Losing the taste for dumb

As I did in the late 1960s, I hope always that someday the average Buddhist practitioner (it might be a Zennist or a Vajrayanist) will wake up enough to lose their appetite for dumbed down Buddhism of any kind.  

What keeps me enthusiastic as I write this blog is that a few people will see in Buddhism its essence—I mean what makes it stand heads above other religious traditions.  (Nope, not all religious traditions are the same, and not every path leads to the same mountain.)

Teaching dumbed down Buddhism, that is, Buddhism that lowers the spiritual content of Buddhism, glossing over its most important elements like nirvana, is easy to do.  There is a whole world of dumbed down Buddhism out there including those who make a fair living out of teaching it.  Those who follow this blog know that path to be one for the puthujjana vehicle or if you like Sanskrit (and mine ain’t that good), prithagjana-yana.

There is no use fighting it.  Not even the Buddha,Gautama, could help the general lot of puthujjanas many of whom were monks and nuns.  However, there is some hope.  Not all is lost!  There are two kinds of puthujjanas.  There is one who lives in total darkness, the andha-puthujjana and one striving after his spiritual good, the kalyana-puthujjana.

I guess you could say that most of us here started out as andha-puthujjana.  Then one day we got tired of hanging around our andha-puthujjana buddies and became kalyana-puthujjana.  It dawned on us that Buddhism is really about awakening, awakening, that is, to something profound and transcendent.  This awakening even provides us with the key to unlock all those crazy Zen koans we  have been struggling with over the years.

Maybe dumbed down Buddhism offers a way of converting the andha-puthujjana to a kalyana-puthujjana.  Still, it needs to be underscored that real Buddhism begins with a profound intuition of pure Mind which puts one beyond the reach of puthujjana-dom.  Then this awakening is further expanded, requiring many years which, incidentally, is the perfection of prajñâ (insight/wisdom).

 

Comments

[Wai]

This Blog is the compass showing true north. Sutras are the maps showing where the treasure is hidden. What is asked of us Zen adepts is just effort and determination, add a balance between faith and doubt - and that's it! Lucky indeed. How can we ever hope to repay this? My mother told me once:

You don't have to repay us for what we, your parents, gave to you
You can repay us by doing the same for your own children, when you have them

[Sonny]

Thank you Zenmar for all you write. I always had an intuition before I learned of Dark Zen that dumbed down Zen these days isn't the original essence of Zen as was originally taught.