Followers

Tuesday 24 May 2016

Is Zen a religion part 2

I reckon this could be quite an important question for some meditators. People who don't think there are any supernatural beings, no metaphysical reality beyond or above this life in front of their noses, i.e. no gods or spirits - such people might want to find what Zen has to offer them, if it is not a religion in the Western Judeo-Christian sense. If it is, then they may be put off. 

 If they are mindfulness meditators, Buddhism is where the practice, in essence, came from. And some mindfulness teachers and writer will drop Buddhism into the conversation quite naturally at times - because they are Buddhists. (Other mindfulness teachers are not, of course - it's not compulsory!)

In the earlier post I was looking at the way Buddhism, even Zen in its traditional context, can look like a religion, even though Buddha claimed no supernatural status.


Oddly enough, one of the most helpful comments on the reality of Zen I found came from a man who very much did believe in God, spirits etc - Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and religious philosopher.

[Merton is commenting on the story of a great Chinese Zen master who was asked if he had inherited the true and enlightened spirit of a previous patriarch; he said he hadn't, because he did not understand Buddhism. That's perhaps a bit like a Pope saying he didn't understand Christianity.]

"If he (Hui Neng) had laid claim to an authoritative teaching that made this enlightenment understandable to those who did not possess it, then he would have been teaching something else, that is to say a doctrine about enlightenment. He would be disseminating the message of his own understanding of Zen, and in that case he would not be awakening others to Zen in themselves but imposing on them the imprint of his own understanding and teaching. Zen does not tolerate this kind of thing..."

So the job of a Zen master seems to be to awaken a deep understanding in the being of  another, not to try to describe it.

Merton goes on "the language used by Zen is therefore in some sense an antilanguage, and the "logic" of Zen is a radical reversal of philosophical logic...Zen uses language against itself to blast out our preconceptions," to let us escape from the way we see things and facts as verifications of the words we make up in our minds. We forget, says Merton, to see things, we substitute verbal concepts for the thing itself. Zen seeks to break through this into something that is always there, indescribable in ordinary verbal terms.


                                              (Thanks, Tommy lad, I found that helpful.)

So Zen is a state of being, a way of living in reality. Hence all those apparently tiresome riddles, its obsession with paradox, its insistence on meditation and not talk. It's not, in essence, a doctrine at all. It can show you techniques and procedures (how to meditate) but it can't tell you about enlightenment.

Zen may venerate Buddha, and in the East it may deal in monks and monasteries; we can, in the West, turn into a religion, or at least we can make it appear religiose, a cult, something only for the select and wise few.

Or we can find appropriate ways to seek to awaken and enter the Zen state of being, a consciousness that doesn't depend on gods, that won't be described in philosophical terms.

As Thich Nhat Hahn said, "Zen is life; it does not imitate."

And this from John Crook, of Maenllwyd:

"No guru, no church, no dependency.

Beyond the farmyard the wind in the trees.

The fool by the signless signpost

Stands pointing out the way."




But don't forget to enjoy this life:


DESPAIR
by Billy Collins

So much gloom and doubt in our poetry—
flowers wilting on the table,
the self regarding itself in a watery mirror.
Dead leaves cover the ground,
the wind moans in the chimney,
and the tendrils of the yew tree inch toward the coffin.
I wonder what the ancient Chinese poets
would make of all this,
these shadows and empty cupboards?
Today, with the sun blazing in the trees,
my thoughts turn to the great
tenth-century celebrator of experience,
Wa-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things
could hardly be restrained,
and to his joyous counterpart in the western provinces,
Ye-Hah.

No comments: