From the mystical stream

Modern Zen is murky in the sense of being difficult to understand, especially, for the average beginner.  Making matters worse is trying to make Zen something that lives outside of the Buddha’s teachings in which doing seated meditation is all that is necessary.  Some Zennists even go so far as to believe Zen is more psychological than spiritual or religious.  (Perhaps they’ve left their previous religion for a number of reasons.)  

From a historical understanding of Zen, according to Heinrich Dumoulin, “Zen is the school of enlightenment born from the mystical stream of Buddhism” (A History of Zen Buddhism, p. 52).  Of course, we should not regard mysticism as a simple term.  There are varieties of mysticism just as there are different religions.  Sufi mysticism, for example, is different than Jewish mysticism.  What, perhaps, ties all mysticisms together is direct communion with the absolute which leaps over concepts and words, thus giving one a new way of looking at the world as it really is.  

Judging from the Western interpretation of nirvana it is not a subject empty of speculation which seems, at times, to baffle some who see no mystical stream in Buddhism.  However, for those who acknowledge the mystical stream, nirvana is decisively transcendent.  It is beyond the empirical condition of man, that is, the samsaric man who is subject to rebirth; not just dying once but many times.  The Buddha’s diagnosis of why we suffer and the cure for suffering is certainly a mystical one.  

Looking at Zen, itself, which is born from Buddhism’s mystical stream; which according to Bodhidharma is about seeing our true nature, this seeing is a profoundly intuitive and mystical one which has nothing to do with the eyes of flesh.  In addition, the apprehender and the apprehended vanish in the moment of intuitive seeing.  

This, as we might guess, should make Zen less murkier, but oddly it doesn’t.  This seems to me to be partially due to the fact that Mahayana Sutras are not studied as much as they should be but more, I don’t get the impression that Western Zen teachers are all that interested in looking at Zen, mystically.  Their orientation is largely psychological which is a serious mistake.

Comments

[Susan]

Three years after recommencing Zen practice and beginning Sutra study I am much more optimistic about the future of Buddhism in America. (Certainly, one of the reasons is that I discovered The Zennist.)But beyond that in the Ch'an, Chinese tradition, it is more easy-going to learn. After being wary and uncomfortable for such a long time, I suddenly realized that I could go "along the Way" at my own pace; that no one was going to force me to drop my "cultural baggage" until I was ready. And, I began to recognize that all the other students have baggage as well. It hasn't anything to do with speaking a language, having a particular ethnicity or with being from Taiwan, India or the USA. It has to do with being human, and even though practice is a solitary struggle we all had to help each other through it as well as we could. So the ideal life of Mahayana is to form connections rather than attachments and to learn from others (from observing sentient beings, as it says in the Diamond Sutra) rather than torturing ourselves with a life of deprivation on a mountaintop.

[Thezennist]

cloudless: Ego is a Western invention. He is the dude who takes care of the nasty id. In Buddhism, the concern is misidentification with what-is-not-our-true-self. We are not this psychophysical body consisting of physical shape, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness. Remember, cloudless that your self or âtman is not physical shape, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness.

[cloudless]

What distinguishes all forms of Buddhism from Western psychology is that in psychology the purpose is to make an ego feel better and to be adjusted in society, while in Buddhism the point is to see the ego as illusory and the cause of suffering. Final release from suffering would be to extinguish the ego thought or feeling totally. When there is no sense of me or mine then there is no person to live or die. There is no one to suffer. The question of what the nature of reality, in any objective sense, is not important

[MStrinado]

N. Yeti: I hate to use this expression but some of us have a 'calling' for the mystical. :)

:-)

[Thezennist]

N. Yeti: I hate to use this expression but some of us have a 'calling' for the mystical. :)