Throwing out the baby

The proverb which warns us that we might be throwing out the baby with the bathwater in some of our undertakings is an old one but always timely.  When Zen came to the West with the baby and the bathwater, understanding what is the essential meaning of Zen became important.  For example, is zazen the baby, that is, the meaning of Zen, or the bathwater?  Are Zen’s various rituals and observances which, by the way have never been unique to Zen, the baby or the bathwater?

Certainly, it is a fact that there have been periods in Zen’s history when Zen has undergone a reformation:  something getting tossed out, in other words.  As we might expect, the reformers have always maintained that their intentions were of the noblest kind.  Still, inadvertently, they may have tossed out the baby with the bathwater in their zeal.

Modern Zen has not escaped the problem of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  If you check in at your local Zen center, you may not be aware that your modern Western Zen center may have thrown out something resembling the baby with the bathwater insofar as seated meditation or zazen appears to be the centerpiece.  But real Zen, according to contemporary Zen master Joshu Sasaki, is not about sitting (cp. Zen Notes XX, No. 8).

Looking back to the early history of Zen it was not regarded as a school based on seated meditation.  During the Sung period, a number of Zennists argued that Zen or Ch’an was a synonym for the Buddha Mind (fo-hsin).  Zen has nothing to do with sitting and everything to do with realizing Buddha Mind.  In fact, dhyana from which the words “ch’an” and “zen” are derived is not about sitting.  Sitting is not contained the the accepted Buddhist Sanskrit definition of dhyana. 

An example of the Zen baby that has been tossed out along with the cultural bathwater is evinced in the words of Zen master Szu-hsin Wu-shin of Huang-lung (1044–1115):

“While still alive, be therefore assiduous in practising Dhyana.  The practice consists in abandonments.  ‘The abandonment of what?’ you may ask. Abandon your four elements (bhuta), abandon your five aggregates (skandha), abandon all the workings of your relative consciousness (karmavijnana), which you have been cherishing since eternity; retire within your inner being and see into the reason of it.  As your self-reflection grows deeper and deeper, the moment will surely come upon you when the spiritual flower will suddenly burst into bloom, illuminating the entire universe.  The experience is incommunicable, though you yourselves know perfectly well what it is” (Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism (1933), p. 8).

As the reader can see, true dhyana (the baby), to a large extent, has been tossed out of modern Zen (read, for example, the books of late Zen master Joko Beck).  Furthermore, dhyana has nothing whatsoever to do with sitting.  It has everything to do with abandoning our psychophysical body and the material world to which we cling so that we might behold pure Mind thus realizing that all things are illusory and unreal.  There is only Mind, in other words.

 

Comments

[Bob Morris]

Phenomenalism is "the view that physical objects do not exist as things in themselves but only as perceptual phenomena or sensory stimuli (e.g. redness, hardness, softness, sweetness, etc.) situated in time and in space. In particular, phenomenalism reduces talk about physical objects in the external world to talk about bundles of sense-data." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenalism

[Azanshi]

The clye clown wrote;

"I believe it is well accepted that Ch’an/Zen was/is known as the “meditation school” and that zazen (“seated meditation”) is the primary (but not the only) practice."

For most spiritual bozos, ignorance is to a certain point, bliss. To you however you will soon find how painful it can really become. But smile, you can always see it as buddhist joko beck zen practise - a weird kind of western white boy testament, where a do not harm potsmoking hippie
mind set can be as beneficial as the noble wisdom of a genuine zen sage-grins.

[Kojizen]

Imperishable Night, Methinks The Zennist is on good grounds when he views Dogen's Zen as religious phenomenalism. I just found this, it goes right to the matter. http://goo.gl/JgzRY (Dialogue and syncretism: an interdisciplinary approach By Jerald D. Gort, page 138)

[Imperishable Night]

All well, but if this post was meant to target Dogen again ... I think you made Dogen into a straw man. The real Dogen is not a "phenomenalist".

Read the "One Bright Pearl" chapter of the Shobogenzo and see is your phenomenalist straw man argument holds water.

"One bright pearl is able to express Reality without naming it, and we can recognize this pearl as its name. One bright pearl communicates directly through all time; being through all the past unexhausted, it arrives through all the present. While there is a body now, a mind now, they are one bright pearl. That stalk of grass, this tree, is not a stalk of grass, is not a tree; the mountains and rivers of this world are not the mountains and rivers of this world. They are one bright pearl. "

"Therefore, the reality and beginninglessness of one bright pearl are beyond grasp. All the universe is one bright pearl—we do not speak of two pearls or three pearls. The whole body is one right Dharma eye. "

"Each of the many facets of its radiant variegations are the quality of the entire universe—who can take them away."

Etc. etc.

[clyde]

I believe it is well accepted that Ch’an/Zen was/is known as the “meditation school” and that zazen (“seated meditation”) is the primary (but not the only) practice.

And please note that the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree in meditation.