The restoration of Zen

I am always looking for something to blog about that fits with The Zennist.  Today I was watching YouTube as some guy restored a Kenwood cassette deck X76 which he found on a beach while he was driving with a lot of other trash people had tossed away.

Then I asked the question, How might one restore Zen?  It would be a project of restoration, that is, of bringing Zen back to its former state.  But unlike the restoration of the cassette deck which was about disassembling it then cleaning all the components of the deck, repainting the housing, and finally reassembling it, Zen is more of restoring the goal of Zen and then restoring its methodology.

If anything that has turned Zen into some seaside piece of junk like the cassette deck, it is our corrosive misunderstanding of mysticism in addition to our failure to see it alive and well in Zen. 

No, Zen is not that far away from Plotinus or the negative theology of Dionysius Areopagita. 

To be sure, like the mystics Plotinus and Dionysius, Zennists who have had kenshō understand even when demonstrated by the Zen master's cryptic words or gestures it remains hidden and ineffable for us, and when conceived by our intellect, always unknowable and frustrating.  We see this when a monk asked Yunmen 雲門 this question: "Where do all the Buddhas come from?" Yunmen answered: "The East Mountain walks over the water."  Yet, this is what each and every koan is about for the faithless unawakened.  Koans hide a mystical path; only the awakened Mind sees the golden thread that runs through all of them. 

Zen’s kenshō, in mystical terms, is really the sudden joining of the transcendent (apophasis) and the immanent (kataphasis).  There is return to what is most primary and undivided.  With this is also the overcoming of the dualizing power of consciousness or vijñāna that keeps sentient beings in samsara.

With a mystical overview, Zen can be restored; all the corrosive misunderstanding from its present day body that is so harmful to it, removed.

Comments

[Buddha06157647]

If it ain’t broke then don’t fix it

[n. yeti]

I hope Alain makes his way back here some day. While undoubtedly afflicted by some deep nihilistic tendency which leads to lugubriousness and inverted views as expressed through his philosophies, he is not a hopeless case. There is no Zen master, as far as I am aware, who has expressly vetoed being a goody-goody, and perhaps after many kalpas of compassionate worldly attachments he is ready to throw off the mantle of existence and discover the deathless, and thereby the highest-most compassion, which is not to palliate the suffering of sentients, but to obliterate the root of suffering by wielding the diamond-mace of Manjusri which can crush even the hardest head like a molded grape and demolish the cause, not just diminish the effect, of suffering.