On Sun, 27 Mar 2011 08:18:58 -0700, michael sylvester wrote: [snip] > The phrase "if you meet the Budha on the road,kill him" goes >way way back of the foundations of Zen.
There are a couple of points to keep in mind about this statement: (1) Zen Buddhism emphasizes the importance of experience over the transmission of knowledge in words and symbols. From this point of view one does not need a teacher or a savior like the Buddha to gain enlightenment but most novices will not understand this or will misunderstand it. Once one has achieved enlightenment, it will be clear that one did not really need a teacher to achieve it but well-meaning teachers can help provide corrections when one goes off the rails (not being familiar with operant conditioning it had not been unusual for a teacher/sensei to hit the novice upside the head when the student is in error instead of rewarding correct behavior like a good Skinnerian). A better statement is "When you are hungry, eat. When you are thirsty, drink. When you are tired, sleep." In "real life" (i.e., the everyday dream world we operate in), such notions are foolish because we have to schedule such activities for when we can do them and not on the basis of what we might need at particular point in time. Training and discipline allows one to decide whether one has real needs (true hunger, thirst, fatigue, etc.) instead of mere wants (in Marty Scorcese's "The Departed" the mole played by Matt Damon tries to get access to files on undercover cops of and he tells the FBI guy played by Alec Baldwin "I NEED those files", to which Baldwin responds "No, you WANT those files. You'll have to work around that." which captures the want/need distinction that discipline tries to make clear). (2) A key point in Zen Buddhism is that we filter our experience through prior knowledge, expectations, attitudes. beliefs, etc., and to gain enlightenment, to be able to actually perceive what one is experiencing at a given moment instead of the interpretation of that experience, requires one to learn how to prevent these forms of automatic processing from kicking in. In this sense, mindfulness means just focusing on the experience and not how one would describe in words, indeed, given the nature of subjective experience "words will not be able to describe what they cannot describe", that is, talking about an experience is a poor substitute for having the experience. And one person's experience may be very different from everyone else. >They are part of phrases called the koans,for example, "what is the >sound of one hand clapping".Those phrases are meant to enlighten >the existential experience. Not to put too fine a point on it, consider the following quote from the Wikipedia entry on Zen Buddhism (yadda-yadda): |A koan (literally "public case") is a story or dialogue, generally |related to Zen or other Buddhist history; the most typical form |is an anecdote involving early Chinese Zen masters. These |anecdotes involving famous Zen teachers are a practical |demonstration of their wisdom, and can be used to test a |student's progress in Zen practice. Koans often appear to be |paradoxical or linguistically meaningless dialogues or questions. |But to Zen Buddhists the koan is "the place and the time and the |event where truth reveals itself"[30] unobstructed by the |oppositions and differentiations of language. Answering a koan |requires a student to let go of conceptual thinking and of the |logical way we order the world, so that like creativity in art, |the appropriate insight and response arises naturally and |spontaneously in the mind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_buddhism People often confuse koans and the answer one provides to them with the types of "tests" one might be given in school or other contexts, that is, there is one or a limited number of correct answers. The novice thinks that there is a "correct" answer to a koan and, given people's ability to talk endlessly about things that they don't really understand (such as Zen Buddhism) will try to come up with the "right answer" while the teacher is merely using the koan as a device to go beyond the automatic conceptual interpretations one would make. If one has access to Ioanna Salajan's "Zen Comics", featuring the adventures of the teacher and novice, I would suggest looking at story #13 on pages 23-26 which covers this point clearly. Also, several decades ago there was something of a scandal when someone published a book that contained a number of traditional koans and answers that were considered "suitable" for them. One way of thinking about this book is that it is like a book on the SAT or GRE that provided questions and answers before these became widely available. Another way to think about it is that it is an atlas but the maps are all wrong and if you used them to navigate and locate things, one would be hopelessly lost. >There are some wotks re contrasting and comparing Existential >psychology and Bejaviorism by Skinner,Rollo May and a paperback >by a British dude (Alan Watts) turned Zen guru- Psychotherapy: >East and West. The problem, of course, is that if you are trying to understand what Zen training is supposed to achieve, you'll never find it in a book. There were two movies based on Somerset Maugham's "The Razor's Edge", one with Tyrone Power circa 1946 and an extremely bad version with Bill Murray in 1984 -- a trailer for this deservedly obscure film is available on the YouTube; see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-cIUVgacaY There is a scene where Bill Murray is sitting out in the snow reading a book after having spent several months as a hermit ascetic. He experiences satori (a state of sudden spiritual enlightenment) and starts to tear up the book he is reading. He realizes that no matter how many books he reads, he will never understand what enlightenment is. Living life and living it properly is the real answer. But one needs discipline to transcend the conceptual categories one has learn to segment the perception of experience and achieving and maintaining that discipline is extraordinarily hard. >If I was into Existential psychotherapy,my best advice to a client would >be : BE HERE NOW. Maybe. Maybe not. I have to ask: have you ever undergone surgery with insufficient anesthesia? I once had to undergo an emergency root canal because after the dentist had started it, it got infected (and extremely painful). The dentist had to do the complete root canal in one session but after an hour of unsuccessful pain management (i.e., shot, drill, pain, shot, drill, pain, and so on), he just knocked out all feeling on one side of my face. After a couple of hours he was finished and I dreaded the moment when the anesthesia would wear off. Now, a person practicing mindfulness would try to focus on the moment even if it was overwhelminingly painful. Having the appropriate training and discipline would allow one to sit through such an ordeal while continuing to be in the moment. Lacking such training and discipline I did what I think was the typical human response: I cried when the pain got to be too much, I tried to dissociate myself from the experience in order to distance myself from the pain but neither helped to deal with the lightning bolts of pain radiating through my head. I really did not want to be in the moment at that time and was grateful that I was ultimately able to get some pain relief from drugs. Would you still say "Be here now" under such circumstances? Then again, ignore what I am saying -- I don't know Zen Buddhism at all. Or clouds. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8jGFu7ys64 -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. 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