The lesson we need to learn from history is that we can become easily deceived by it. Zen has a history but not a very reliable one if we examine its primary sources. Looking at the lineage of the Zen patriarchs going back to the seven Buddhas is not going to help us to see our own true nature, or the same, our True Mind. Indeed, there is little of it that is spiritually useful except the recorded sayings of the Zen teachers many of which emerged during the Song period.
A more important and useful history might be one that looks at Zen from a mystical perspective; not so much Western or through the eyes of Catholicism and the Orthodox Church, but as a unique category of human thought, like philosophy, which attempts to plumb the depths of human consciousness until it comes to the very substance of thoughts. This is not likely to happen because the West doesn't have a high regard for mysticism nor a high regard for mind or consciousness. For it, only brains are real from which consciousness is born and dies.
If we look at how the establishment ("establishment" meaning the guardians of materialism) treats the subject of the afterlife and karma, it's not a good picture. The critics for one thing, are overly skeptical to a fault only granting themselves dispensations. If one envisions a special, high cabal who determines what we are to believe and disbelieve, one exists, but not in the way we imagine it does. It is just the invisible hand of commonsense thinking which struggles to stay at even a commonsense level. It wants simplistic solutions, that is, treating problems simpler than they actually are. Intelligence is altogether lacking: the capacity to see things and problems, including various situations, from their own side and foresee the hidden consequences (both short and long term) that underlie all decisions.
Taking this all in, what we are facing is a simplistic Zen that plays well to our commonsense. If then Zen seems to become more complex than we first imagined we stand our ground choosing to fight against this complexity. We extoll the virtues of the beginner's mind as if there is something sacred in being simple minded—a Forrest Gump of Zen. We work to eliminate Zen which speaks of kensho. We put our bets on the table that Buddha-nature is this world—everything is Buddha-nature. This is the hand we play. But we lose. We have only deceived ourselves. We even imagine that we are Zen master Linji's (J., Rinzai) the true man of no title refusing to see this as a metaphor for ultimate reality, i.e, that which animates this bag of bones but which is unconditioned.
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