ZenFollow

(Gotta wrap this up, will edit and proofread later.)

I told Debalic a couple weeks ago that I would explain what 'Zen' was. I was confident that I could succeed in doing something that nobody, not even world-reknowned Zen masters, Buddhist Patriarchs, Lamas, or even the Great Gautama Buddha himself, has been able to accomplish in the 2500 year history of Buddhism.

Looking back, I realize I may have been a little presumptuous.

Literally, Zen is the Japanese way of pronouncing the Chinese symbol for Ch'an, which simply means 'meditation'. Ch'an actually comes from the Sanskrit (Ancient Indian) word Dhyana.

Obviously, the connotative meaning behind the word Zen is far more expansive than the literal meaning, or I wouldn't be boring you with this lesson in Asian theo/etymology.

Any attempt to explain what Zen's real meaning is, is an exercise in futility. Here's why...

In Chinese there is a word: Hsin. Hsin has no direct translation. Sometimes it means spirit or soul. Sometimes it means ghost or mind or heart or personality. Basically, I think the Chinese need to start squeezin' out a few less slanty-eyed babies and increase the size of their frickin' language.

Anyway, Buddhism is all about seperating Hsin from everything else. Actually, Buddhism is all about allowing everything else to absorb Hsin. No, that's not right either. Buddhism is all about realizing that none of the things I just mentioned even exist.

Basically, Zen Buddhists believe that the universe is one giant lump of interbeingness in which nothing exists. It sounds paradoxical if not downright contradictory. It sounds like Buddhists are just a bunch of quasi-intellectuals who equate philosophy with playing semantics and employing circular logic. I assure you, such is not the case.

You can't imagine Zen, or understand it. So using words, which are a construct of the mind used to interpret, is a waste of time. The mind is like a monolingual Frenchman trying to translate an English sign to a Russian tourist. Plus, the Frenchman is a bagel.

There is a parable for this mental impediment.

A man is admiring the sky from his porch. The moon is bright and beautiful and magnificent. He sees his wife through the window. He motions to her to get her attention, and then points to the moon.

"Look at the moon," he says. But she could not hear him. The glass was too thick, and she was too old and too hard of hearing.

The man, determined to share this wonderful moon with his wife, points to the moon yet again, even more passionately.

"Look at the moon!!!"

Once again, she doesn't hear him.

Frustrated and disappointed, he gives up and goes back inside.

His wife asks him, "Is there something wrong with your finger? Why do you keep elevating it so?"

Like I was saying, you can't understand Zen- you can't understand the true nature of nothingness. There's no use in explaining it, or trying to point it out. The person listening to you ramble will only wonder why your finger troubles you so.

Invariably, one or two of you fu[/i]ckers will now chime in with, "Nuh-uh! I can do it! I can picture nothingness!"

I will then respond by saying, "Shut yer pie-hole, you fu[i]cking moron." So please, save us both the hassle of engaging in an utterly pointless and predictable exchange, and respond to a thread more worthy of your contributions.

Moving on...

Zen is nothingness, but how do you explain true nothing? How do you explain true void? The human mind is capable of neither explaining it, nor grasping it. The word 'nothing' implies a thousand different things; black, vacuum, space, emptiness.

The only pure definiton of 'Nothing', if such a defintion existed, would contain not even a single word. How do you transmit or convey the meaning of nothing if you have no means, no medium, of transmitting or conveying the message?

That's the trick, you don't try to unlock the mysteries of Zen, you don't attempt to untangle it's tangled web. You don't interpret it, you don't solve it.

What the fu[/i]ck [i]DO you do then?

Once again, you don't do or not do anything. Bugs Bunny, the original Hollywood transvestite, made a habit of dressing up in tight, seductive garb and flirting cruelly with many of his nemeses. On one occasion, I can distinctly remember him asking this question of Yosemite Sam: "Is you is or is you ain't my baby?"

To know Zen is to just "is". No, that's not a frickin' typo, brainiac.

There's a story that illustrates the concept of is-ness quite well.

A Zen master hands his student a cup with a large hole in the bottom and asks the student to go fill the cup with water. The student, knowing that he cannot possibly fill a cup which has no bottom with water, but not wishing to irritate his master by being argumentative, quickly runs to the sink and attempts to fill the cup.

The student then turns the faucet on, and holds the cup beneath the pouring water. Sure enough, the water goes straight through. The student tries again a couple more times while putting on a show to make it appear he's doing his very best. After he's convinced his master will be satisfied that he actually [i]tried to do as he was asked, he returns to the master and says, "Master. I cannot fill this cup. The water goes through the cup faster than I can fill it."

The master slaps the student and takes the cup from his hand. He then walks outside and throws the cup into the lake, and says, "There! Was that so hard? You fu[/i]cking moron."

Hopefully, the parallels are self-explanatory. The cup in the story is your mind.

The hole in the cup is the inability of the mind to grasp the idea of true nothingness.

The lake is the interbeingness, the nothingness, the true nature, of all things.

I can remember the first time I glimpsed Zen.

I was 16 and I'd just gotten laid. I was staying at a beachfront hotel. It was late, maybe midnight or 1 or 2 in the morning. I snuck down to the water, carefully avoiding the fuzz (lifeguards) and swam far enough from the shore to insure the few remaining lifeguards would be unable to see my head bobbing up and down in the water, and to make sure the headlights on their patrol vehicles wouldn't reflect off my eyes.

There wasn't a cloud in the sky, but there was a very thin layer of fog hovering above the water. This fog prevented the ambient light of the hotels and business from reaching me.

I just floated there, not really thinking of anything... except maybe one thing, I kept saying to myself, "My God... look at all the stars." Yep, just like the movie.

An eternity of nothing was stretched before me, and above me was naught but dark empty space emblazened with the outlines of cold suns a billion miles away. And for all I cared or was aware, the world of fast-food restaurants and frantic traffic may as well never have existed at all. In fact, it hadn't.

People often comment on how the ocean, or sometimes the night sky, makes them feel small. I didn't feel small that night, at leat not for long. The sensation of smallness and insignificance I'd initially felt had dissipated almost immediately after I utterd the words, "My God, look at all the stars." I can't tell you what I felt, because I'm sure, as sure as is humanly possible, that I wasn't feeling anything. I do remember, however, that for one flickering instant, I was happier and more terrified than I'd ever been, or ever have been since.

This kind of experience is called 'Satori'. Everyone experiences it from time to time, to varying degrees.

Stop thinking. Just is. Enjoy. From the first not one thing is. Just is. Enjoy.

Congratulations! You're a fu[/i]cking Zen Buddhist!

[i]Edited, Thu Mar 25 00:29:58 2004 by Thundra

I saw Totem eating lox. That fu[i][/i]cking Jew! Where's Hitler when you need him?

Zennnnnnnnnnn........

First, it should be noted that to try to prove or disprove your definition of Satori, Zen, or Enlightenment, as accurate, is patently absurd. Buddha would be laughing at the both of us.

Second, no, Satori is not 'the result of a conscious effort (or non effort) to achieve enlightenment'. Any effort to achieve Zen is doomed to fail. You can only achieve a Zen mind if you aren't trying to.

Third, semantically, you are just as wrong as you are right. Let's take a look...

One definition of Satori.


Another definition of Satori:


And another description of Satori




There are tremendous similiarities between Zen and the Tao. The phrase 'The Way that can be spoken is not the true Way', is a key tenet of both traditions. They share a lot of history, and undoubtedly, were influenced by the same ideas.

If you cut and paste a few more words from a Buddhist glossary, you might convince someone you actually know what you're talking about.



I don't presume to fully understand Zen, and so in a sense I don't understand at all. I presume only to understand that I don't understand.

Edited, Mon Mar 29 00:26:09 2004 by Thundra

Is the forum broken?

I was wondering about the utter lack of posts...is it just you and me here, Pat?

No, were I trying to convince people I actually knew what I was talking about I'd cut and paste parables and share my "meaningfull" personal experience and then try to relate it to something entirely diffrent, that is, enlightenment. Then I'd grossly oversimplify, because as we all know, everything is in reality quite simple and easy to understand and requires no more effort than reading about it on the net for about ten minutes.

Zen training is of course pointless and unessicary because everyone has access to the Zen mindset if they'd only come to realize it by relating it to the times they stared at the stars while floating in the water. Right?

Or, it could be that you haven't the vaguest clue what you're talking about and your knowledge of Zen is derived almost wholely from Star Wars movies and watching Kung Fu re-runs?

It's true that you can't explain the Zen experience if you've experienced it. It's also true, however, that you can absolutely **** up trying to explain it to the point where you're not even vaguely close. By attempting to relate it to your own personal "wow man, that's deep" experience you've accomplished just that. You're infinately further from understanding the Zen mind than Jesse Helms is. At least he doesn't pretend to.

Edited, Mon Mar 29 15:30:20 2004 by Smasharoo

No, Gedo isn't a form of Zen. It's a description of other paths that lead to enlightment specifically other than Budhism. It's sometimes reffered to by Westerners as a "form of Zen", but it's not. Therefore, Taoism, Confucianism, hell Christanity, that lead to enlightenment would all be considred Gedo.

But I'm sure you knew that, right?

Look, whatever makes you happy. It's not worth me arguing about it with you. If you think that linking internet definitions of Zen support your case for not being a poser with cursory knowledge of it, that's great. If you consider Gedo a form of Zen, that's great too.

Zen is something I'm more personally invested in than I'm going to expose arguing about it with you here. It was a mistake of me to try to educate you when, clearly, you're an expert on the subject. My apologies.

Could be worse. We could be adherants of a religon founded by a guy who got tied to a peice of wood two thousand years ago who basically said "love everyone and don't fight back even when you are attacked" who actively persue the descrimination of those who don't belive what they do and the deaths of those beleive in essentially the same God, but who read the book written by the guy in the cave instead of the book written by the guys who hung out with the guy who was tied to the peice of wood.

Personally, I see the paradox being that the people that believe in God think they can understand the motivations of a supreme being who tells them how to behave. If that weren't paradoxical enough, being like an ant comprehending the reason his anthill get's bulldozed to build a skyscraper, they then ignore the presumed perscribed "right" way to behave that has been laid out by devine providence and pick and choose random peices of the devine will that suit them as they feel like it.

Now that is a paradox.

http://www.geocities.com/jiji_muge/kensho.html



From somewhere on your linked page. I've honestly never bothered with reading the myriad of web sites about Zen as they almost invariably get it wrong. In the same way I wouldn't refer to Phil Jackson as a "Zen Master" I'm not going to bother with what a bunch of dis-affected Westerners Who Want to Be Diffrent happen to think about Zen.

There's nothing for me to discredit about you or your experience of Zen. If you've studied, practiced and achived any level of a Zen mind then that's fantastic. If you want to pretend you have and you haven't that's fantastic, too. Who am I, as one pathalogical liar to another, to judge your quest for spiritual enlightment.

I'm serious when I say it's not worth arguing about to me. This is my last post about it.

Ok. Educate me then. What's the diffrence between Kensho and Satori please? What is meant by this:



and no, it doesn't support your argument. Your argument is that Satori is a sudden insight which and this is the important part can happen spontaniously without training or effort.


Yes. Mental upheavel your "spacing out" experience doesn't ecompass which is why it's Kensho and not Satori.


No, I'd say that's why we have two seperate terms, Kensho to describe sudden insight without reordering of the mental state and Satori to describe awakening because of the reordering of the mental state.



You convinced me not to. Now convince me that you understand the diffrence between Kensho and Satori and that I'm wrong about it and explain the diffrence to me.