JanAnders said to Marsha:
The same attention would be applied while we are composing contributions to MD.
"The rules for the tea ceremony are to be followed exactly. Each moment
matters, and the sequence of events is laid out rigidly. The ceremony flows,
and there is meaning in every gesture; each moment is to be savored. The tea
ceremony is the way of life itself. It captures the essence of Zen — life in
the moment with great attention."
"In this regard, the tea ceremony is a mindfulness meditation. It is a moving
meditation, practiced to cultivate samadhi. The repetition and rigidity of
action allows you to enter a deep meditative state, as you know each movement.
As you perform each part of the ceremony, you do so with mindfulness, paying
careful attention to each and every movement. When you whisk, you whisk. When
you pour, you pour. When you drink, you drink."
dmb says:
Right, Jan. This isn't just applicable to tea and poetry. Fixing a motorcycle,
a nation, a culture or one's own life - as in the case with Lila, is going to
involve great attention to the particular static patterns of the situation. As
Pirsig puts it, "Zen is attached to social disciplines so meticulous they make
the Puritans look almost degenerate". Even in those classroom scenes, after
Phaedrus teaches his writing students that they do know what "quality" is,
"then the text came into its own", he says. Once they knew that quality is
real, then they wanted to know how to get it and all the rules became helpful
guides rather than dull conventions, oppressive rules or whatever. Then they
were able to see the quality of static patterns rather than just the static, so
to speak. Surely Phaedrus, the rhetorician, would hope for excellence in
thought and speech in a philosophy forum dedicated to the discussion of his
work. It would be quite strange if this literary philosopher didn't care about
the artful use of words, big time.
"Pheadrus thought that this Hippy revolution could have been as much as an
advance over the intellectual twenties as the twenties had been over the social
1890’s, but his analysis showed that this “Dynamic Sixties” revolution made an
disastrous mistake that destroyed it before it really got started.
The Hippie rejection of social and intellectual patterns left just two
directions to go: toward biological quality and and toward Dynamic Quality. The
revolutionaries of the sixties thought that since both are anti-intellectual,
why then they must both be the same. That was the mistake.
American writing on Zen during this period showed this confusion. Zen was often
thought to be a sort of innocent “anything goes.” If you did anything you
pleased, without regard to social restraint, at the exact moment you pleased to
do it, that would express your Buddha-nature. To Japanese Zen masters coming to
this country, this must have been really strange. Japanese Zen is attached to
social disciplines so meticulous they make the Puritans look almost degenerate."
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