/lit/ - Literature

>>20469671
And so, the Chinese Buddhists, seeing that the Taoist Chinese sages of their own culture were not at all in conflict with the Buddha’s teachings, developed and encapsulated this in the school of Zen, which combined Mahayana Buddhist teachings about the Buddha-nature with Taoist teachings about the Tao. They must have went: “Old Lao Tzu and Siddhartha Gautama weren’t talking about something foreign and exotic — they were talking about THIS HERE RIGHT NOW WHICH I AM EXPERIENCING!” and laughed.

And yet even today, Westerners, looking into Zen, get into all these head games about it — “You and I and he and she can’t ever possibly be enlightened — we’re just stupid Westerners — it only happens to officially certified people who spent years training a certified Zen master.” Or, conversely, they scoff and laugh, claiming it all to be shallow mystification and Orientalism, thus blocking off their own inseeing.

And yet, if I even try to say or write any of these things about it, to “guide” or “teach” or “advise” others, I fall into the great presumption that I am enlightened! And yet, if I deny that I am enlightened, perhaps that’s a just-as-great error and denial of the truth. And, furtherfurthermore, if I simply try to write what I think about Buddhism, Zen, Taoism, and the like, in the words and patterns-of-thought that feel authentic and natural to me in the moment, skeptical scoffers will go, “It’s just some New Age Westerner Orientalizing his patterns of thought and language. He doesn’t have any true understanding, he’s just copying the style of writing of Chinese and Japanese sages he found deep.”

If you talk about Zen, you can get further away from it, but if you refuse to talk about it, then, again, you might be failing to do your duty to help others. So talking and non-talking both have to take their proper role. Perhaps, to really drive in the point of the timelessness and perenniality of all this, we might bring up sayings from our own traditional culture and religion:

>There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

A time to be silent and a time to speak! And yet, can we say that the Prophet Ecclesiastes was a “Zen master” or a “Taoist sage”? In a sense, yes, in a sense, no. Really, he wasn’t any of these — rather, he simply was who he really was.