Zen, for the mature student, is not so much a hunt for the right interpretation or meaning of Zen as it is a means by which to exhaust the student’s approach to Zen by thought (the process of thinking or conceptualizing Zen). Only in that moment of great doubt when the student totally doubts the efficacy of their approach to Zen will they get near enough to Zen—enough so that it reveals itself to the student.
This doubt can’t be faked either. A beginner just cannot say they’ve experienced great doubt just because they believe they have. They haven’t even taken up the long journey to see their true nature or kenshō. Beginners like this are living in a fantasy—something like their own movie in which they are the director. This is all they know how to do. They don’t seem to understand that, actually, walking seven miles alone on a dusty unpaved road is different from the fantasy of walking on this road.
Zen master Dahui’s great doubt paves the way for direct intuition which bypasses analysis, reasoning, speculation and inferring — all this under the heading of deluded thought. Even skepticism is bypassed which tries to deconstruct Zen and even re-contextualize Zen into something it was never meant to be.
The literature of Zen is to be seen as more of an intrinsic analysis of the Buddha’s teaching which is quasi-metaphysical (quasi = ‘as if’). But there is also something else the literature is doing. It is summoning forth the student’s intuition which is the only means of approach to what lies hidden beneath thought. Hence, the reason behind the call by Zen masters for no thought 無念.
Summoning forth one’s intuition is, in the beginning, just about trying to contextualize Zen; to see what the frame is that surrounds Zen’s literature to make sure the interpretations we come up with are going in the right direction. But this proves a difficult task for today’s Zen beginners whose ability to contextualize Zen properly is, frankly, terrible. The scholars who do the translations of Chinese text into readable English are a little better and understand that Zen is closer to Plotinus than Edmund Husserl.
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