, yellow, red, white. I take them off and enter into the realm of purity. As soon as the students see this, they feel happiness and desire. When I take off [the garment of purity] too, students lose heart, and run off in crazy confusion saying I have no clothes. I say to them: Do you recognize the person in me who is putting on the clothes? Suddenly they turn their heads around and they recognize me. “Good people, do not accept the ‘clothes’. The clothes cannot move: it’s the person who puts them on. There is the garment of purity, the garment of birthlessness, the garment of bodhi, the garment of nirvana, the garments of the buddhas and patriarchs. Whatever has to do with words and names and phrases and texts is all a matter of changing ‘clothes’. Words are formed by being brought forth from the ocean of vital energy at the navel and coming out through the teeth. Obviously they are all illusory transformations.
...
wearing a costume
illusory transformation
persona non 在
...
“Good people, you generate the karma of speech outwardly, and inwardly you show mind and its objects. All the states of mind you have because of your thoughts are all ‘clothes’. You accept the ‘clothes’ that the person puts on as something real. Even if you pass through countless eons of time, all you do is keep changing clothes, cycling through the triple world, revolving in birth and death. It is better to have no concerns, to meet without recognizing and talk together without knowing each other’s names.
“When students these days do not succeed, it is generally be cause they accept words and terminology as [the route to] under standing. In big notebooks, they copy down the words of dead old men; they wrap them up in layers and layers of cloth, and don’t let other people see them. They say that these are mystic messages, and guard them most seriously. This is a great error. I ask you blind ones with many births to go, what juice are you looking for on dry bones?
“Some do not know good from bad. They seize upon ideas from the scriptural teachings to discuss and compose commentaries with. This is like putting a lump of shit in your mouth, then spitting it out and giving it to someone else. It also resembles the way people in conventional life relay official orders along to each other. Thus do this type pass their whole lives in vain. They call themselves leavers of home, but if they are asked about the Buddha Dharma, they are tongue-tied and speechless, with eyes popping out and mouths pulled down in a frown. Even if Maitreya appeared in the world, this type would move to another world to suffer in hell.
Anyone who's ever tended to a garden and eaten what they grew knows the power of piling up bullshit intentionally. There's nothing like a predigested meal to really make the seeds sprout and grow, but one must take care not to over do it; get stuck into a pattern of behavior of over applying the bullshit, and you'll burn the root.
What do you think?
Bankei was a real enlightened Zen Buddha in the long line of real historical Zen Buddhas who left behind written records documenting their instruction and public debates with the skeptical.
No faith needed. Doubt celebrated.
Here's some of what stood out to me:
As you're all turned this way listening to me talk, if out back there's the cawing of crows, the chirping of sparrows or the rustling of wind, even though you're not deliberately trying to hear each one of these sounds, you recognize and distinguish each one.
The voices of the crows and the sparrows, the rustling of the wind--you hear them without making any mistake about them, and that's what's called hearing with the Unborn. In this way, all things are perfectly managed with the Unborn.
pg. 4
It is such a big deal that Zen Masters prove their perspective by demonstration of it's reality in a way that people who have fallen in love with Zen Masters are willing to keep talking about.
It's that tantalizing embrace of reality that keeps bringing me back to them and challenges the newbie to consider: "What if all the ideas you have of being itself can do no more than pictures of a cake on a menu can for a hungry person?"
Bringing awareness back to reality is what Zen Masters are kings of. But when you have crows and sparrows, what would anyone need Bankei for?
Yunmen says:
‘The whole great earth is disease — which one is medicine?
The whole great earth is medicine — which one is disease?’”
For a thousand years Zen Masters built socialist farming communes, curing people of all kinds of diseases, even without enlightenment.
How?
They didn't promise people a magical afterlife. They didn't prompt people mystical wisdom. They didn't tell people that you can transcend your passions to become a kind of compassionate automaton of purity.
How did they do it?
It's not complicated, but it's counterintuitive if you have been raised in a religious society like the West. Much like the idea that doctors need to wash their hands because it turns out there's invisible bugs, too small to be seen.
Take the problem of death, for example. It really freaks people out. It famously freaked out Zen Master Buddha before he was enlightened. The reason it freaks people out is because they know they will die. It's an inevitable, unavoidable truth.
But the solution to this is remarkably simple:
Who dies? Because it turns out you don't know. And understanding that, you understand that people are dying all the time, all around you, and you never see it. The physical body is transforming constantly and the mental bagage is mutating constantly.
Somebody's gonna die, but you don't know who it is. Why are you gonna get upset about the death of a stranger?
Zen Masters showed people, the solutions, hiding in plain sight for a thousand years in lifetime after lifetime of public interview, and their communities wrote down the transcripts of these explanations, we call these "koans".
Koans require you to be fair and reasonable and that's it. You don't have to have faith, you don't have to believe anything anybody tells you, and you do not have to accept the invisible thought authority of gods or men.
The whole universe is the disease. Who is the patient?
Bankei was a real enlightened Zen Buddha in the long line of real historical Zen Buddhas who left behind written records documenting their instruction and public debates with the skeptical.
No faith needed. Doubt celebrated.
Here's some of what stood out to me:
The mind is unborn...when you abide in the unborn, there's nothing anyone needs to tell you, nothing you need to hear.
pg. 3, Bankei Zen
The implications for Buddhism are as immediate as they are deadly. Buddhism, like all religions, relies on the promise that you need it for something. Usually that's a problem they created themselves and convinced you to believe you had, but that's beside the point.
Here, Bankei is attesting to the experience of enlightenment as one that is fundamentally incompatible with subservience to religious authority. It's a big deal because in his tradition enlightenment is everyone's fundamental state and therefore instantly and immediately accessible to everyone.
All the Buddhists that flock to hate on t his forum (at this point just New Agey Zazenists) insist as a matter of faith that mediation of experience by religious faith and refinement to a spiritually pure state are legit Zen instruction but a thousand years of Zen Masters like Bankei talking on the record and before a critical audience show otherwise.
Don't get fooled.
Translation is a key part of Zen study.
As we've learned over the last several hundred years, especially working with dead languages, fluency is really secondary to a deep engagement with the context.
赤肉團上，有一無位真人，常從汝等諸人面門出入。未證據者看看
At the heart of the lump of flesh, there is a Buddha nature of no rank, constantly going in and out from the face-gates of all of you people. Those who have not yet confirmed it: Inspect [it]! Inspect [it]!
If you ever come across a translation of a Zen text without footnotes, then you know it's wrong. Zen culture is full of entendras and references that are essential in understanding how the text is intended to be read. Don't get me started on mistaking a bell for a jar.
I have never worked with the Linji text, other than reading it once or twice so it's all pretty new to me. There's some interesting footnotes here.
The phrase lump of flesh uses the character for heart, suggesting an entendre I overemphasized by including the word heart.
Where the literal has "original nature" I rendered it Buddha Nature. Western audiences are not going to understand the Buddha nature versus original nature controversy between Zen and Buddhism and the Buddha Nature reading will be more meaningful to them.
Lots of Zen translations have used. "Look, look" and while this is technically correct, it does not emphasize the Zen cultural mandate for self knowledge. Much like in the Four Statements of Zen where we get "see nature", in that phrase both the understanding of nature and the type of seeing are opaque to the Western audience.
One of the most controversial choices I made is not literally translating 真 = true.
The literal translation of "genuine person" is sensical, but in the wrong way. Person who is being genuine is being sincere and honest... But that's not what he's talking about.
The part of us that has no rank is the Buddha nature.
So I'd be willing to accept real self instead of "Buddha nature". And then footnote "real self" with the only real self as Buddha nature. But then the audience doesn't read the footnote, they make the same mistake of the earlier, sensical, "genuine self".
I don't see a way around this that doesn't mislead the audience. It's pretty easy to say, Buddha nature and the text, and then footnote it with: "genuine person" here means Buddha Nature.
r/zen • u/astroemi • 14d ago
In the 8th case from the Book of Serenity, Tiantong and Wansong (in parenthesis) write,
If you are clear and free, (Like insects chewing wood...)
There's no objection to my babble.(...happening to make a pattern.)
This is in the context of the case about Baizhang’s Fox (go read it if you haven’t). Where an old man is turned into a fox for saying something he thought was true but hadn’t experienced it first hand. Baizhang (who has had the experience of enlightenment) corrects him.
Tiantong says about this in his verse (which you should also read), “'Not falling,' 'not blind,' they haggle, As before entering a nest of complications.”
So the old man was corrected because Baizhang said some words to him, but Tiantong calls that back and forth “haggling”, then he calls his own words babble.
Wansong compares all of this to insects chewing wood and making a pattern without intending it. Does he mean Tiantong's verse? Or does he mean Baizhang and the old man's interaction? If the latter, I think he is saying that in terms of Zen, there wasn't a right or wrong, a winning or a losing. Mostly it came down to the old man responding to Baizhang's words and adjusting in turn.
Lately I've re-read Peter Haskel's translation of (some? According to Claude, there isn't one record as there are in Chinese records, it's a bunch of different material floating around sperately) of Bankei's Record.
The argument that's been made over the past few years is that Bankei isn't Zen lineage because he never met a master, didn't leave any heirs, and didn't do dharma combat. Incidental to this was the seeming fact that he wasn't familiar with Zen memes.
I think each of those points is worth breaking down:
Chinese Monk who "confirmed" Bankei's understanding: Daozhe Chaoyuan
Bankei Yōtaku met the Chinese Zen master Dōsha Chōgen (Chinese: Daozhe Chaoyuan, 道者超元), who had arrived in Nagasaki in 1651 and was residing at Sōfuku-ji, one of the Chinese temples there.
Dōsha was a Linji (Rinzai) monk and a dharma heir of Feiyin Tongrong, which made him a dharma brother of Yinyuan Longqi (Ingen), the monk who founded the Ōbaku school in Japan.
Claude Fable 5
Daozhe Chaoyuan, who came prior to Yinyuan but was forced to go back to China because he was not Yinyuan’s dharma heir. It is under him that Japanese monks such as Bankei Yōtaku, Egoku Dōmyō (1632–1721), and Dokuan Genkō studied. After Yinyuan arrived, Daozhe could not even live in Nagasaki anymore because a purge of monks without Yinyuan’s dharma transmission forced him to go back to China.
Rising Sun: Chinese Zen Master Yinyuan and the Authenticity Crisis in Early Modern East Asia
I think we need to take all lineage claims and "controversies" with an extremely large grain of salt, but Bankei (and other famous in Japan names) meeting with the dharma brother of the Master (Yinyuan Longqi) who infamously and extremely controversially introduced the practice of formal dharma-hall public interview to Japan seems like a huge deal.
The story goes that Bankei presented his understanding in person through the common language of written Chinese/Kanji, Daozhe wrote that he didn't get it, then at some later point Bankei snatched the brush from Daozhe before he could even write anything, Daozhe then confirming Bankei.
The names of Ituzan Sonin (1655-1734) and Setsugai, and Daitei Zenkei (d. 1788) and Genmon Eigin (d. 1747) get mentioned by Peter Haskel as either heirs, grandson heirs, or otherwise disciples of Bankei in discussing the sources of his translation. The language he uses seems to suggest more than just those names.
The issue, as usual with Japanese personages, seems to be that the records are not publicly accessible in the same way Chinese records are. When trying to find the source text for the Bankei text, Claude said that they're in some university or another and aren't digitized. It's easy to imagine that the names mentioned by Peter Haskel as well as the masters associated with the Zen renaissance in China around the time of the Manchu invasion who then left for Japan to establish seemingly the first Japanese lineages in centuries are in a similar state of sitting in some digitized university, museum, or temple collection.
Various encounters in the "Words and Deeds" section stand out both as examples of dharma combat and as formal Q/A type sessions.
I'm going to list them in order I think would be most compelling in terms of requiring actual literacy with the source material.
Crows are Black/Swans are White/Pines are Straight/Brambles are Crooked
Referencing Baizhang's Fox Case, Linji's shouting, Deshan's staff, Judi's Finger raising, Bodhidharma's wall-gazing and identifying those cases as expressions of provisional Zen instruction rather than generating religious interpretations of them
Rejection of "zazen/zuochan" as seated-meditation; correctly contextualizing the term as akin to Buddha Reigning. Broader hostility to Japanese religious obsession with seated meditation.
Zen figures of speach: "wearing out straw sandals" "flowers in the sky"
Bankei was keen to acknowledge from the get-go that he wasn't big into using Zen cases as the basis for instruction because Japanese people, including monks, were illiterate in written Chinese, unfamiliar with the specific terminology employed in the texts themselves, and could just as well make his point without doing so; but his familiarity nevertheless seeped through.
I think it's a fair comparison to say we at Japanese records where we were with Chinese ones ten or fifteen years ago: we know they're there we just don't have access to their digital scans to do even the most rudimentary of work with them.