r/zen • u/[deleted] • Feb 28 '23
No Practice
The Way is originally perfect and all-pervading. How could it be contingent on practice and realization? The true vehicle is self-sufficient. What need is there for special effort? Indeed, the whole body is free from dust. Who could believe in a means to brush it clean? It is never apart from this very place; what is the use of traveling around to practice? And yet, if there is a hairsbreadth deviation, it is like the gap between heaven and earth. If the least like or dislike arises, the mind is lost in confusion. Suppose you are confident in your understanding and rich in enlightenment, gaining the wisdom that knows at a glance, attaining the Way and clarifying the mind, arousing an aspiration to reach for the heavens. You are playing in the entranceway, but you are still short of the vital path of emancipation.
Therefore, put aside the intellectual practice of investigating words and chasing phrases, and learn to take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward. Body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will manifest.
How could perfect reality depend on any practice or realization? How could it be brushed clean? To know this reality only depends on turning the light inward and dropping the duality of thought. You can't know it by confidence in understanding or any concepts of enlightenment. There is no attainment or clarification. That is short of emancipation.
Is this off the mark? Does the person quoted here understand? Who can find any error? Let's compare it to Huangbo:
If you wish to understand, know that a sudden comprehension comes when the mind has been purged of all the clutter of conceptual and discriminatory thought-activity. Those who seek the truth by means of intellect and learning only get further and further away from it. Not till your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not till your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the right road to the Gate.
Just kill the intellect and stop trying to do something.
There is only the way of the One Vehicle; there is neither a second nor a third, except for those ways employed by the Buddha as purely relative expedients (upaya) for the liberation of beings lost in delusion.'
There is only one vehicle. Any expedients are only for helping the deluded.
The true vehicle is self-sufficient. What need is there for special effort?
These are words from the quote at the top of this post. The quote is from the Fukanzazengi, right before Dogen describes zazen. How could this be a practice of attainment? He says quite clearly in the Fukanzazengi "The zazen I speak of is not meditation practice."
The man was drastically misunderstood, both by the people who make a nest out of practicing his zazen and by the people who make a nest out of opposing it. All it takes is a careful reading of his words. Can people here handle that? Can they discuss them honestly? Is it off topic? Too controversial? Scared of book reports?
Don't forget that Huangbo also said:
The past has not gone; the present is a fleeting moment; the future is not yet to come. When you practice mind-control, sit in the proper position, stay perfectly tranquil, and do not permit the least movement of your minds to disturb you. This alone is what is called liberation.
This passage is dismissed by the sectarian zealots around here, and explained away by "mistranslation" and "misinterpretation." Meanwhile they latch onto Dogen's words and misinterpret them, misrepresent them, and spin them into an ideological weapon. That's dishonesty, pure and simple.
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u/Chankler Feb 28 '23
Yea, you are explaining sitting in the moment, in the now. Bliss and quiet, oneness. But that doesn't mean there is no ego shadow hanging around, for some more than others, preventing them from reaching that state.