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The Intimacy of Not Knowing

Finding Your Truth With Zen Koans
BookBabyerschienen am01.07.2023
The book provides any intellectually-curious person with a description of how Zen Koans are used to diminish mental suffering. Koans, sometimes called 'Zen riddles' are paradoxical teaching stories that can trigger Buddhist enlightenment. The book discusses how responding to koans does not allow wordy explanations but leads the aspiring student to demonstrate their grasp of a given koan bodily, through physical actions and gestures. It is designed to give its readers a sense of the benefits of working with koans; even if they are not Buddhists and do not meditate.mehr

Produkt

KlappentextThe book provides any intellectually-curious person with a description of how Zen Koans are used to diminish mental suffering. Koans, sometimes called 'Zen riddles' are paradoxical teaching stories that can trigger Buddhist enlightenment. The book discusses how responding to koans does not allow wordy explanations but leads the aspiring student to demonstrate their grasp of a given koan bodily, through physical actions and gestures. It is designed to give its readers a sense of the benefits of working with koans; even if they are not Buddhists and do not meditate.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781667898995
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Verlag
Erscheinungsjahr2023
Erscheinungsdatum01.07.2023
Seiten176 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse1499
Artikel-Nr.11961878
Rubriken
Genre9200

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe

Preface
A Manifesto of Sorts

In this book, I explain Zen koan training to non-Buddhists and non-meditators. My intended audience includes many intellectually-curious people who have been intrigued by popular references to Zen and Zen koans. Yet, when they try to pursue that interest through further reading, they conclude that koans are too esoteric or too exotic to be of any use to them.

I believe that a closer acquaintance with the classical koan literature will greatly benefit non-Buddhists and others who may never formally adopt the Buddhist path.

The koan literature is one of the great cultural treasures of humankind on a par with our Western classical inheritance from Greece and Rome. Westerners have neglected the contributions of Eastern cultures for centuries. It is an imbalance that has long needed correction. Providing some familiarity with the koan literature is indispensable for this purpose.

This book can also benefit Zen students for whom koans are not used as the primary vehicle of training. However, students who are working with an authorized Zen teacher should first discuss their intention to do so with their teacher to be sure that this does not interfere with their teacher s planned course of training.

I am not an authorized Zen Master as that term is understood in the formal tradition. Nevertheless, I have practiced koan Zen for more than fifty years under authorized teachers and have completed the koan curriculum of my small but influential Japanese Soto Zen reform sect, the Harada-Yasutani/Sanbo Zen Lineage.

In that time, I have experienced a deep transformation of my attitude toward life. This has taken the forms of a greater trust in life itself and an increasing confidence in myself to work through any problems that arise. In all humility, I believe that sharing this experience might help those troubled by anxiety or depression.

I have subtitled this book, Finding Your Truth with Zen Koans. Like Zen itself, this book provides a kind of therapy rather than a philosophy. Western philosophy is always an ex post facto reflection on remembered experiences in which the actual bodily life of the present moment has gone.

Here, I conjure up the fleeting life of the present moment. Koans create a living reality by demanding an action or movement from students when challenged by their teacher to demonstrate their grasp of a koan.

Koan practice requires the audiovisual presence of teacher and student in the present moment. Only in this way can the spark of awakening recorded in koans be rekindled into the eternal flame of life here and now.

Zen koan training requires the student to respond through bodily actions, rather than wordy explanations.1 Goaded by teachers to become one with the koan under study, the student is finally driven to reenact some action described in the koan. Such reenactments are bearing witness (as one of my teachers used to say) to the fundamental joy and sorrow of life.2

The beauty of Zen koan practice is that it requires students to demonstrate through bodily action that they have been awakened to a new reality about themselves, rather than through logic-chopping verbal reasoning.

In Zen, this approach is called getting off the mind road in the sense that we give up solely relying on words to express what we have learned. We can instead rely on hunches or intuitions that we can t justify in words.

The beauty of bodily action as a selfless self-presentation is that it comes after one s mental efforts have been given up and all possible verbal meanings -whether consistent or not-end up embodied in the action at that moment.

Western philosophy has also attempted to specify life in the moment through phenomenology. These efforts are of great interest to me, but in my view, they still attempt to pin down life like a pithed butterfly. I am suggesting there is a way to go beyond this.

If one s physical demonstration is done whole-heartedly the student should feel a direct connection to the original participants in the exchange, just as taking communion in Christianity can become a mystical unification experienced in the body when done whole-heartedly.

Again, the key element is bodily action. The late Japanese Soto Zen priest, Gudo Nishijima, says this about the role of action in Zen:

Buddhism can be called a religion of action. Buddhism esteems action very highly, because action is our existence itself, and without acting we have no existence. 3

This quote points directly at Zen s solution to the mind-body problem. There is no dualism between mind and body when mind and body seamlessly merge in action. Nishijima s obscure equation of action with existence simply means that the true reality of living only manifests in our actions-when mind and body move together as one.

I hereby confess that I am an unrepentant lover of Western philosophy who believes that academic Western philosophy is in dire need of supplementation and renewal from outside sources. The needed complement can be supplied by the philosophical implications of Zen.

I must immediately add that I regard philosophy as an art form, not a science. Philosophy is the art form of selecting the most fertile concept to reduce a complex topic into a coherent explanation. In many cases, the chosen concept is a metaphor, or limited mapping of one domain on another. This can be richly suggestive but also encourages extensions into metaphysical conclusions that have such little empirical basis that they cannot be considered scientific. On the other hand, such conclusions are intrinsically significant for indicating how our minds process the experience of daily life.

Over its first thousand years, Indian Buddhism developed three distinct systems of philosophy that influenced Zen. Zen then entirely assimilated those philosophies into successful training systems.4 Philosophical analysis was then replaced by religious doctrine that had no further need of philosophical debate on the grounds that the training systems succeeded in producing generation after generation of enlightened teachers.

The Buddha himself often expressed disdain for philosophical disputes, regarding them as hindrances to the very pragmatic medicine he was offering to cure human suffering. The great twentieth century Japanese Master, Zenkei Shibayama, was also careful to distinguish the dead aspects of philosophy from the living nature of Zen koan practice.5

In this book, except for brief remarks on the mind-body problem and the important notion of speech acts, I have tried to avoid Western philosophical language by illustrating these points with analogies to our shared human experience.

Some of my chapters have Endnotes. Some of these notes cite source materials, while others comment on Western philosophy. The latter are intended for people who have some college-level background in philosophy, but can be completely ignored by those who don t. The main text of each chapter contains all the key points I wish to make.

A note on my usage of pronouns. When referring to individual teachers or students, I use the possessive pronoun their to indicate that they may be of any gender.

My philosophical bent did materially affect the choice of the koans used in this book. Briefly stated, the book concentrates on koans that provide Zen perspectives on the human mind and human language.

I place a particular emphasis on the koan, Not-knowing is most intimate, which is to say, not knowing is most intimate with our true nature. This koan implies that realizing that one doesn t know what to do in complex human situations is the first step to finding a creative response.

The stance of not knowing is what Shunryu Suzuki Roshi called Beginner s Mind. Rather than an abject and demoralizing admission of ignorance, such a realization is a gateway to your gradual liberation from mental suffering.

Thirty years ago, after having practiced koan Zen for twenty years, I finally took the vows by which one formally becomes a Buddhist lay person. This ceremony is roughly equivalent to a baptism or confirmation in other religious traditions.6

One of those vows was the promise not to spare Buddhist resources in helping others who are suffering. Though I am not a formally authorized teacher, I am still bound by my promise to share Buddhist resources with others if I feel it will lessen their suffering. It is my good-faith belief that by helping others find a new way in which to regard their own bodies and minds, they can lessen the tendency they may have to judge themselves too harshly for imagined failures or deficiencies.

Finally, please recall that the Buddha himself was a pioneering empiricist and pragmatist, urging people to reject his instruction if they did not find it helpful. I urge you to do the same. Yet I sincerely hope that this book will help you to attain some sense of the Four Eternal Abodes of loving kindness, compassion, enjoyment in the joy of others, and equanimity in the face of life s many hardships. As I suggest in the Epilogue, you can get this sense in something as simple as staring fixedly at some natural feature of the outdoors until you feel you are seeing the dancing flame of eternal life.

 

Endnotes

1. Philosophy buffs will...
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