Gate Thirty-seven
Read the following, place it in your heart and sleep on it. Then, tomorrow, live it until evening when you can leave a brief comment on what you may have received during the process.
Belief and understanding are a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with them] we decisively comprehend the paramount [truth].
By “Dharma Gate”, We mean a teaching or practice that can lead to spiritual growth: some kind of positive outcome in terms of our practice. A way to approach the truth.
Koan: "Probably the highest rewards of Buddhism are experienced through a fundamental and radical shift in the way you understand the world and your place in it. Among different forms of Buddhism, this shift in understanding has been called different things, including awakening, enlightenment, satori, or kensho (a Japanese term which means “seeing one’s true nature”). For those of us no longer beginners to Buddhist practice, the concept of awakening raises a troubling and dualistic question: Do we know the essential truth yet, or not? If you really want to awaken, the whole process of longing and struggling to realize the essential truth for yourself can be filled with frustration, confusion, and anguish. What is this fundamental awakening experienced by the Buddha, and by subsequent generations of practitioners? Of course, there isn’t just one awakening. Or, that is, there isn’t only one truth to awaken to. We benefit from insights into the nature of dukkha, or suffering; into impermanence, and into our own karmic entanglements. However, there is a pivotal and essential shift in perspective at some point in a person’s practice. Before that shift, we don’t really get it. After that critical shift in perspective, it’s as if we’ve woken up. Putting words to the fundamental awakening in Buddhism is extremely difficult. Right Understanding itself is beyond words, so any words we choose to describe it are like – as the well-worn adage goes – just fingers pointing at the moon, where the moon is reality itself. Although the Buddha spent many years in full-time, hard-core spiritual striving, he didn’t find the answers he was seeking until he directly perceived how suffering was created and perpetuated by the particular kinds of views we hold about ourselves and the world. His perspective radically shifted such that he was completely liberated from suffering and from the cycle of its perpetuation. It’s impossible to adequately summarize Right View in few words, but essentially it means you are freed from delusions that drive you to create suffering.
- Domyo Burke's ZEN STUDIES PODCAST101
Most note worthy replies :
That which is, which I know is thereI can't know for sure, and that's not fairBut I can sit on a matToward a wall in my flat
Belief and intellectual understanding help to frame our practice and keep us on the right path so that we can know truth through direct experience. Two sides of the coin, as it were...
Trust in the teachingsMaintain beliefBut keep on sitting
合掌 仁道 生開 - gassho, Jindo Shokai
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Originally Posted by Shokai
