Zen was earlier called the “Sudden School” or “Sudden Teaching”. Such a teaching, to put it simply, meant realizing ultimate reality is the goal of the practice from the very beginning. From this, we could say that the means was open and subordinate to the main goal which is realizing ultimate reality. For example, we could do some meditation. Do prostrations. Go on long walks. Build a retreat cabin far from the madding crowd and try various methods including reading the discourses of the Buddha. Ultimately, none of these methods work. They help, that is true. But the road they offer doesn’t go all the way. It stops short. This is when ‘great doubt’ comes into the picture.
Great doubt is not about the faith to doubt awakening. That would be absurd. Great doubt only means an eventual loss of confidence in practice for its own sake and the intellectual approach to realizing ultimate reality. This is what I call coming to our wits’ end. We come to a place where we have nothing left to depend upon. We have no more devices left. By analogy, in our effort to see the wave-less water we have to give up, eventually, our habit of trying to pat the waves down as a means. It’s only making matters worse.
Hitherto, our efforts consisted of a path we made leading to a destination imagined by us. But since we already have the Buddha-nature the actual path has to challenge us to let go of everything, suddenly. What remains by this sudden letting go all at once is, suddenly, the eternal Buddha-nature or the same, ultimate reality. Now things are turned around. We see all things to be a configuration of this nature whereas before all things who served to conceal it from us. Great doubt was necessary so that we might let go rather than hold on.
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