Speaking of watching your Ps and Qs, when taking up the way of Zen meditation, it may seem all too easy to get things backward. In fact, according to the great Zen ancestors, getting it wrong is a natural and necessary part of the process, expressed as "Fall down seven times, get up eight," apparently an old Chinese saying adopted by Master Dogen. He also said that hitting the bullseye depends upon the 100 prior misses. So we are inevitably immersed in trial and error. In considering Buddha's original teaching in the First Sermon — outlining the Four Noble Truths, including the Eightfold Path — one aspect is often overlooked. Along with the fact that they consist of a description of reality and a prescription for practice, respectively, they also include four admonitions, or instructions for how to approach implementing them. I think of these as the four "charges," one accompanying each of the Noble Truths, namely: 4 CHARGESExistence of dukkha - (we are to fully) UnderstandOrigin of dukkha - () AbandonCessation of dukkha - () RealizePath to cessation of dukkha - () Follow The translator's choice of "understand" in this context seems woefully inadequate, given that even Buddha himself pointed out that what he realized was beyond understanding, in any ordinary sense of the word. But setting aside the semantics, let's consider all four commands as outlining a process of assimilating and acting upon Buddha's teaching. We are to fully understand, or comprehend, the existence of suffering in this world. We are to abandon its main source, or origin, namely our own craving. We are to realize the cessation of suffering, hopefully in this lifetime. And we are to follow the Path in our daily actions, so that everything we do becomes the path. And thus, as Buddha taught in the Lotus Sutra, widely regarded as his last teaching, there is actually no separate Path, if everything is the path. We are on this path whether we know it or not. And, of course, we do not necessarily engage the process in the order implied by the sequencing of the sentence. In fact, we begin at the end, with the Eightfold Path. It, too, is usually laid out in reverse order of its implementation: Right wisdom: view and thought; right conduct: speech, action and livelihood; and right discipline: effort, mindfulness and meditation. Again, we begin at the end, with meditation, which leads to mindfulness and greater effort, which affect our conduct, and so on, leading eventually to right wisdom of understanding and worldview. Or so we hope. But when we consider the difficulty of what Buddha did, and is asking us to do, it seems impossible on the surface — as do the Precepts, when considered as literal and absolute. So we are left with the prospect of figuring out what these directives actually mean, and how they might be accomplished, by contemplating them in meditation, which brings us full circle to where Buddha realized these truths, on the cushion. In Zen meditation, we are encouraged to give up our reliance on the ability of the discriminating mind to analyze and understand, and instead to trust our intuition to come to an insight into reality that is not accessible to reason alone, what Master Dogen referred to as "non-thinking": neither thinking, as such, nor notthinking. So we are to find the sweet spot, the balance between these two aspects of our original mind. In light of this attitude adjustment to the way we ordinarily approach problem-solving, let me suggest another analogy to clarify the long and broad teachings of Buddha's tongue. P's & Q's of ZenKeying off of this common trope, engage with me in an experiment in semantics that may hopefully shed some light on buddha-dharma. Setting aside the "Qs" for now, I propose that we can frame the basics of Buddhism in alliterative form, as a collection of words beginning with P, or more precisely, "Pr," which turns out to be a substantial set of considerations to be assimilated before ("pre-") setting a course of action: • Premises & Principles• Predilections & Proclivities • Prescriptions & Practices• Promises & Predictions Premises & PrinciplesBuddhism, and for that matter any body of teaching, is based on a set of premises, defined as: ... a previous statement or proposition from which another is inferred or follows as a conclusion: if the premise is true, then the conclusion must be true. Another pr word pops up in the definition: proposition, which has a less definitive connotation, being a mere proposal, than a premise, which indicates a more settled basis. Premises, when proven out by experimentation or sheer experience, may become principles, much as hypotheses become theories (and with enough evidence, laws, or precepts) of the profession under consideration, such as science; or, well, law. Predilections & ProclivitiesHowever, Buddhism — dealing as it does with fallible human nature — also takes into account ...
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