Hi,

I feel that the following topics are so important, that I want to have them as their own thread, and not just part of others ... So, I repost them here ...

Quote Originally Posted by Fuken
Every chapter begins by talking about how so and so experienced a great awakening.

I would like to know how it is that nowadays awakenings seem so taboo.
Oh, Great Awakenings are not 'taboo', never where and are not now. Where would you get such a narrow idea?

But what is truly "Great" about these Awakenings?

Where in the Zen literature does one see someone running around after their "Great Awakening" yelling "Eureka Eureka" at the top of their lungs, tears streaming down their eyes, all mysteries of the universe revealed and all one's personal problems and hang ups washed completely away????

NO WHERE!

(except perhaps in certain Kensho-fetishist book like "Three Pillars of Zen" and similar farces. Remember: "After the Ecstacy ... the Laundry!") There are so many Buddhist people with story book images of "Great Awakening fairy tales" in their mind ... and not the slightest idea what the true "Greatness" of "Great Awakening" is and where truly found. Such people have never experienced a True "Great Awakening" ... True Kensho ... True Satori ... Not a one has truly experienced "Great Awakening" ... for "Great Awakening" is a Buddha's soft and sublime smile.

Great Awakening is profound yet subtle, mundane but a miracle, the clearing up of mysteries yet the allowing of others (as the Buddha taught that some questions are not relevant to the quest), the solving of all problems through and through even as so many of life's problems remain.

I am so tired of folks who talk of "Great Awakening" without the slightest idea what is so "Great" about it! They are naive, children.

Nothing is more precious than to be a man who has nothing further to seek. Just do not give rise to any fancies, and be your ordinary selves.


I am so tired of those children who write that the Zen masters of old, based on some "they lived happily ever after" image of "Great Awakening, were thereafter "perfect people without a fault or a flaw." How ridiculous! (save that none of us have a "fault" or "flaw" from the start ... including all the faults and flaws we must labor day by day to repair. Read and reread this sentence three times and three times again, until it is completely pierced ... for it is at the very Heart of "Great Awakening").

After Keizan had his "Great Awakening", and Dogen ... and all the others ... what changed?

Do you know? Do you truly know?

So many folks mouthing the words "Great Awakening" would not know "Great Awakening" if it was right before their own eyes (which is precisely where it is ... and one's eyes too).

Quote Originally Posted by Nick B
The first thing that comes to mind is that Micchaka practices sorcery. Sorcery boils down to cause and effect thinking.
Oh, there is a "magic" to this realization ... more ordinary yet spectacular than any dime store trick. People do not realize the spectacular realization of the most ordinary (for who judge's the "ordinary" to be "ordinary"??) This is the Greatest of Great Awakenings!

Quote Originally Posted by sittingzen
Craig,

A favorite passage of mine. In each Zazen, I try, although there really is no trying, the dropping of body and mind.
Most folks do not know what is this "dropping of body and mind" They feel that it must be the attaining of some state of disembodied consciousness. (In fact, there are forms of meditation which attain such disembodied states, but Shikantaza is not so).

To "drop away body and mind" is to simply and thoroughly drop the mind-body's demands/wishes/aversions-attractions/hard categorizing between the self and all that body-mind consider 'not the self'. Thereby, the "self" is put out of a job ... the hard walls between self and other soften or fall ... body and mind thus dropped away as the resistance and separation to "other" is dropped away ... thus "self" vs. "other" is dropped away ... thus "self" and "other" dropped away.

The way there is radical non-demanding, non-seeking, just sitting ... the way of no way.

Please be clear on this point.

Gassho, Jundo