William,
Edgar wrote:
"Zen is understanding how this works so that one can realize the truth nature
of things beyond the mind's model of them.... "
And I would say that Zen is the experience and state of being enlightened by
all things, which becomes possible after any and all understandings have
dropped or dissolved suddenly, and as long as they remain dropped. Any
understanding kept in mind will prevent this direct touching of reality, even
however if a flavor, or a memory, of the fundamental and direct experience
should happen to remain. Continued zazen helps to keep us from attaching to
models.
The occurrence and ongoing experience of "being enlightened by all things" is
the phrase expressed by Dogen, who incorporated the best of Chinese and
Japanese practice, already in the 13th Century A.D. He expresses so much, so,
clearly, and lived only to age 53. He writes that practice is already
enlightenment, and that practice is the expression of our enlightenment (but he
writes from the point of view of enlightenment, and that is how things look
from there). The Soto school of Zen claims him as theirs, but I feel his
teaching is appreciated by all the schools, and powerfully.
Dogen emphasizes the primacy of practice, and, in particular of Zazen. Some
say he advocated only Shikantaza, but we can see he employed koans also, and
drew up and collected many of them himself, in order to help his students. We
still have his koan collection today.
--Joe
> Edgar Owen <edgarowen@...> wrote:
>
> William,
>
> Well to start with it's simply the way the senses and the brain work.
> Actually reality is nothing at all like the model of it our senses and mind
> constructs.
>
> The world that we think we live in is entirely a construct of our individual
> brains with the exception of it's logical structure which the mind must
> approximate to a certain degree of accuracy for us to be able to function in
> reality...
>
> Zen is understanding how this works so that one can realize the truth nature
> of things beyond the mind's model of them....
>
> Edgar
>
> On Apr 18, 2013, at 12:38 PM, William Rintala wrote:
>
> > Is this illusion of the senses akin to Kant's Ding an sich? That we can
> > never know the objects of our senses but only what our senses perceive.
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