Drawing water and chopping word is not Zen

Layman Pang (740–808) is credited with saying:  My supernatural power and marvelous activity is drawing water and chopping wood.  For a Westerner new to Zen who reads this, anything mundane they do, well, they are being just like Layman Pang.  This is Zen according to them!  But their attitude also fits in with the adage, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.  These kinds of people are really boneheads.  I, too, was once a bonehead. 

Zen is not about loving the mundane, having an everyday mind, washing bowls or drawing water and chopping firewood.  The famous quatrain attributed to Bodhidharma tells us in a nutshell what Zen is really about.  The last verse is about “seeing our true nature and becoming a Buddha” 見性成佛.  Is this easy?  Didn’t Siddhartha, before he became the Buddha, struggle to awaken?  Maybe he just should of chopped firewood!

Layman Pang made his famous Zen remark after he awakened—not before.  His awakening is what made him the great sage—not the mundane tasks.  I have put the critical enlightenment parts into bold about Layman Pang. 

During the Chen-yüan era of T'ang, the Ch'an and Vinaya sects were in high favor, and the Patriarchal doctrine likewise flourished, diffusing its brilliance abroad, spreading rampant as a hop vine, and effecting its entrance everywhere. Then it was that the Layman initially visited Shih-t'ou, and in an instant his former state [of mind] melted away; later, he saw Ma-tsu and again sealed his Original Mind. [From that time on] his every act manifested his penetration of the Mystery, and there was nothing about him that did not accord with the Way. He had the boundless eloquence of Mañjuśrī,8. and [everything he said] was in conformity with the Mahāyāna treatises on reality.

After that he went about everywhere testing [men's] attainment of the Ultimate Principle (Yun P'Ang, The Recorded Sayings of Layman Pang: A Ninth-Century Zen Classic, trans. Dana R. Fraser, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, and Yoshitaka Iriya, 40–41).

Are you starting to get the picture?  Zen is not easy and those who go out of their way to make it easy are really charlatans.  They hide behind their robes and the glitter.  They hope you are awed.  If you are awed by these externals, it is much easier to make you believe the nonsense they hand out.

Now, I am going to let you on to a little secret.  When Layman Pang made his eloquent Zen remark, what was the power and why was it so marvelous?  When he awakened, to what did he awaken?  Okay, it was the Original Mind and the Ultimate Principle.  But what was it really?  Layman Pang did what only a few could do, he awakened to the animative principle of his psychophysical body which is described as being luminous or in Sanskrit, prabhāsa.  The functioning of his mortal body was just an expression of the luminous Mind or spirit which—and this is really important—he personally realized!

There is more.  This animative spirit is unconditioned.  What it moves is never other than conditioned.  The moving principle is first; what appears is after, which is always conditioned.  The after part is what we are stuck on.  It is only after the 'after part' suddenly disappears that we witness this animative spirit. 

Comments

[Adasatala]

Jung, LOL. Hope you're doing well. Please, give my regards to your family.

[Jung]

" Except for dead-water bullsh*t zazen, where there is no arousal of even the tiniest ounce of vigor or zeal"

If you believe there is the slightest vigor or zeal in your "standing on one leg" meditation compared to ordinary zazen than you are just fooling yourself in this matter as in many others.

True vigor (or zeal) is found solely in disembodied meditation, where there is no standing, sitting or a lying down body acting as a supporting proxy for the meditating mind.

It is simple. In such a true state of one pointed dhyana, there is no possible place for a body, in any position. If there is the slightest presence of a body, than your mind is not engaged in true dhyana, it is just grazing, like a lofty cow unaware of the imminent slaughter the approaching evening of the day.

So, how do you engage in such meditation, and where exactly do you disengage?

You either get this and use the knowledge to your own spiritual advantage, or you do not and thus remain in the unfortunate state of mere primate believing themselves to be Bodhisattvas, or even Buddhas.

It seems to me, from reading some of your comments, that while your body might have left the war behind it, your own mind never actually accomplished that. Hence your present dilemma that keeps obstructing your mind from engaging effortlessly in the unconditioned, unborn body of enlightenment and nirvana.

[Adasatala]

Dear diary.. LOL.

People don't like it if you urge them to do difficult practices. They just say that since the Buddha abandoned ascetic practices then there is no need to do anything special or even put forth proper effort of any kind. Except for dead-water bullsh*t zazen, where there is no arousal of even the tiniest ounce of vigour or zeal. People who call that 'practice' wouldn't see the Buddha if he knocked their teeth out. Everybody seems to be caught up in this effortlessness malarky, and thus they never exhaust their karma. This is called having a relationship with both teaching and practice in thought only, which creates even greater karmic burden.

Anyway. Last night in a dream I was explaining standing meditation to some random person. I was trying to tell him that hands clasped together in salutation are as powerful as two giant iron henges pushed together. The week before, in another dream, I was reading the minds of all the people I met in the dream. Their thoughts appeared as dharmas within my own mind. They asked me how I did that, I said I didn't know. And a day or two before that dream, I dreamt that I jumped from a plane, which was way high up in the sky, and landed on my feet like a lightning-bolt, with the weight of a hundred mountains. The earth shook, and a great thunderous roar spread throughout the green valley upon which I landed. After impact, I didn't wake up, nor was I scared that I might die during the jump and / or fall. I just stood there in great awe of the beautiful mountain peaks which surrounded me, and I had a very sharp and clear view of everything. Crystal clear scenery. Then someone gave me a strange little tablet of sorts, which was white and also kind of luminous. I swallowed it, and the clarity increased and expanded to include every single thing immediately. Such powerful alertness. The clarity felt as powerful as my landing. After a while of enjoying this state, I stood firmly on my two feet and clasped my hands together in salutation, praising the Buddha.

[david b]

Have you ever read the Ishtopadesha? There are 2 English translations both free online. The Discourse Divine by C.R. Jain, and The Golden Discourse by Vijay K. Jain. In just 51 verses it does a better job explaining the metaphysics behind enlightenement than any text I've ever seen. Of course, its technically a Jain text.