For those who practice Soto Zen's zazen, they are more or less instructed by teachers that zazen is not about waiting for something spectacular to happen. Enlightenment happens the minute one learns sit correctly. According to Dogen, zazen is the enlightened practice of the Buddhas, here and now. This is to say that if you learn to sit correctly in a Soto Zen center, you too can be a Buddha!
Dogen's teaching of Buddhist meditation, who also believed that zazen was “transmitted from Buddha to Buddha,” finds no unvarnished precedent in the old canon of Buddhism or even in the Mahayana canon. Certainly, one can find the word meditation (P., jhâna; S., dhyâna) in the canon but never the compound sitting-meditation. On the same track, the notion of shikantaza (lit. just sitting) is altogether absent from the Buddhist canon.
Dogen doesn't even take into account that the Sixth Patriarch Hui-neng understood that truth is to realized by mind not by sitting or just sitting (shikantaza). The record shows that Hui-neng said: “The Truth is understood by the mind (hsin), and not by sitting (ts’o) in meditation" (Suzuki, The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind, 36).
If one expects to see what the Buddha saw it will be with a well trained mind; not the ability to sit for long periods of time stewing in Mara the Evil One’s psychophysical (pañca-skandha) machine. In this regard, we have the capacity to see beyond our embodied condition—we shouldn't rest content with it.
Dogen’s treatment of zazen is too concrete and fetishistic. Do those who practice Soto Zen zazen check out Dogen's claims, for example, that zazen was transmitted from Buddha to Buddha? In what discourse did the Buddha say this? Was it in the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra or any other major Mahayana Sutra? I don't think so. Here, in fact, is what the Lankavatara Sutra has to say about dhyâna/meditation in general.
“Further, Mahamati, in order to go beyond the Dhyanas, the immeasurables, and the formless world, the signs of this visible world which is Mind itself should be discarded. The Samapatti leading to the extinction of thought and sensation does not enable one to transcend the world of particulars, for there is nothing but Mind. So it is said:
176. The Dhyanas, the immeasurables, the formless, the Samadhis, and the complete extinction of thought (nirodha)—these do not exist where the Mind alone is.
177. The fruit of the Stream-entered, and that of the Once-returning, and that of the Never-returning, and Arhatship—these are the bewildered states of mind.
178. The Dhyana-practiser, the Dhyana, the subject for it, the destruction, the seeing of the truth, —these are no more than discriminations; when this is recognised there is emancipation” (trans. Suzuki).
My master told me;
"Spiritual ineptness is a strange religion. It has countless followers and yet offers nothing of lasting value in return."
Posted by: minx | January 18, 2012 at 08:57 AM