Thomas Merton on Zen
Zen is deliberately cryptic and disconcerting. it seems to say the most outrageous things about the life of the spirit. It seems to jolt even the Buddhist mind out of its familiar though routines and devout imaginings, and no doubt it will be even more shocking to those whose religious outlook is remote from Buddhism. Zen can sound, at times , frankly and avowedly irreligious. And it is, in the sense that it makes a direct attack on formalism and myth, and regards conventional religiosity as a hindrance to mature spiritual development.
Zen resolutely resists any temptation to be easily communicable, and a great deal of the paradox and violence of Zen teaching and practice is aimed at blasting the foundation of ready explanation and comforting symbol out from under the disciple's supposed "experience." we must admit it is perfectly logical to admit, with the Zen Masters, that "Zen teaches nothing." One of the greatest of the Chinese Zen Masters, the Patriarch,
Huineng (see Lesson 9) was asked a leading question by a disciple:
"Who has inherited the spirit of the Fifth Patriarch?"
(i.e. who is Patriarch now?)
Huineng replied: "One who understands Buddhism."
The monk pressed his point: "Have you then inherited it?"
Huineng said: "No."
"Why not?" asked the monk.
"Because I do not understand Buddhism."
Huineng (rejects) teaching . . . a doctrine about enlightenment. (Then) 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, since this would be incompatible with the true purpose of Zen: awakening a deep ontological awareness, a wisdom intuition (Prajna) in the ground of the being of the one awakened.
Since the Zen intuition seeks to awaken a direct metaphysical consciousness beyond the empirical, reflecting, knowing, willing and talking ego, this awareness must be immediately present to itself and not mediated by either conceptual or reflexive or imaginative knowledge. And yet far from being mere negation, Zen is also entirely positive. Let us hear
D.T. Suzuki on the subject:
Zen always aims at grasping the central fact of life, which can never be brought to the dissecting table of the intellect. To grasp the central fact of life, Zen is forced to propose a series of negations. Mere negation however is not the spirit of Zen.
Hence, he says, the Zen Masters neither affirm nor negate, they simply act or speak in such a way that the action or speech itself is a plain fact bursting with
Zen. Suzuki continues:
When the spirit of Zen is grasped in its purity, it will be seen what a real thing that (act - in this case a slap). is. for here is no negation, no affirmation, but a plain fact, a pure experience, the very foundation of our being and thought. All the quietness and emptiness one might desire in the midst of most active meditation lies therein. Do not be carried away by anything outward or conventional. Zen must be seized with bare hands, with no gloves on.
It is in this sense that "Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach , it points" The acts and gestures of a Zen
Master are no more "statements" than is the ringing of an alarm clock.

All the words and actions of the Zen Masters and of their disciples are to be understood in this context.
Usually the Master is simply "producing facts" which the disciple either sees or does not see.
In the relation between Zen Master and disciple, the most usually encountered "fact" is the disciple's frustration, his inability to get somewhere by the use of his own will and his own reasoning. Most sayings of the Zen Masters deal with this situation, and try to convey to the disciple that he has a fundamentally misleading experience of himself and of his capacities.
"When the cart stops," said Nayan, the Master of Mazu,
"do you whip the cart or whip the ox?"
And he added, "If one sees the Tao from the standpoint of making and unmaking, or gathering and scattering, one does not really see the Tao."
If this remark about whipping the cart of or the ox is obscure, perhaps another mondo (question and answer) will suggest the same fact in a different way.
A monk asked Baizhang, "Who is the Buddha?"
Baizhang answered: "Who are you?"
A monk wants to know what is Prajna (the metaphysical wisdom-intuition of Zen). Not only that , but
Mahaprajna, Great or Absolute Wisdom. the whole works.
The Master answers without concern:
"The snow is falling fast and all is enveloped in mist."
The monk remains silent.
The Master asks: "Do you understand?"
"No, Master, I do not?"
Thereupon the Master composed a verse for him:

Mahaprajna
It is neither raking in nor giving up.
If one understand it not,
The wind is cold, the snow is falling.
The monk is 'trying to understand" when in fact he ought to try to look. The apparently mysterious and cryptic sayings of Zen become much simpler when we see them in the whole context of Buddhist "mindfulness" or awareness, which in its most elementary from consists in the "bare attention" which simply sees what is right there and does not add any comment, any interpretation, any judgment, any conclusion. It just sees. Learning to see in this manner is the basic and fundamental exercise of Buddhist mediation. (
If one reaches the point where understanding fails, this is not a tragedy: it is simply a reminder to stop thinking and start looking. Perhaps there is nothing to figure out after all: perhaps we only need to wake up.
A monk said: "I have been with you (Master), for a long time, and yet I am unable to understand your way. How is this?
The Master said: "Where you do not understand, there is the point for your understanding."
The monk said: "How is understanding possible when it is impossible?"
The Master said: "The cow gives birth to a baby elephant; clouds of dust rise over ocean."
From Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Thomas Merton (New
Directions - 1968)
- - - - - - - - - Ferguson -- -- - - - -
1b
. . . concepts like "mind" and "realizing
self-nature" might rightfully be dismissed as fanciful by anyone not familiar with the astounding lives of the
Zen ancients. The authentic ancient masters, without

exception, displayed certain quite remarkable characteristics. Chief among these characteristics was an ineffable sense of total freedom and ease, of peace and equanimity. Such repose is not a "learned" behavior. It appears to be the natural result of truly shedding concern with one's self. It seemed to arise from those ancients' realization of the self's "empty" nature, that is, that the self is not an independent, sovereign entity. The ancients would say, however, that simply realizing genuine self-nature is not enough. The realization must be upheld and sustained with long practice if it is to avoid becoming a mere intellectual understanding. [Zen's Chinese Heritage]
1e
By our conventional understanding, the Zen ancients lived in a society so far from us in content, space, and time that we risk quickly dismissing their relevance. But Zen, in its greatest definition, is not less relevant today than it was in feudal China. It remains important precisely because the enlightenment of the historical Buddha and his Zen descendants does not depend on considerations of culture, behavior, social relationships, intellect, or gods and goddesses.
. . . According to all the old masters, this realization is not to be achieved through analysis, but must be directly experienced. [Zen's Chinese Heritage]
1e
Though there were highly regarded masters living and teaching outside the institutions, Zen's most characteristic geniuses moved freely among the temples and monasteries, and followed a highly prescribed lifestyle. The strength and tradition of monastic life provided the loom on which the spare, elegant, witty, deadly serious, and humorous fabric of Zen could be woven. Though it would be wrong to say monastic life was essential to all Zen, it has been essential to a great deal of the best of it so far. [Zen's Chinese
Heritage]

3d popoup of Bodhidharma Four Practices
7
Farong story
----end Ferguson -- - - - - --
- - - ---Nine-Headed - - - - -
1d
. . . since the essence of Zen might well be what one teacher called "the moment-by-moment awakening of mind," there is little that may sensibly be said about it without succumbing to that breathless, mysteryridden prose that drives so many sincere aspirants in the other direction. [Nine-Headed Dragon River]
3a his "emptiness" was neither absence nor a void. . .
Like the empty mirror on which all things pass, leaving no trace, this ku contains all forms and all phenomena, being a symbol of the universal emphasis. Thus this emptiness is also fullness, containing all forms and phenomena. [Nine-Headed Dragon River]
"I do not know."
And with "I do not know." Bodhidharma launches Zen with the supreme answer. As Peter Mathiessen observes, notknowing:
. . . echoes "vast emptiness," yet goes still deeper to the unnameable source where there is noting-to-know, were nothing exists outside the doing and being of this present instant witout past and future. . . . Like emptiness, this not-knowing is very close to us, therefore hard to see. It is the source or essence of our life, and of Zen practice. . [Nine-Headed Dragon
River]
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-----Mu Soeng Trust Mind --- - -- - -
2g
His way was one that pointed and permeated; it did not invade or seek to control. In Chuang's pages we feel the conviction that only the self-discovered truth is the truth that can be lived. His Ultimate was a course, a cosmic force. So
Chuang talked of this Tao, this road, this way of life— this spontaneity that cannot be captured, only fostered; this that cannot be labeled because it has no name. [Trust In Mind]
He was, of. course, driven into the idiom of the absurd. When one has expanded his consciousness—call it satori, samdhi, enlightenment or mastery of the Tao— one's thought enters the paraverbal. Then to communicate with others who have not yet crossed that bar requires parable, metaphor, satire, or nonsense.
The absurd becomes that third point to which both consciousness can relate, and through which ideas can be exchanged. Indirection is then seen as guidance.
[Trust In Mind]
"Buddho-Taoism" is a collaboration of . . . neo-Taoist philosophers and Chinese Mahayana Buddhist monks, both of the scholarly and the ascetic persuasion. The two traditions of Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism stand in contrast to Western philosophical traditions, which have well-defined terms, the subject matter subdivided and built up into connected whole . . . even before
Bodhidharma arrived in China, a ground had been prepared in which Taoist and Buddhist ideas collaborated with each other, mainly in opposition to
Confucian ideas, and found a healthy respect for each other. [Trust In Mind]
2h

The transplantation of Buddhism into China is one of those puzzling events that have left historians scrambling for categories of description. [Trust In
Mind]
2i
. . . an unmistakable preference for immediate, intuitive knowledge, both of which were to be hallmarks of Buddho-Taoism as it emerged in subsequent centuries, and as it had been developing embryonically in centuries prior to Sengchao. He was at ease with the paradoxes created by wordplay that leaves the meaning ambiguous but points to the truth that lies behind words. This truth had to be experienced, not reasoned out. [Trust in Mind]
5b
Sengcan and the fledgling tradition of Chan were not interested in establishing a "Truth"-with-a-capital-T but rather in finding a template for living with awareness and clarity. In that sense, they were expressing the original message of the Buddha. The goal of the mature Chan tradition is not to answer questions but to dissolve the lust for or addiction to seeking answers and to diminish suffering thereby. . . . [Trust in Mind]
When Sengcan's poem and other Chan texts are using the language of traditional Buddhism, they are placing themselves within the doctrinal context of Mahayana
Buddhism; when they are using the language of paradox, it is to place themselves within the free-wheeling tradition of Zhuangzi's Taoism. [Trust in Mind]
9d
Huineng reasserted the territory that was first explored by Sengchao, and later articulated by Sengcan.
In Huineng's Platform Sutra (the foundational text for the "new" Chan; the "old" Chan was, definitionally, the
Chan of Bodhidharma and was identified the with

Lankavatara Sutra as the primary text), we find the fullest crossover yet of basic Chan and Taoist ideas: the ordinary mind of man is deluded, and the practice of no-mind (wu-shin) is considered sufficient for the rectification of that deluded mind. Closely allied to wu-hsin (no-mind) is wu-nien (no-thought), and when combined with wu-wei (nondoing or non-action), we have, within the literature of "new" Chan, a full-fledged collaboration with Taoist ideas. [Trust in Mind]
----end Mu Soeng Trust Mind --- - -- - -
-------Wu Golden Age ------
2g
If Buddhism is the father, Taoism is the mother of this prodigious child. But there can be no denying that the child looks more like the mother than the father. [The
Golden Age of Zen]
Mod2
Whether this and other stories about Bodhidharma possessed historical truth is far from certain. What is certain is that the Bodhidharma legend was believed in as a fact by the actual founders of the School of Zen in the Tang dynasty, when it had already become a living tradition. [The Golden Age of Zen]
3d
This discourse is a gem of spiritual literature. It shows that the author was in the grand tradition of
Buddhist writers . . . . But, profound as it is as a piece of spiritual literature, it is certainly not Zen at its most characteristic. We have here nothing of the breathtaking abruptness, the blinding flashes, the deafening shouts, the shocking outbursts, the mystifying koans, the rocket-like soarings beyond the sphere of reason, the tantalizing humor and whimsicality, the unaccountable beatings, which were to fill the pages of Zen literature as such. [The Golden
Age of Zen]
11a
For Shenxiu and the Northern school, Buddhism can be summed up by the doctrines of sila, prajna and dhyana

(moral discipline, wisdom and recollection and peace).
These represent the three stages of gradual enlightenment: sila, the abstention from evil; prajna, the pursuing of good; dhyana, the purification of one's mind. [The Golden Age of Zen]
11c
In this view, they are not so much stages of spiritual life as streams flowing from the self nature as the sole fountain of wisdom. Everything depends upon awakening. The self-awakened will spontaneously avoid all evil and pursue all good. He enjoys an ineffable freedom and peace, and carries within him a living fountain of wisdom.
The way of Huineng was, then, professedly opened for men of the highest spiritual gifts. But taking mankind as it is, one can not but admit that even "men of
Mahayana" are rare enough, to say nothing of "men of the highest Vehicle." Onee wonders how many monks and lay devotees who have claimed themselves to be members of the southern school of instantaneous enlightenment have in truth been men of the supreme vehicle as envisaged by Huineng. [The Golden Age of Zen]
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2i
. . . in his orientation toward the immediate and experiential perception of absolute truth, and reveals itself in his preference for the paradox as the means of expressing the inexpressible. [A History of Zen
Buddhism]
1e
The incident described in a story occurs in a particular place at a particular time among a small number of people, or in someone's imagination. But once it is developed as a pointer to awakening, it can be pondered by innumerable seekers of the Way for hundreds of years. A poem that was originally scribbled in a mountain hut in China can be recited daily in

monasteries all over East Asia. Thus a certain core of
Zen literature has entered what might be called the collective consciousness of the tradition. Some of the ancient sayings and writings collected in this book have survived such a process. [Essential Zen]
1e
Robert Aitken Roshi comments on the old stories in this manner:
[In Zen] modern teachers who know what's what do not treat the old stories as history or philosophy or psychology or literature. They do not talk about the old stories, but rather they present them as arcana that require inquiry that is far more profound than academic study or explanation—the very same kind of inquiry that was demanded in the ancient interactions.
Koans are not riddles or riddle-like stories or teaching devices. They are direct expressions of the most profound, perennial facts, and deserve our exacting attention. ???
3e
While there was nothing specifically Zen in his doctrine . . . the teaching of pi-kuan, wallcontemplation, was what made Bodhidharma the first
Ancestor of Zen Buddhism in China. [Essays in Zen
Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki]
4a
. . . absolute mind, to be distinguished from an empirical mind which is the subject of psychological study. When it begins with a capital letter, it is the ultimate reality on which the entire world of individual objects depends for its value. [Manual of
Zen Buddhism, DTSuzuki]
. . . the ignorant and the simple minded, not knowing that the world is what is seen of Mind itself, cling to the multitudinous of external objects, cling to the notions of being and non-being, oneness and otherness, bothness and not-bothness, existence and non-existence,

eternity and non-eternity . [D.T. Suzuki, The
Lankavatara Sutra]
. . . [I]t is like those water bubbles in a rainfall which have the appearance of crystal gems, and the ignorant taking them for real crystal gems run after them .... They are no more than water bubbles, they are not gems, nor are they not-gems, because of their being so comprehended [by one party] and not being so comprehended [by another]. [D.T. Suzuki, The
Lankavatara Sutra]
2g
Thus, wu-wei as "not forcing" is what we mean by going with the grain, rolling with the punch, swimming with the current, trimming sails to the wind, taking the tide at its flood, and stooping to conquer.
Wu-wei is thus the life-style of one who follows the
Tao, and must be understood primarily as a form of intelligence — that is of knowing the principles, structures, and trends of human and natural affairs so well that one uses the least amount of energy in dealing with them. [The Way of Zen]
7
Farong’s Song of Mind "Wisdom from the Zen Classic Xin
Ming" - Translated by Master Sheng Yen
9c
The Platform Sutra maintains that the nature of man is from the outset pure, but that his purity has no form.
But by self-practice, by endeavoring for himself, man can gain insight into this purity. Meditation, prajna, true reality, purity, the original nature, self-nature, the Buddha nature, all these terms, which are used constantly throughout the sermon, indicate the same undefined Absolute, which when seen and experienced by the individual himself, constitutes enlightenment.
[Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch]
9f

His teaching began with the goodness of human nature and ended with the goodness of human nature. There is no need of plowing or weeding: it was originally pure.
. . . He made light of "all the ink in the universe," and left no writing. ???
11c
Different teachers dealt in different ways with the practical implications of this teaching, and in particular with the question of how to regard the defilements of the mind in light of the Buddha-nature's supposedly being intrinsically pure.
Shenxiu approached the problem from two angles. When describing the practice from the outside, he stated that the pure mind and the defiled mind, though conjoined, were essentially separate, each with its own intrinsic reality. Neither generated the other. Thus the goal of the practice was to rid the mirror-like pure mind of any impurities. When describing the techniques used to rid the mind of its impurities, however, he recommended that the meditator regard the impurities as essentially unreal. In reality, some of the practices he taught implied a sudden approach to awakening; others a more gradual approach.
[The Buddhist Religion]